Screening in Toronto as part of NXNE on Thursday, Jun 18 at 7pm @ NFB Theatre

Fandom is really just a pissing contest set to prove two things: your favourite band is in fact the greatest, and you are in fact the greatest fan of your favourite band. The favourite band’s identity is of little consequence. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks dictates that passion can be stirred by both the sublime and the mundane. For the Depeche Mode fans featured in Nick Abrahams’ The Posters Came From The Wall, however, fandom has political and religious connotations; the pissing contest on display here is much more than braggadocio.

Posters does not focus on the band, and in truth it only focuses on the fans indirectly. The subject is the great divide that separates artist and fan. As the title suggests, it documents the moment in a fan's life when those 2-dimensional images turn to flesh, and exist not as mere representations but as human beings on a stage, sharing the same space in their little corner of the world.

The film also documents those corners of the world where even the 2-dimensional images are contraband, let alone live performances. The great divide can exist anywhere -- Romania, Russia, Germany, Iran, and beyond -- and the film posits that the music of Depeche Mode had a reassuring effect on the inhabitants of some troubled countries in the midst of political unrest and suffering. Set against that backdrop, the notion of “songs that saved your life” discards its trite roots and assumes a deeper significance.

But such significance is not derived from the band’s lyrics. Instead it is what the band represented that has enraptured their youth. The look and style of Depeche Mode epitomized what the people in these countries wanted to be. Their surge in the late '80s/early '90s also coincided with tumultuous periods in these countries’ histories, designating Depeche Mode’s music as a stabilizing force at a time when very little was stable.

For much of the film, Posters earnestly depicts the galvanizing power of music in the face of adversity. There are times, however, when it loses sight of the road and swerves to become no more than a curious look into the lives and times of the superfan. Its opening segment takes place in Pasadena -- Depeche Mode’s spiritual home and culmination of earlier DM pic, 101 -- where we see a couple of teenagers do their tightest Dave Gahan impressions. Interesting though it is, it undermines the troubled social climates of the rest of the film’s destinations. It’s almost as if Abrahams changed course midway through filming, diverting from his original point once he realized the path the film was organically assuming. It would seem that what began as a study of the connection between artist and fan soon evolved into a more fascinating study of fandom in the face of political turbulence in 2nd-world cultures.
 
To dismiss Posters as merely a showcase of the more hardcore fans of Depeche Mode would be to miss its point entirely. As a North American audience exposed to such a wealth of music, we sometimes lose sight of the impact a certain band can have on our lives. The Posters Came From The Wall reinforces that impact by placing it before a greyscale backdrop, making it, by contrast, all the more impressive.

--Gavin Crisp