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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

November 22, 2007


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2007-11-22

Behind the music

New film pieces together the mysterious life of jazz legend Albert Ayler

(My Name is Albert Ayler, Nov. 23-26 at Cinematheque)

Albert Ayler is widely regarded as one of the most remarkable figures in 1960s American free jazz, and was deeply respected by contemporaries such as John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. As a tenor saxophonist, Ayler broke clefs and astounded audiences in a short career during the late 1950s, when avant-garde jazz was in its infancy.

Like so many great American artistic talents, Ayler was forced to build his early career overseas. Trained musically in the army, having cut his teeth as a teen in Little Walter's R&B acts, Ayler recognized the potential for an audience in Europe, where he worked to develop a considerable following for his dissonant eloquence on the horn in the early 1960s.

Returning to New York after several years working in Sweden - where he had befriended and joined American avant-jazzist Cecil Taylor's band - Ayler struggled to earn money for food before striking a record contract that led to his breakout album, Spiritual Unity, with a trio that included Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray. In New York, Ayler eked out an existence until his body was found in the East River in 1970. He was only 34.

Making a documentary on a subject for which only a few images, both moving and still, exist can certainly be daunting. While such a dearth of material might prevent several filmmakers from going ahead with a project, Swedish director and evident jazz buff Kasper Collins has forged ahead regardless.

Much of the meat of this film hinges on the audio from interviews conducted during the 1960s, where we eerily hear Ayler speak defiantly about his commitment to the music despite his blatant frustration with underdeveloped audience tastes and his own dire poverty. Phrases such as, "I'm like Picasso - people don't understand me," "If people don't like it now, they will," and, "My imagination is beyond the civilization in which we live," may sound initially hubristic, but when they accompany great excerpts of Ayler's chaotic music and thoughtful interviews with his admiring contemporaries, the effect is illuminating. Ayler has become such an underappreciated historical anecdote, with next to no large-scale consideration, that one cannot help but respect Collins' obscure dedications.

To tell Ayler's story, Collins uses an array of interviews with Ayler's family - including his former bandmate-cum-estranged psychotic brother Donald and his widowed father - along with chats involving former players from both Europe and America. Particularly fascinating is a phone interview with Mary Parks, Ayler's last lady-partner, who carries with her a certain Yoko-like reputation for isolating and manipulating Ayler in his final years.

The principal fault of Collins' work is that, quite simply, he overuses repeated imagery in simplistically nostalgic ways, and that - in editing terms - he's no Walter Murch.

Jazz fans will be able to overlook such small shortcomings, while underedified amateurs should enjoy this obscure foray into the life of the musician whom Coltrane requested play at his funeral.
— Walter Forsberg

When video was cutting edge...

The Beaver Trilogy documents the evolution of celebrity and technology

(The Beaver Trilogy, Nov. 23-26 at Cinematheque)

A+

In 1979, TV cameraman Trent Harris stumbled across a goofily excitable and giddily enthusiastic 20-something named Richard Griffith, loitering in a Salt Lake City TV station parking lot. Claiming to be the "Rich Little of Beaver, Utah," the young self-described "Groovin' Gary" began to do his best (read: mediocre) John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone impressions, dumbfounded that he was being videotaped - for real, for actual, for TV!

This incident was Harris' first experience using videotape technology (which was quickly replacing film in TV news circles at the time), and it proved so bizarre that Harris would revisit it in subsequent years using emerging actors Sean Penn and Crispin Glover to re-enact the role of 'Groovin Gary.'

Now, re-enactment in documentary can take several forms: basic staged paternal illustrations - like in Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) and countless subsequent NFB productions, as well as more complex techniques such as Kiarostami's reality-bending fandom in Close-Up (1990), or the dramatic self-referentiality of Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Gary Burns' recent Radiant City (2006).

