Moonage Daydream

 

Director Brett Morgen

MOONAGE DAYDREAM          B                                                                                                 USA  Germany  (135 mi)  2022  d: Brett Morgen

At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead and that man had killed him.                                                                                                                             This created an arrogance with man that he himself was God.  But as God, all he could seem to produce was disaster.                                                                                                                   That led to a terrifying confusion: for if we could not take the place of God, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?                                                                        —David Bowie, 2002

A Proustian plunge into the subconsciousness of David Bowie, and whether you like him or not, this is impressive filmmaking, resembling the ecstatic surrealism of Guy Maddin, who lives in that subliminal world, where the use of vintage film clips is simply astonishing, interweaving bits and pieces from Georges Méliès’ A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902), F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922), and Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927), all the way up to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), and a whole bunch more (every movie featured in Moonage Daydream), resembling what Martin Scorsese did with archival clips in Hugo in 3D (2011), where obtaining the rights was an essential component of this film.  The oversaturated color is simply spectacular, shot on an IMAX camera, so if you’re a fan of David Bowie, this film is epic, the kind of thing you’d drop acid to watch back in the 60’s (Brett Morgen wants you to watch 'Moonage Daydream' on drugs), as it luxuriates in a hypnotic kaleidoscope of psychedelic colors, using never-before-seen archival footage, some of it rare and never broadcast before, officially authorized by the Bowie estate, where musical material is mixed with choice interviews of Bowie, including a stream of monologues, creating the effect of narrating personalized bits from his own diary.  Morgen is a tireless archivist who spent seven years with the material, experiencing a heart attack in between, which forced him to examine his own life more closely, channeling Bowie as a role model, where spontaneity became the key takeaway, reconfiguring a more personalized vision, weaving together an impressionistic collage of previously unseen performances, unheard recordings (most played in their entirety thankfully), some rare 16mm film stock, experimental video art, including abstract graphics and animations from Stefan Nadelman, never before seen paintings, drawings, home movie clips, photographs, journals, while a constant sound of Bowie’s music is mixed with his voice philosophically ruminating on subjects like spirituality, travel, aging, mortality, gender fluidity, and chaos.  The irrepressible artist openly expresses weaknesses and contradictions, while also acknowledging private and artistic crises, where the imperfections of the artist become part of his persona which go hand-in-hand with the idea of personal growth, where you have to learn to accept who you are, yet the film omits drug and alcohol problems, while only cautiously touching upon his aloofness.  Born David Robert Jones in London, coming from an ordinary childhood in the Brixton suburbs, Bowie suggests it’s a natural reaction to want to get out and explore the rest of the world, questioning who he is and what he wants to be, while continually evolving and discovering himself in the process, often appearing as strange and unworldly as he could be, not afraid of cross-dressing, insisting that it’s okay to be off-kilter and unabashedly weird.  Early in his career, Bowie views himself as a stranger to himself, as he was not that comfortable with himself, shy and struggling at times with confidence, afraid to show his vulnerability, claiming “I’m a collector and I seem to collect personalities.”  He rose to prominence in glam costumes that experimented with androgynous transgender dressing, appearing onstage with different alter-ego characters, though the lines are often blurred between them, including Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and the Blind Prophet, becoming a 70’s superstar in London, having an impact throughout Britain, where he can be seen performing with Jeff Beck doing an I’m a Man Yardbirds riff before amusingly breaking out into the Beatles’ Love Me Do at one point, Love me do - David Bowie - Moonage Daydream Clip - YouTube (2:56).  Some of this resembles Mick Jagger in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), where he wants to inhabit a different identity, mirroring the various onstage personas that Bowie assumes, while also feeling like an alien inhabiting the earth, a perpetual outsider, assuming that intergalactic role in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where he eventually comes to resemble David Byrne in those oversized pastel suits, drawing inspiration from the world of art, painting, drawing, dancing, and sculpting throughout his life, using creative outlets to help him stay in touch with his inner realm, while also traveling the world, developing an avid interest in photography, where he can simply immerse himself into a different culture as an anonymous observer.   

