Some of the most intriguing films at Sundance this year had music at their center: the Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage of Heck, as well as a Nina Simone documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? look at the artists’ struggles as human beings, while Doug Aitken's chronicle of his ambitious Station to Station project told the story of how music impacts the lives of individuals. These three are some of the most thought-provoking music documentaries on the horizon for 2015.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Nearly a decade in the making, Brett Morgan's Montage of Heck sheds light on Kurt Cobain’s psyche, utilizing diary entries, home movies, and interviews with Cobain’s mother, father, sister, and first girlfriend, Tracy Marander. Montage of Heck is surprisingly focused on the psychology of Kurt Cobain and as such, it doesn’t offer much on the genesis of Nirvana’s music in the mainstream; rather, Cobain's story is told through intimate, graphic insights that come from the inner-workings of his own mind—including 200 hours of unreleased audio and 4000 pages of Cobain’s own writing.
The film explores the socio-political underpinnings of the American underground through the lens of Cobain’s impulsive creativity, which often reads like an indictment. Many of his writings concern the pressure to be a "manly" man in a patriarchal society to which he conscientiously objected; he makes a cartoon called "Mr. Mustache" whose protagonist suggests that to be "100% American male" is to be complicit in the degradation of women. Cobain, in later writings, reveals that Courtney Love was the first person who "taught [him] that it is ok to be a man in a man's world." He spits in the camera and plays up his own histrionics in live footage, while the diaries mirror his unraveling. It's a disturbing portrayal of Cobain, one where we see him as a conscientious objector caught in the machinery of what he considered to be facile entertainment.
Montage of Heck is also defined by disturbia, including a diary passage about how Cobain never had any friends as a teenager ("I hate everyone because they are so phony"), which leads to a discussion of how he didn't want to kill himself before knowing what it's like to get laid. He tried to have sex with a girl who his cohorts labelled "retarded"—a girl that Cobain says had only ever had sex with her cousin—and though he was too "grossed out" to go through with it, the event led to such personal trauma and social alienation that he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself.
Cobain encountered punk rock shortly thereafter, and the discovery imbues his writing with a passion that wasn’t there before. The documentary makes clear that Nirvana gave Cobain a sense of purpose and an outlet for nihilism and artistic inclination. A strange emphasis on his later domestic life dominates the tail end of the film—Courtney Love and a young Francis Bean figure prominently, Dave Grohl is conspicuously absent. Also, Cobain’s first suicide attempt in Rome is played here as an act of passion rather than the consummation of his depressive state that the rest of the film rendered with striking clarity. Montage of Heck breathes new humanity into our well-exploited collective memory of the man.
What Happened, Miss Simone?
What Happened, Miss Simone? culls footage from Nina Simone's Civil Rights-era performances to tell the story of a woman who grew up "young, gifted, and black" in the Jim Crow South. The documentary borrows its title from Maya Angelou's famous question about Simone’s life, and at one point, before we see Simone electrifying the crowd at a Malcolm X-led protest, an elderly gentleman makes the statement: "No man in the Civil Rights movement was willing to say what she did. When we heard her sing "Mississippi Goddam" [following the "Mississippi Burning" murders of 1964]....that was something we all wanted to say, but not one black man would say 'Mississippi Goddamn’." Her daughter then reminds us that Simone "used the blues as a stage for something bigger": "They're shooting us down one by one," Simone tells a mournful crowd after the assassination of her friend Martin Luther King, Jr., "And don't you forget it."
Simone’s diary entries decry the emptiness of overworking herself on the road in a racist America. (She later said, after settling in Europe, that America felt like a "bad dream.") We also see the trauma of her husband’s domestic abuse juxtaposed with a life-affirming improvisational performance that is said to have confounded even Miles Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1987. In a moment of commanding triumph, the woman who canonized "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" steps out from old documentary footage and insists for the camera: "I'll tell you what freedom is: freedom is no fear!" and the words crackle and ripple through the air like a comet. "No fear!" she cries again—the picture of an artist whose struggle and perseverance underscore the genius that is her legacy.
Station to Station
Station to Station is a documentary about a train that artist Doug Aitken designed as a Levis-sponsored mobile light installation, which travels 4000 miles over the course of a month. The resulting 61 one-minute films (which were combined into a single documentary) offer live concert footage and mediations on "perspective", "motion", and "the Frontier". Beautiful art/music combinations like Olaf Breuning's slow-smoldering "Smoke Bomb" are edited alongside Mavis Staples singing "Holy Ghost" over slow-pan footage of economically-depressed middle American towns that the train passes through. "There are two movies on this train," Aitken says of the project. "One is the landscape the passengers see as it rolls by, and the other is the one they make in their mind." All of the footage was collected on the road: photographers, designers, musicians, architects, buskers, sunsets. Ariel Pink performing "Dayzed Inn Daydreams" in Brooklyn, Savages doing "Husbands" in Oakland, Cat Power strumming her guitar in a cave, and Beck playing harmonica with a gospel choir in the desert all become part of the documentary's kaleidoscopic Americana. The through line connecting each vignette is footage of the train moving through changing landscapes where each performance becomes a montage of thought. The film works towards a progressive conversation about movement, art, music, and freedom; in it’s final moments, the sound of two auctioneers speaking at lightning-speed turns into a song that the cinematographer overlaps with imagery and sound from two toe-tapping Flamenco dancers. The result is a cacophony of beautiful noise that overlays a collage of familiar images as they divide, growing smaller with time, fracturing infinitely.