With Sherpa, Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom revisits the story of Everest, but in present day and from the Sherpas’ perspective instead of that of the Westerners who hope to conquer it. The film is now streaming on Netflix in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
[Read more…] about TIFF15: Sherpa is an inside look at the Nepalese people who make climbing Everest possibleDocumentary
What Happened, Miss Simone? is all about the passion
Liz Garbus’ new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, consists mainly of rousing historical footage of Simone’s concerts and interviews, while paying tribute to Simone’s achievements and illuminating the struggles in her life.
Nina Simone wanted to become the first black female classical pianist to perform at Carnegie Hall. She had to settle for becoming a cultural icon and performing there as a jazz legend. Despite penning an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement and achieving great acclaim, she always regretted not making a career out of playing Bach in concert. Liz Garbus’s new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, which consists mainly of rousing historical footage of Simone’s concerts and interviews, tries to compensate by paying tribute to her achievements and illuminating the struggles in her life for posterity. Filled with footage of her passionate performances, It’s a terrific introduction to and celebration of the life and many hard times of Nina Simone for the uninitiated. It’s a loving ode, and like the great Roger Ebert doc Life Itself, shows its respect for Simone by telling us both the good and the bad.
[thrive_lead_lock id=’19429′]Starting in the middle with a performance by Simone at her peak, What Happened, Miss Simone otherwise tells the chronological story of Simone’s life. Born in North Carolina in 1933 as Eunice Waymon, Simone was the sixth child in a poor family. She took up piano at a young age with a teacher who trained her in serious classical music. She had a natural talent, and it pushed her to practice to perfection. Achieving her potential as a musical prodigy was hard, arduous work that kept her from playing with others. It was isolating. She worried that people only valued her for her ability to tickle the ivories to provide entertainment. That relationship with her music never really changed throughout her career. Music was a source of anguish, but also an outlet for release.Simone’s musical dabbling was also key to her first encounters with and understanding of racism in America. When she was asked to give a recital at the local white church as a young girl, she was told her parents had to sit at the back. She refused to play unless they were sitting up front, so they were permitted, but it was a harsh introduction to the realities of the Jim Crow laws, under which her community suffered. When her career turned political — starting with the Civil Rights anthem “Mississippi Goddamn,” which she even performed at the end of the Selma march — she used her music as a platform to voice what it was to be a black woman in America, which made her a crucial player in the Civil Rights Movement while alienating other fans. “Mississippi Goddamn” was an angry song, honest and bold, especially since cuss words were outlawed from radio play at the time. Her records were returned to her, often broken, from all of the radio stations. She performs the song in the film with immense conviction. You can see the years of pain and anger bubbling up to the surface.
Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone when she was living in Atlantic City as a young adult, after spending a year at Julliard before being rejected by the Curtis Institute, essentially because she was black. To make end’s meet, she started performing at a local bar with the stage name of Nina Simone in an effort to keep her nighttime performances a secret from her disapproving family. It was there that she started singing because her boss threatened to fire her if she didn’t. She played everything from classical repertoire to show tunes to pop songs, genre-hopping in a way that would inspire her genre-crossing music.
Although fame and success afforded Simone the opportunity to meet and befriend such influencers as Malcolm X and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), the pressure to perform and entertain was unbearable. Her husband kept the business going, but he was also abusive, beating her senseless, and for years, she didn’t know how to leave him, or think to do so. She had extreme mood swings — she would later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder — and dreaded performing. She felt financially responsible for so many people, well beyond her husband and daughter, that she felt obligated to continue. But if you can believe the interviews she gave and the stories her friends tell in the film, she wasn’t happy doing it.
I’m not so sure you can. At least not entirely. For one thing, we know she had extreme moods, and the historical footage on display may just be capturing her lows. She also wasn’t always entirely in control of her mental faculties, especially in the 1970s, before she was diagnosed and medicated, and things fell apart. Considering the sheer dedication and discipline that her musical training required, and her aspirations to perform Bach, she must have gotten some joy out of it, even if it came with the pain of isolation.
The film features performances of both her rich, original compositions, like “Young, Gifted, and Black,” and her exquisite arrangements and reinterpretations of standards like “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” When she performs on stage, she comes alive. She handles the piano with dexterity, sings her heart out, and carves out a niche that is entirely her own. Even when she’s playing covers, she’s found a way to own them. She lets it all hang out, much to the audience’s satisfaction, and she looks like she’s having a great release.
Although the focus is often on her lyrics and her deeply expressive voice, if you’re paying attention, there’s enormous technical proficiency on display in her piano playing: these are nuanced, complex arrangements played with rare skill.
But the film doesn’t do adequate justice to Simone’s prodigious talent as a composer, pianist, and arranger. Garbus did not interview Simone’s musical collaborators to talk about her musicianship, nor are critics or her contemporaries present to discuss how her classical training was instrumental to her songwriting and performance. She may not have become the great classical pianist that she had aspired to be, but she was a groundbreaking jazz singer-pianist, melding classical, jazz, and blues styles together. The film does a disservice to her talent and legacy by not exploring this. You know when you’re listening to Nina Simone, because nobody sounds like her.