The highly subjective, experimental nature of this film is not for everyone, as it doesn’t follow a linear, biographic progression, doesn’t fill in the missing pieces of his life, and provides no talking points, no references to his many collaborators, where very little is actually identified, offering no timeline, instead it’s an immersive experience expressed through a stream-of-consciousness montage that takes us inside the artist’s ever-evolving interior realm in an attempt to get inside his head, where music unleashes the ferocity of his artistic identity.  While the Velvets and the Andy Warhol Factory got there first, David Bowie took glam rock and made it a lifestyle, extending the boundaries of nontraditional gender identity, where his impact cannot be ignored.  David Bowie has not been a touchstone in everybody’s lives, which may be a generational thing, so when he mentions he has an older brother who introduces him to Jack Kerouac, John Coltrane, Buddhism, and William S. Burroughs, some may immediately identify with that brother (whose sad end is tragically mentioned), coming from an earlier generation who were no longer kids by the time Bowie arrives, already young adults assuming responsibilities and careers, immersed in the working world, married and starting families, where the androgynous exploration of Ziggy Stardust is simply not on their radar, as the pubescent fascination doesn’t really resonate.  Bowie provocatively suggests, at one point, that one of the biggest mistakes of modern society is an overriding need to avoid chaos, instead of embracing and confronting it head-on, which may help understand his artistic sensibility, but it’s also hard to really believe that we should all be embracing more chaos in our lives, as maintaining some degree of emotional balance and overall stability is dependent upon not having to deal with more disruptive chaos, where the negative impact can be overwhelmingly destructive.  One senses that he’s speaking from a position of privilege to even suggest such a thing, as most of us are already dealing with such a staggering amount of chaotic political interference which actually precludes any possibility of happiness.  History is filled with hateful atrocities and targeted persecution, where the inflicted trauma feels like an onslaught of unending chaos, so it’s hard to really get behind that idea.  For those who are not avid Bowie fans, the everpresent stream of wall-to-wall music interspersed with continually interruptive interviews can get repetitive and feel exhaustive, like an over-extended music video, where it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by a frenetic onslaught of avant garde editing techniques that come fast and furious, where there’s really no relief, and while Bowie is portrayed as a self-reflective person, Morgen allows no contemplative moments for viewers.  There is an antidote, however, if you remove the sound and watch as a silent film (Sacrilege!), the stream-of conscious imagery is endlessly fascinating, changing the entire perspective, drawing attention to the filmmaker himself and his cinematic vision, where you can actually appreciate the work as a surreal dreamlike fantasia and not a music video.  For those who already love Bowie, this film is hugely successful, literally swimming in artistic flair, and for those who are not, this will not likely change your mind, despite a memorial tribute from Rolling Stone asserting Why David Bowie Was the Greatest Rock Star Ever.  There is one standout song, however, coming more than an hour into the film, which Bowie wrote with Brian Eno, Moonage Daydream [David Bowie - 'Heroes' (live)] - YouTube (4:56), a darkly beautiful love anthem drenched in melancholic irony that was featured in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), at first sounding like the Velvet Underground’s I'm Waiting For The Man - YouTube (4:39) with Lou Reed, a lifelong friend and collaborator, symbolizing Berlin in the 70’s when it was a divided city, living on the edge of despair, yet not succumbing to that despair, instead offering a unifying hope, almost like a prayer, where the slowly building intensity of the vocal to a fever pitch epitomizes the young lovers’ growing sense of desperation.    

