Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets

Florian Habicht’s concert documentary film Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets which will be released by Oscilloscope Laboratories this November, will get a special preview screening at Rooftop Films Summer Series on Thursday, August 7th.  Florian Habicht and PULP’s charismatic frontman Jarvis Cocker will be on hand for a Q&A session.

 PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS (Florian Habicht | Berlin | 90 min.) 

Florian Habicht (Love Story) returns to the roof with a lovingly crafted portrait of Pulp, the sexy/nerdy Sheffield rock group that struggled through the 80’s, soared to superstardom in the mid 90’s and then reunited in 2012 for a celebratory final tour. Habicht follows lead singer Jarvis Cocker, an eccentric and cheeky Everyman, as he and his band prepare for their ultimate performance in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans in their native city. The resulting film, like Jarvis’ lyrics, overflows with bittersweet memories, unexpected moments, and the understanding that life and death can be made immensely more bearable with the indulgence of tiny fantasies. 

Pulp is most famous for their mega hit “Common People,” an exuberant anthem sung in the voice of a working class kid recounting a night of erotic accomplishment with a slumming heiress. The song is ingeniously constructed and exuberantly performed, and it immediately grabs your ear and makes you want to sing along and dance and fuck. But “Common People” is sung in the past tense, and the implication is that the morning after none of this worked out for the best and that the narrator—like most of the rest of us—will return to a world of work and struggle and disappointment. Most of the city of Sheffield lives their lives within that disappointing morning after, but as they talk to Habicht about Cocker, one gets the sense that they relish having had the chance to live vicariously through their native son, almost as if each of the decadent gestures of his wildest years were in some way performed on their behalf. 

Habicht builds upon his previous work by continuing to mine the comic and emotional possibilities of the candid on-the-street interview. The true stars of this film are not the band mates, but rather the people of Sheffield, and Cocker wisely allows Habicht to shift the spotlight away from the stage and onto the faces of the struggling dreamers in the crowd. It is their observations that carry the film, and the most powerful performance in the film does not occur on stage, but rather in a small local cafe where a room-full of aging residents sing a devastatingly poignant cover of Help The Aged. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death And Supermarkets is at once a raucous concert film, a celebratory portrait of a place and time, and a bittersweet farewell to a town that shaped—and was shaped by—a band of dreamers with dirty minds and open, fragile hearts.