Showing at the Showroom: When You’re Strange

[Major Correction: In the opening paragraph of this I state that the film opens with a Jim Morrison look-a-like stumbling around a desert, looking lost, hitching a ride from himself, and then hearing about his own death in Paris on the radio. I felt the whole thing seemed a bit anomalous to the rest of the film, but it turns out it was in fact Morrison in his own film HWY: American Pastoral, with ominous radio dialogue dubbed in by the documentary's director Tom DiCillo.

It's an inexcusable oversight on my part, fuelled by my own indignant pride at ignoring press-notes.

It's comforting to know that others found these sequences uncannily restored to the point of looking like the were shot last week, and I guess the whole thing felt a little anomalous to me. The fact that DiCillo recut Morrison's own film to suit the documentary's narrative purposes is also pretty questionable in my book.

Not that that matters, as it still doesn't excuse the fact that I fucked up.]

When batting around general truisms about documentaries it’s easy to just throw away the glib observation that ‘it’s all about the subject, sink or swim, it’s all about the subject’.  Which is true, as outside the realms of art cinema I have yet to hear or see anyone make a stunning hour and a half treatise on the story of paint drying. That said, part of me wonders why not?

The new documentary When You’re Strange is a study of The Doors brief explosion, the dips, the peaks, and the eventual demise of frontman Jim Morrison. It’s brimming with some quite stunning archive footage of the band preparing, recording, performing, and just larking around, with nary a talking head in sight. The film opens with a pretty uncanny Morrison [look-a-like] stumbling about in the desert, getting a lift from himself(?) and then hearing the news about his own death in Paris on the radio. At which point Johnny Depp, the modern cicerone of the hedonistic Sixties (see – Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson) chimes in some flat, timeless yet instantly forgettable observation about ‘The Man’ Jim Morrison. Which as openings for documentaries go is pretty damn worrying in my book.

The film eventually cuts to the actual business of the band; formation; early beginnings; first performances; the first studio session, and so forth and so on. The early days at UCLA film school, the band members found in meditation class and the first performances with Jim keeping his back to the audience. Following the daft opening a creeping sense of ‘going through the motions’ almost set in, saved wholesale by the endless wash of superb archive material. Footage like this, be it from television recordings, or from home film collections has a nasty habit of looking awful when blown up. Grain, static flicker, crackly sound, and aspect ratios which refuse to stay put make for a documentary makers nightmare. When You’re Strange has miraculously ironed over all these issues, and produced a film for fans of the band to endlessly fawn over.

The reputation of The Door’s live is as big as the band itself, yet actually seeing the band’s frenzied performance, Morrison’s explosive presence, the army of police officers spread out unevenly on stage, managed exceed the over-hyped picture I had of these ‘happenings’. More Beatlemania than hippy-hippy-shake, but with an added twist of cruelty and occasional no-show. The film bumbles on with the over-arching narrative, Morrison’s comings and goings eclipsing the whole of the rest of the band. The myth of the band rolls on, weighed down by the clichés it helped reinforce. Jim Morrison dies, his legacy lives on, The End.

Simply put the film is as good as your love of The Doors. If you can’t abide the band, or Jim Morrison in particular then you’ll really struggle with it. If you love the band then you’ll just drown in all the footage the film serves up. Those in the middle will find the film pretty middling. In part this reflects the film’s success in telling the band’s tale without either overblown hagiography or excessive apology. On the flipside maybe this just reflects how dangerously married the film is to its’ subject matter. 

Of course most documentaries have to be precariously close to their subject to come into existence in the first place, but it’s tricky when you can’t quite place the authorial bias in relation to the material. Director Tom DiCillo must obviously be a fan, but his presence and the tone it applies to the film is filtered through the slightly stern, yet reverentially hushed tones of Johnny Depp. The brilliance of a good and unexpected documentary is the ability to take even the most unpeculiar subject and frame it in such a way that anyone and everyone can take something from it.