But, what's so endlessly fascinating about Harris' The Beaver Trilogy is the way that the passage of time and the celebrity system have added textual layers to the re-enactment performances of Penn and Glover. Their emulations of Griffith's drag-devotion to Olivia Newton John aren't merely incredibly idiosyncratic dramatic interpretations, they have become historical documents of both actors' early careers on the verge of breaking into the mainstream - Harris directed Penn during breaks in shooting for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and Glover while he was working on Back to the Future (1985). This is the kind of documentary providence filmmakers can only wish for.

The feel of the movie's imagery does its fair share of work towards transcendence, too. Initially, Harris' visceral handheld shots, on degraded 1980s videotape, lend an appropriate DIY feel to the first parts - here, the watermark seems to be John Heyn and Jeff Krulik's classic, Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986). Later, Harris' more serious cinema-style shooting lends the penultimate weight to Glover's acting skills. And, while The Beaver Trilogy is a far more intricate and accomplished work than Heyn and Krulik's, both seep the same kind of underground authenticity that you usually only find on grease-stained VHS labels of tapes that have been passed around like illegal immigrants.

Using the term 'dramatic interpretation' to describe Griffith's, Penn's or Glover's performance is somewhat of an understated disservice. They are unquestionably some of the most tangibly moving and genuinely melodramatic screen performances you will get the chance to see this year (even if you're only deeply affected in between belly chortles). Harris skillfully constructs each section to build on audience incredulity of the incident's veracity, tiny undeveloped intrigues and gestures, and - ultimately - the surrealistic focal point of the entire movie: Please Don't Keep Me Waiting by Olivia Newton-John.
— Walter Forsberg

So bad it's... just bad

Kirsten Sheridan's August Rush gets laughs - but not because it's charming

(August Rush, now showing)

A+

Sometimes, movies can piss you off and make you laugh at the same time. This is distinctly not the same thing as a movie being "good-bad," or "so bad it's good." That's camp and that's different.

The kinds of movies I'm speaking of - such as the new Kirsten Sheridan film August Rush - are bad, period. Their badness isn't charming, at all. There is no unintended (Susan Sontag's 'naïve camp'), nor intended (Sontag's 'camping'), cheese quality to them because it is clear that their origins lie in manipulative earnestness, not bad taste. The badness of these movies is on a totalizing, Holocaust scale so grand that laughter is merely a means of enduring the experience of watching them.

Or, as the teen girl seated behind me at the August Rush preview screening put it: "This is so retarded."

August Rush tells the story of two young, rooftop party-going musicians who, on one 'special' night in Washington Square, share a magical moment and coital ecstasy while listening to 'the Wizard' (Robin Williams) play harmonica in the park. (Robin Williams wears a soulpatch and a cowboy hat.)

But, unbeknownst to their own selves, the couple - Irishman Lewis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and affluent princess Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) - already shared a moment earlier that evening! During each of their respective performances - Lewis with his Matchbox 20-calibre U2-wannabee rock act, and Lyla with her Julliard cronies - the notes they struck seemed to speak out across the city to each other. (I know, it's so stupid).

Soon, Lyla's unbelievably dick-ish dad whisks her away and gives away her unborn child for adoption. Lewis becomes some kind of broker, which is evident from this ne'er-to-be-a-classic line of dialogue: "Get me 10 per cent! I want 10 per cent! Yes, it makes the world go 'round."

Anyway, their kid Evan is a musical genius and can somehow sense that his parents are somewhere out there. He runs away from his orphanage (do those still exist?) to New York City and joins up with - you guessed it -Robin Williams as 'the Wizard,' who is glaringly supposed to be like 'Fagin' from Oliver Twist, and works as the ringleader of a bunch of enslaved, child musician buskers who live in the abandoned Fillmore East (which certainly doesn't look like the condos it houses in reality). Evan - quickly renamed 'August Rush' after some kind of frozen vegetable truck passes by - is intent on finding his parents, and spends the rest of the film trying to play to larger and larger audiences such that they might hear him.

Let's just say that Simon & Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park ends up with nothing on this kid, in the most obvious ending of all year. Writers Nick Castle, James V. Hart and Paul Castro should really not be allowed back to work when the strike ends because if movies grew in farmer's fields, August Rush would come from Nebraska.
— Walter Forsberg

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