Written, directed, edited, and produced by Morgen, the immersive nature of the film is significant, released during a worldwide health pandemic when no one was attending live concerts, so this opens up a communal experience for viewers that had been heavily restricted.  Many of those conducting interviews with Bowie are befuddled by the man behind the image, as they attempt to define or pigeonhole him, but he remains an elusive spirit whose honesty can be refreshing, as oftentimes, especially early in his career, he’s still searching to understand himself.  This is Morgen’s third pop music documentary, following the Rolling Stones film CROSSFIRE HURRICANE (2012) and his take on the tragic trajectory of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in MONTAGE OF HECK (2015), a film where the music never seems to stop, even during the interview segments, never really providing an overview of his life and career, as those can be found in Francis Whately’s television documentaries DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS (2013) and DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST FIVE YEARS (2017), instead it accentuates certain phases of interest to the director, hoping to provide personalized insights.  Bowie hated the artificiality of Los Angeles, so in the mid 70’s he moved there for two years and kept a creative journal while living anonymously, soaking up the cultural differences, yet remained relatively reclusive, acknowledging that America filled spaces in his imagination that England couldn’t, where he felt like a “a foreign body,” explaining “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.”  However, he quickly felt artistically burned out and in the grips of cocaine addiction, moving to West Berlin after searching for the most uninviting city, yet he left an indelible impression, forging new musical paths by working with Brian Eno, employing various experimental sound inventions that included ambient music and the William S. Burroughs cut-up technique.  There’s a theatrical quality to Bowie, who’s been in several films, including Tony Scott’s erotic vampire film THE HUNGER (1983) and Nagisa Ōshima’s prisoner of war drama MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE (1983), while also performing theatrically in the lead role of John Merrick in Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man in 1980, making him the first rock star to perform in a Broadway play, appearing onstage with Tina Turner in a surprise visit during her Private Dancer Tour, even making a Pepsi commercial together, evolving into an iconic stadium pop star while living a secluded life, all assembled into a collective mix of clips interspersed throughout the film, never spelling things out directly, allowing viewers to decipher what they’re hearing and seeing.  Bowie was an inveterate world traveler, living in a nomadic state, refusing to buy a house, always on the move like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, preferring ships or buses, and especially loved trains, as he had a fear of flying, generally accompanied by a collection of books, yet the aching loneliness of this solitary experience allowed him to become an acute observer of life in obscure places.  A recurring motif is watching Bowie ride neon-soaked escalators in a Singapore mall while wandering endlessly through markets and temples and red light districts, like an explorer in a travelogue film, becoming a stranger in a strange land during the Southeast Asia leg of the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, Bowie and the Fluorescent Escalators – Ricochet YouTube (3:48), yet we also watch him splatter paint onto a giant canvas on the floor in a Jackson Pollack style.  While there’s a latent obsession with the trailblazing aspect of his 70’s bombastic glam rock period, where the enigmatic title comes from a recording made during his Ziggy Stardust phase, with suggestions this may be his greatest pop culture achievement, there’s only just an inkling of interest in his later career, when he appears happier and more at ease with himself, with only a brief nod to his marriage to Somalian model Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, while avoiding his death altogether from a prolonged illness with liver cancer, coming just days after releasing his final album.  Offering unique insights into the creative process behind so many of his music videos, songs, stage shows, and theater shows, where his career, and his identity, can be defined by constantly reinventing himself, this film is a celebratory tribute that nostalgically looks back exploring the life of a shapeshifting artist while also merging with the director’s own fascination with sound and picture and montage.   

Note

While not in the film, it’s important to point out the different versions of Bowie’s song I’m Deranged, written with Brian Eno, playing over the opening and closing credit sequences of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997), Lost Highway by David Lynch - Opening Credits YouTube (2:34).  And let’s not forget Seu Jorge singing Bowie songs in Portuguese in Wes Anderson’s THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004), The Life Aquatic - Seu Jorge - YouTube (4:19), Greta Gerwig twirling, dancing, and leaping through the streets of New York to the music of Bowie’s Modern Love in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), Frances Ha [2013] - Dance in the street - YouTube (1:08), also one must mention this unforgettable rendition of Bowie’s signature song before a jam-packed Wembley Stadium in London, David Bowie - Heroes (Live Aid, 1985) YouTube (6:50). 