Font fetishist doc Helvetica immediately springs to mind in this sense, taking the definition of a flat subject and breathing focus into the subject, and it was served well by building on the passion and interest of those at the heart of typography design. A Fistful of Quarters also plumbed the dangerously fringe fields of retrogaming, pursuing the compulsive score chasing of cabinet arcade freaks. As a struggling Pac Man addict I was instantly drawn to this tale, and the film found a huge audience well beyond the limits of gaming-niche it inhabited with a story of a rivalry that matched any Hollywood fare you care to mention. It of course played very loose and ready with the facts to build an immaculate arc for this story, but this it would seem is par for the course in modern documentary making.

That said, selling a documentary on an unspectacular subject is [as the Swedes would say] like selling sand to the Bedouins. Both Helvetica and Fistful both held a kooky hook which could sell them to anyone with even the smallest vein of curiosity. That they were both great documentaries also helped. Speaking personally, the magic of a brilliant documentary is the unexpected one you stumble across at a film festival, or at the back end of the TV schedules. Sheffield’s own DocFest does a fine job of bombarding me with more peculiar things than I could shake a festival pass at, and the kinks of programming and personal availability has forced me into seeing films I wouldn’t otherwise touch with a barge pole. A few stinkers along the way, sure, but a few gems I wouldn’t ever have a chance of seeing again.

Television however is the real home of the cold-calling documentary. A highlight in recent memory was The Man With the Golden Gavel, about A-list art auctioneer Simon de Pury, which I caught late on BBC4 and somehow managed to keep me hooked well past my bed time. Its’ subject, while charming to excess, is not particularly likeable, and more than a little cut-throat. It’s hard to curry interest in the struggles of a man who can only be described as obscenely rich, but the film skipped along with a swift pace and was packed with plentiful detail about the large auction houses of the world. I had absolutely zero interest in the subject, but stuck watching I was.

Whether When You’re Strange will have this effect on the unsuspecting cine-goer I couldn’t  tell you, as author and viewer are too enthused about the subject to begin with.

When You’re Strange is showing at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield from the 1st of July 2010

The 12th British Silent Film Festival

Through the course of my daytime adventures/studies I have the tremendous fortune of attending a number of conferences, and more importantly festivals dedicated to the dead art of silent cinema. It baffles many people how anyone could ever be so obsessive with something so ‘primitive’ and ‘arcane’ something so abstract to what we know and love, what with the All-Singing All-Dancing Technicolour Widescreen Real-D Surround Sound Cinema of today.

Many would be quick to rebuff any such harsh judgements, but of course I see where the layman might be coming from. Grubby unclear films, with little people running around at supernatural speeds to the merry plink and plonk of the honky-tonk piano can easily seem pretty Neanderthal.

Needless to say this is a pretty cruel vision of silents, coloured by decades of worn prints being show at 50% the speed they should be running at, with picked-out-of-a-basket soundtracks slapped on to fill the silence. Silent film festivals are about reversing that, reviving living soundtracks with both improvised and especially scored music, showcasing some of the finest film restorations from across the world. Films that demonstrate the birth of a medium at one end, and the perfection of it at the other.

It baffles me that anyone who claims to love film could possibly keep themselves away!

Last weekend saw the annual British Silent Film Festival set up shop in the imposing Barbican centre in central London, and for 3 (and a half) days the organisers did an excellent job of putting on some amazing talks and performances around some know, and some lesser know films from the silent era. The topic of ‘Sound’ was the focus of the festival, looking both at the early experiments with sounded motion pictures, as well as looking at the issues faced by modern musicians tasked with accompanying these films. The latter in particular proves a fascinating meeting point for film historians and improvisational musicians.

A presentation by Toby Haggith of the Imperial War Museum and the musician Stephen Horne looked at the arguments for and against the use of cue sheets provided with the First World War propaganda film Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks. Is it right to impose a modern score which might colour a film as elegiac? A soundtrack to the living dead marching off to what we widely regard today as a futile battle? The film was shot with optimism that the war could now be won, and that the tank in particular was the one device which could potentially break The Hun. Cue sheets from the time can be equally problematic, with no connection to the action on screen, and sometimes with unwittingly dangerous associations to the modern ear. One reel of The Ancre cited Entrance of the Gladiators as the appropriate backing music, yet little did music arrangers in 1917 appreciate quite the clownishly insensitive connotations this would have in the latter part of the century.