What Happened, Miss Simone? gives Simone’s personal struggles and her role in the political discourse get their due, though we never really find out quite what happened? Living in a racist, misogynist society while suffering from mental illness proved too much even for this strong-willed feisty woman. But the thing Simone seemed to care about most gets no attention. She channeled her classical training into a new avenue, and she ought to be remembered for how she did, and how well she did it. Could Nina Simone exist, after all, had Eunice Weyman not spent years entranced by Bach? There’s more to Simone’s sound than her voice. [/thrive_lead_lock]
Seymour: An Introduction: A moving portrait of the artist as a humble teacher
In Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke follows his friend. former concert pianist Seymour Bernstein, for an intimate, inside look at the process of making art, its rewards and struggles, and an ode to a great teacher.
[Read more…] about Seymour: An Introduction: A moving portrait of the artist as a humble teacher
Merchants of Doubt: an inside look at the climate change denial industry that doesn’t delve deep enough
Merchants of Doubt takes an in-depth look at how the same public relations experts — these “Merchants of Doubt” — who helped tobacco companies persuade the world, in the 1950s and 1960s, that cigarettes weren’t harmful to health, even though the tobacco companies had done their own very good scientific studies that proved the opposite, were later employed to sell lies about climate change.
Frederick Wiseman on his new film National Gallery
In this interview, Frederick Wiseman discusses capturing the paintings in National Gallery on film, his editing process, directing theatre, and how to familiarize yourself with his oeuvre. This is an excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1, purchase a copy here. The book also features interviews with Wiseman on In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris.
[Read more…] about Frederick Wiseman on his new film National GalleryPeople with dementia are more Alive Inside than you might expect
Alive Inside opens on a ninety-year-old woman, sitting in a chair set against a black background, explaining that she can’t remember anything. The setting is very deliberate: she suffers from dementia, and as the film will argue repeatedly throughout, people with dementia in nursing homes live in a world devoid of meaning. We watch her start listening to Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she lights up, telling us it reminds her of her school days. Then, the film cuts to an old black-and-white film strip, a stand-in for the kinds of memories the music must be evoking. The stories of her life start pouring out. What the social worker Dan Cohen discovered is that music seems to unlock a previously inaccessible world of memories for people with dementia, and Alive Inside follows his journey to bring this joy to more people.
The parts of the brain involved in remembering music are the last ones to be affected by dementia, and music can activate more parts of the brain than any other stimulus. So when we meet Henry, a ninety-year-old man suffering with dementia, who’s been in a nursing home for 10 years, it’s music that wakes him up. Before the music, he spent most of his time with his head down, his eyes closed, barely able to string together a few words or remember anything. When Henry is given headphones and music, everything changes. In closeup, we watch his eyes open wide, a smile appear, and the wheels of his brain start turning. Rossato-Bennet has slowed down the footage to magnify the changes. Henry starts singing, remembering stories of his past, and he brings joy to everyone in the room: he was thought to be lost to the world, out of his mind, but the music brought him back.
Director Michael Rossato-Bennett met Henry on his first day of shooting, which was meant to be a one-time thing where he would follow Cohen for a day. But he was so moved by Henry’s awakening, that he ended up following Cohen for three years. In that time, Cohen singlehandedly worked to get music into nursing homes, and get the people there access to the specific music from their past. Any old music won’t work. It has to be something that’s associated with your specific memories. Rossato-Bennett presents Cohen as a lone crusader, driving alone, carrying large boxes of iPods into a nursing home. And initially, he was met with much resistance: we have no problem medicating our elders with thousands of dollars of pharmaceuticals each month, but supplying them each with a $60 personal music system was unthinkable.
The film starts by showing us just how powerful music can be for people with dementia, and then goes on to tackle the whole system of nursing homes and elder care in the United States. There are five million people with dementia in the US, and within the next ten years, this number will at least double. The nursing home, the film explains, was born out of a marriage between the hospital and the poorhouse in the 20th century as a way to manage aging urbanites.
When people move into nursing homes, they lose their autonomy and much of their identity all in one day. Rossato-Bennett always emphasizes the institutional nature of the nursing homes, whether it’s showing us the cookie cutter identical meals being prepared for the residents or filming a nurse bringing medication from the perspective of the “patient.” The problem, Rossato-Bennet and Cohen argue, is that we’re treating our elders like patients and not people.
While Cohen’s goal started out as bringing personal music to as many nursing homes as he could personally managed, he soon realised this wasn’t enough: he’d reached a few dozen homes, but there are 650 in the country. Instead, the film searches for an entirely new way to manage people with dementia. The first sign of promise appears when they meet dementia patient Nell, who continues to live at home with her husband Norman, having avoided long-term care and drugs for ten years. The secret: music. Her husband has kept her constantly stimulated with music. It suggests there may be a different way forward for people with families, willing to do this kind of work, although it’s a more complicated one for those without.
Before completing the movie, Rosatto-Bennet posted a clip of Henry “waking up” with music to YouTube, and it went viral. Suddenly, Cohen’s mission transformed from something nobody was interested in hearing about to one that had more demand than he could meet on his own. The chief pleasure of the film is watching these various people with dementia listening to music, which causes them to wake up, become alert, and regain their identity. One participant hadn’t moved or responded to any stimulus in several years, but once she had her music, she started dancing in her bed. Although the film provides some interesting information about how music works its magic and the state of nursing homes today, it’s a little light on scientific information. It goes for the visceral instead of the intellectual, and in that it’s a success. But it’s such a fascinating idea that I wish they had dived deeper into why it works, instead of just what can be done with this discovery.
Alive Inside is now streaming on Netflix.