Sleepwalk

 

Director Sara Driver

SLEEPWALK                 B+                                                                                                            USA  Germany  (78 mi)  1986  d: Sara Driver

Coinciding with the UCLA black student filmmaker’s L.A. Rebellion movement on the West coast, among the driving forces of a new American independent cinema were also NYU film students of the late 1970’s and early 80’s that included Spike Lee, but also Jim Jarmusch, whose name became synonymous with the burgeoning New York underground art scene centered around the CBGB music club, forming a close collaboration with Sara Driver, his future partner, co-writing her student film YOU ARE NOT I (1981), while also sharing the cinematography duties on this film with Frank Prinzi, incorporating long takes with static camerawork.  Along with Phil Kline, the film’s musical composer, they formed an eclectic group of cutting-edge New York artists known as No wave, which included various other impoverished artists living on New York’s Lower East Side.  Their limited means allowed them to produce more radical and experimental art work, coinciding with a pre-AIDS historical period when the city of New York was near bankrupt, forcing people to take whatever odd jobs they could just to pay their rent.  According to Driver, she worked in a Xerox shop along with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, where the long, monotonous hours Xeroxing documents may have contributed to the overall somnambulistic mood of the film.  According to a 2012 interview from Huffington Post, "Flashing Back With Sara Driver on the Bowery",

This area was not heavily populated.  It was like a war zone.  You had an instinctive reaction to the street.  You had to be tuned into everything around you otherwise you would get hurt.  You would run into your heroes on the street, like Burroughs, and they had an influence on your work.  And that was a wonderful time in the city when we had repertory art houses and a lot more European films.  Studios didn’t own theaters the way they do now.  I got a great education from NYU and from these cinemas.  I was influenced by Jacques Rivette’s films, and Tarkovsky’s.  Their magical realism was a big influence on Sleepwalk.   

In fact, this film recalls the inventive cloak-and-dagger playfulness of Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), or the Juliet Berto character in Out 1 and Jacques Rivette R.I.P. (1971), where an underlying sense of nocturnal danger lurks just underneath the surface, shot almost entirely at night within just a few city blocks, where the now gentrified intersection of Soho, Chinatown, and Tribeca reveals what was then a run-down and decaying neighborhood with streets noticeably empty, not to mention pervasive signs of graffiti, where much of this film feels as if drifting in a trance, creating an increasingly spooky effect, all centered around a mysterious Chinese manuscript in The Year of the Dog.  Selected as the opening night film for Critic’s Week at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, the film seems to exist in its own netherworld, like an alternative reality, where any number of things go wrong or just don’t seem right, where instead of tying up loose ends, like the perpetual search to solve crimes with doglike tenacity by Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo (1968 – 2003), this film is more about the loose ends themselves, incidents with no resolution, things that happen for no apparent reason, mysteries that remain unresolved, where we’re instead aimlessly drifting through time, as the title suggests.  This film was a major influence on Jarmusch’s GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999) and the avant garde surrealism of Guy Maddin, particularly on his outlandish screenplays that just cry out for novel cinematic techniques and special effects. 