Click here to listen to the less than dignified Entrance of the Gladiators

Other musical treats in the festival included a morning of bizarre early sound experiments showcased by film historian Tony Fletcher (Teddy Brown and his Xylophone being my particular favourite),  a screening of Britain’s first complete sound feature Under the Greenwood Tree (a curious if occasionally quite stilted take on Hardy’s classic), an orchestrally accompanied screening of Griffith’s classic damsels-on-ice-floes-thriller Way Down East (complete with crash-bang-wallop radio style sound effects), as well as a one off performance of the silent western White Oak accompanied by Five Live’s own Mark Kermode, The Dodge Brothers and Neil Brand!

If the quiff and the double bass wasn’t a big enough indicator: That’s him to the far left. He’s even been so generous as to slam modern bombastic cinema (a la Michael Bay) for having forgotten the ‘melody of melodrama’ so apparrent in silents. To hear his reflections on Moderns vs Silents, as well as the White Oak performance click HERE.

Kermode’s promised more shows in the future, and I can’t wait. Not so much to hear some more bass-slappin’, string-pickin’ Americana to my silents but also to help drag in some more Kermode fan-boys and girls into the slightly hidden world of silents. I had the opportunity to tempt two of my ‘normal’ film friends to two of the evenings performances and they absolutely loved it. The varied tempo, the melodrama and the occassionally baffling plot lines can be hard work at first, but once you settle into it you really do get a brilliantly unique, fascinating, and often gripping film experience.

The Barbican play regular host silent screenings throughout the year, and a number are regularly doing the rounds on art house cinema circuits around the country. If you hear of one coming to town with a budding musician or two in tow then really do go out of your way to check it out.

It may well be a notch or two outside most peoples comfort zone, but how can you continue to live oblivious of an era where square-jawed male heroes could regularly cry with relief for romantic and narrative resolution, and where dogs were regularly used as the ultimate Deus ex Machina? If that isn’t amazing, then I don’t know what is.

Sensoria: The Alchemists of Sound

Late April brings the eclectic and occasionally eccentric Sensoria film and music festival to Sheffield. Stepping beyond the usual tokenism of other single media festivals Sensoria manages that rare feat of keeping one foot in the live music venue and the other in the picturehouse. The most headline grabbing attraction this year has been the big-news-in-certain-circles reunion of local post-punk legends The Comsat Angels introduced by the quiffed face of British mainstream film criticism Dr Mark Kermode (residing). Which in my book at least lived up to the hype, carried if nothing else on the radioactive love of the Comsat fans. I doubt I will ever again see quite so many middle-aged men in quite such a buoyant state of boyish ecstasy. Three more ‘final weekend’ dates have been announced so look them up if you’re in need of some angular early 80’s introspective pop.

Yet the Alchemists of this post aren’t the Walkley-based foursome but rather the title of a 2003 documentary about the spectacular and cultishly lauded BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Their name may not be instantly recognisable to most but their output will be, if purely for the iconic music to many a British childhood nightmare in the theme tune to Doctor Who. On a smaller scale anyone who’s had to endure a stint in the British education system may be familiar with the workshops’ electro signatures to any number of mind-numbing educational programmes. Just about the only fond memory I have of geography lessons is chanting along with my peers to the relentlessly progressive and chirpy theme to something billed as Landscapes or Global or something equally asinine. Schools programming parody Look Around You excellently captured the incidental swooshes blips and blops that gave these programmes their bizarrely futuristic sound. That is to all purposes the Radiophonic Workshop at its simplest.

