Michael Karoli

In 1968, musician Irmin Schmidt and friends founded the avant-garde band "Can", which achieved worldwide fame. Schmidt also made a name for himself as a composer for films by Wim Wenders. In this documentary, the charismatic sound tinkerer looks back on his life and career.

The late-'60s avant garde rock band CAN gets a feature-length tribute with this affectionate documentary chronicling its odd inception and subsequent career. In CAN -- The Documentary, the remaining band members are interviewed amidst culled together archival footage from talk shows, concerts, and television appearances to paint a portrait of a band who always remained happily on the sidelines of mass appeal, mixing street music, jazz, folk, and rock into a sometimes poppy, sometimes abstract stew. The band's influence on such seminal acts as Sonic Youth and Talking Heads is also analyzed.

The experimental German krautrockers CAN's legendary "Free Concert," recorded in Cologne's Sporthalle, Germany, on February 3, 1972. The circumstances of this Cologne show were unusual. Rather improbably for such an experimental band, Can actually scored a chart success in Germany with "Spoon," which would later be tacked onto the end of Ege Bamyasi.