A surrealist fantasy based on someone’s experiences working at a computer all day, positioning itself between dreams and reality, between first person subjectivity and accidental voyeurism, the film has the look of a B-movie with a manuscript that takes on characteristics of a children’s fairy tale, while the film features an overworked central protagonist, Nikki, Suzanne Fletcher, who actually resembles a ghostly silent film character, yet she’s a single-mom who works at a Soho copy shop, never showing much expression, leading a relatively mundane existence, accidentally cutting her finger, drawing blood, while her eyes also momentarily glow green.  In addition, playwright Harvey Perr is the boss of a nefarious backroom operation performing weirdly inconsequential assignments, with Steve Buscemi in heavy glasses carefully inspecting a table filled with photographic slides, as if searching for a missing ingredient, an Asian woman blithely collects paper strips, one after another, where it would be hard to find a more boring job, while another loopy-eyed woman paints the exact same watercolor.  Adding a great deal of spice is Nikki’s roommate Isabelle, an utter revelation by performance artist Ann Magnuson in flaming red hair, who just offers plenty of energetic personality and pizzazz in an otherwise slowly moving picture, dropping by her job to borrow money in a humorous appearance, as if moving in an altogether different speed.  Nikki’s world is turned upside down when two shady characters, Stephen Chen as Dr. Gou (whose name means “dog” in Chinese), and Tony Todd as Barrington Rutley III (with bandaged and mutilated fingers), hire her to translate an ancient Chinese scroll, no questions asked (Nikki just happens to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese!), which appears to have been stolen by Barrington, seen earlier in what resembles a shadowy German Expressionist dream sequence bathed in a red light.  Ordered to never let the manuscript out of her sight, Nikki works late, but after she leaves the computers and telephones turn back on, seemingly expressing a life of their own.  As she walks home alone, bizarre events occur, with an off-putting sound design featuring a highly inventive percussive score that forebodes upcoming dread.  When she sees a young boy in his underwear standing alone at an intersection, she graciously helps him across the street, only to see him run back across and stand there again, a young girl throws confetti into the air, while a grown man in a suit barks at her on the sidewalk.  These idiosyncrasies simply appear and disappear, seemingly on their own wavelength, adding a mysterious texture to ordinary reality. 

Waiting home alone is her young half-Chinese son Jimmy (Dexter Lee), quickly throwing some TV dinners into the oven, suddenly realizing the manuscript smells like almonds, with Isabelle arriving home agitated, complaining about a long list of disappointing boyfriends before remembering Nikki’s boyfriend called earlier.  When she calls back there is no answer, but Driver leaves a stark image of the phone ringing along with an unmade bed next to an open window in his empty apartment.  The next morning, arriving to work early, the manuscript itself seems to be providing the film’s narration, spoken by an unseen Asian woman’s voice, as it was at the film’s opening, which then intermingles with Nikki speaking the words in her head as she transcribes them.  As if by magic, an Asian woman arrives at her desk, identifying herself as Ecco Ecco (Ako), the likely narrator, claiming the stolen manuscript belongs to her, describing it as dangerous, asking to meet later on a deserted rooftop, but she never shows.  Instead, police arrive later at the office with the gruesome news that she’s been executed, strangled by her own hair, reporting several fingers missing.  Done for the night, she leaves the office alone, where certainly one of the hair-raising scenes of the film is the old-fashioned elevator ride down seven stories, filled with ominous sounds, inexplicably stopping at every floor, where the open door reveals something different on each floor, offering a window into people’s private lives, but also just a collection of strange and curious things, meeting Barrington at the bottom with his missing fingers.  On a barren street resembling a desolate wasteland, she encounters a black dog whose eyes also glow green.  By the time she gets home, Isabelle’s head has turned bald, resembling the story in the fairy tale, where little by little, the manuscript seemingly has powers that begin to take over her life, with her finger magically cured afterwards.  In a mindboggling idea that sounds utterly preposterous, hoping to make her feel better, Nikki suggests Isabelle and Jimmy spend a few days relaxing in an Atlantic City hotel by the beach while she works on the manuscript, where Isabelle could gamble and Jimmy could find other kids to play with.  Leaving in the dark of night, on the other hand, just feels overly weird.  Of course, Isabelle, her head wrapped in a scarf, makes a quick stop, visiting a Chinatown herbalist for hair treatment with Jimmy sleeping in the back seat, when the car gets stolen by a small-time crook (Richard Boes), who hilariously brings the car for quick cash to an overly pregnant fence who freaks out when she sees a kid in the back seat.  Utterly clueless as to what to do, the film indescribably takes off on two tracks with an inept kidnapper who really isn’t such a bad guy, though his archaic methods are crude, and Nikki, equally in the dark, stammering out into the streets calling her son’s name, eventually growing tired, laying her head down by the East River and going to sleep, where we’re never sure if what transpires is real or simply imagined.  Macabre and unsettling, Driver really provides an alternative universe that feels completely original.