Born in the late 50’s out of the experimentation and engineering know-how of the sound technicians at BBC radio the story of the workshop is one of decidedly British eccentrics from both the sciences and the arts honing away at defining their own craft. It’s an absolute goldmine for a documentary. Alchemists of Sound takes the conventional talking-heads route of anecdote driven historicizing, spliced together with narrated segments of that classic tv documentary trick of tracking and zooming in/out of still images. Which is perfectly ok as there’s something ineffably awesome about seeing musicians dwarfed by banks of sound modulators, or hunched over an array of magnetic tape decks. It is as fine a document as any of the genuine razors-and-tape craft which went behind these early electronic experiments. About five and a half minutes into the Youtube clip below you can see how they laboriously constructed the Dr Who theme, layer for layer. It’s amazing, I could listen to that opening bass note all day.

As if in illustration of the gulf between early sound technology and modern digital sound manipulation, the archivist concludes the segment by compiling the meticulously layered tracks one by one on his rather handy computer. It’s almost a little deflating.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with Dick Mills, one of these very alchemist interviewed in the documentary who was more than willing to share tales of late night splicing and rushed commissions for long forgotten regional programmes. Rounding up the session one of the organizers for the festival asked Dick if he knew any reason why the gathered audience was predominantly made up of ‘young folk’. He was much at a loss to explain this new generation’s interest, but the audience itself was more than keen to chip in. Respect for the craft, the discipline and the sheer inventiveness of the Workshop were all cited and Dick was more than a little bowled over.

The added value of film festivals is more than reciprocal for an audience who goes out of their way to encounter both strange films and occasionally those brave souls associated to these strange films. Those tech savvy kidz could have more than likely just stayed at home on that frightfully wet Monday evening and just sneakily watched it on Youtube. But then that would be to rather miss the point.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Metal really aint the coolest of things and word that Vice magazine were producing a film about Iraq’s one and only axe-wielding band had the same disgenuine air to it as a hipster in a Maiden t-shirt. Yet for all it’s throbbing insincerity Vice have managed to pull off a band documentary that isn’t totally insepid.

Things start out on a bit of a wobbily path as we get to meet the band in their small rehearsal room, tucked away under a store in central Baghdad. The place is bedecked with hand-penned Metallica logos and grainy A4 print-outs of James Hetfield and co rocking out. It’s all a bit ramshackle, and at that point it’s hard to see what convinced the original journo that he had truly ‘discovered’ some amazing talent.

Seeing their fans queued up outside a hotel for their exclusive ‘Vice’ gig, the angsty teenage vibe is knocked up to eleven by a small posse of young men wearing long-sleeve band t-shirts that would make even a Spanish teenager shamefaced. Not pretty. But then this is a country where such satanistic/Americanistic garb could have them thrown in lockdown pretty much indefinitely. Nothing ironic or snide here, just a big old heart for metal and big willingness to say ‘fuck you’ to the turbulent status quo.

At this point the film starts to turn, perhaps on the sight of seeing a gaggle of Iraqi metal fans go crazy for the band, moshing frantically as they are sat kneeling on the floor. It’s as bizarre a sight as it sounds, but it’s a concession to the tradition of a circle pit that hotel management wouldn’t be too keen on. The band genuinely Rawq Out, and in true metal fashion the fans end up piling themselves on top of each other. It’s more metal than you could shake two devil horns at.

The documentary narrative skips forward a year or two and we get to see the band regrouped in Syria. They play another bizarrely seated-yet-banging gig, struggle to record a demo to send to the world, and generally moan about how awful things are for the Iraqi refugees. On being shown a rough cut of the first half of the film the band members get quite emotional at being reminded of just how locked-down and broken up their home town is. Any semblance of the life they had growing up has effectively been destroyed. Their little rehearsal room has been scudded to pieces, and ramshackle as it was, it was their portal out of rather shit times. For those who love it Metal can be a fine window for escape, and in a war zone it’s the only comfort these guys had.

In the end it turns out to be a lot like Ross Kemp in Afghanistan: seemingly ridiculous and farcical from the outset, but in the end quite simple in its focus on average people stuck in an extraordinarily awful situation. No bells and whistles verite documentary making, just sincere and revealing portraits. And at its heart reminds you what metal is really about. And that’s no mean feat.