The
Soul of a Man
Wim Wenders, Director
110 mins, 2003
Part of the series, The Blues
Martin Scorsese, Exec. Prod.
web
site
Wenders' statement that his film is
"more like a poem than a documentary"
is a fair description of the form and style
of his recent film, The Soul of a Man,
produced as part of the American PBS
television series, The Blues. Indeed, as an
anthropologist and filmmaker, what I found
most refreshing about his film is how this
renowned auteur of the cinema poetically
blends fact and fiction, breathing new life
into the all-too-often-flattened pitch of
historical documentary. And, unlike many
ethnographic and documentary filmmakers,
Wenders is not afraid to explore his medium:
his is informative and cinematic.
With some recent forays into more
experimental forms of visual ethnography,
some filmmakers have found in performativity,
re-enactment, and scripted scenarios a means
by which to place evocation before analytic
description; offering up a different kind of
'ethnographic film'. All the same, it would
be pretentious to regard Wenders as an
ethnographer. However, considering his
notable career as a director of feature
length fiction and documentary films, he
remains a producer of cultural artifacts,
and therefore - if one wishes to subscribe
to Bill Nichols idea that all films are, to
a greater or lesser degree, documentaries,
or Karl Heider's keen notion of the "naïve
ethnography", i.e. films that
unintentionally inform us about culture -
his recent work remains relevant to issues
of race, gender, and the political economy
of the music business. We should also be
aware that Wenders' recent film is not his
first venture into the amorphous zone of 'documentary'.
Nick's Film - Lightning Over Water (1981),
inventively and sensitively documented the
aging, cancer-stricken struggle of famous
Hollywood filmmaker Nicholas Ray as he
collaborated with Wenders to produce a
record of his final days. Circumventing some
of the redolent pitfalls of many a
documentary (and ethnographic) film - such
as assumed positions of neutrality and
transparency on the part of the filmmaker -
The Soul of a Man is similarly self-aware: a
vantage point and admonition that is fairly
rare amongst documentary films that deal
with the past.
Laurence Fishburne, serving as the
reflective ferryman for the audience,
exhumes the voice of Blind Willie Johnson (a
1930s-era southern, black, blind bluesman)
who takes us on an animated journey into the
early days of American blues. Shot mostly in
black and white with stylized - slyly
self-referential 're-enactments' - the
director pairs these speculative filmic
vignettes with recordings from the original
music sessions in order to evoke and
illustrate a sense of the personae, emotions,
and circumstances that influenced and
surrounded some of the earliest audio
recordings of what were later to be called
'The Blues'. These evocative images and
scenes stand in for the 'actual' (if any do
indeed exist) motion picture images from
this time and place. This manner of
performative re-enactment works as an artful
means of lending a sense of 'being there',
hinting at the subtle and unspoken
inspirations - in this instance, of making
music - in a fashion similar to some of the
enticing film works by Tracey Moffatt,
Marlon Riggs, and Marlon Fuentes.
On that note, as the film suggests, the
undeniably organic birth of these songs
serves to demonstrate how such mainstays of
a genre are, originally, pre-conscious (i.e.
'that Blues sound'). And further, how
taxonomy and style are really just
self-restrictive, imposed boundaries that
selectively draw from the essential elements
of an art form: sadly, turning personal
expression into a commodity. The same can be
said for films of a documentative and
ethnographic nature that ascetically
subscribe to the orthodoxy of realism,
instead of being reflective of and
responsive to the constituent elements of
their genesis (i.e. "the pain",
"the desire") and - like the poet/bluesman/artist
- use such emotions not only as their point
of departure, but as the binding elements of
their work itself.
The layering of Wenders' film is a seamless
weave of original musical recordings married
with re-enactments, nuanced with historical
and biographical tidbits. Present-day
interpretations of blues classics from Blind
Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J. B. Lenoir
- performed by T. Bone Burnett, Lou Reed,
Shemekia Copeland, Nick Cave, Bonnie Raitt
and others - demonstrate just how
foundational these early bluesmen were to a
wide variety of contemporary musical forms.
Raitt's modern-day reinterpretation of Skip
James' lyric "I'd rather be the Devil,
than be that woman's man" to "I'd
rather be the Devil, than be a woman to that
man" is a subtle flip-of-the-lyric,
that nevertheless reflects changes in gender
dynamics over the past seventy years, not
only in regards to American society in
general, but - as Raitt's success has
demonstrated - within the music industry as
well. Noticing the shift in gender should be
as obvious as the shift in race, as well.
But this latter transposition is never
formally dealt with within the film.
Micro-criticisms aside, Wenders' recent
foray into 'experimental documentary' is a
success: an inspired composition mixing
fiction and nonfiction, intoned with
allusional social commentary on the
prejudices and injustices encountered by
early African American musicians, which
together equally inform and entertain the
viewer. The film breaks from the mold of
historical documentary (a genre that is so
often played with a rather prescriptive and
formulaic hand - just strumming the chords,
as it were). Instead, Wenders' film - like
the contemporary musical renditions he's
gathered herein - is not so much a cover (of
blues tunes, or historical documentary) but
more akin, in spirit and form, to the
original: the initial structure is
acknowledged but new territory is forged,
resulting in a resonant opus of artistic
cinematic and musical expression with social
relevance.
(Wim Wenders quote from Program Guide,
Galway Film Fleadh XV, pg. 43, 2003)
©2003 Kevin Taylor
Anderson
|
