Doc n Roll Film Festival is a touring festival that was established in 2014 with an aim to showcase both independent film and music through short programmes of music documentaries which celebrate diverse styles of music. As the festival made a short but memorable stop in Manchester, I was lucky enough to catch a few screenings which granted me new insight into music styles that were not particularly in my wheelhouse.
Film has always been a form that relied heavily upon music; even silent films were never silent, with musical accompaniment an established convention well before the coming of sound technology in the late 1920s. But the music documentary feels more modern and hip, perhaps really taking hold in the late '60s and early '70s with the emergence of the pop and rock as a major economic force. It is easy to see why documentary makers, particularly those who are learning their craft, are drawn to music as their focus: The flamboyant subjects, the driving beats which dictate the edit pace and dynamic stage performances can do most of the heavy lifting for the filmmaker. The films are cheap to make, their subjects eager for the limelight and there is a built in fan base, so funding these films must also come marginally easier than more abstract creative films which the same filmmakers have in their mind as they pitch their projects.
On the opening night I arrived rather late (ironically because The Spice Girls were clogging up Manchester traffic with their fans of anything but diverse or interesting music) to Gullivers on Oldham Street in Manchester to attend the Music Shorts Doc Night; a screening of 5 short documentaries. The highlights of which were; ‘The Velvet Underground Played At My High School’ (Dirs: Jannelli, A and Pietri, R. 2017) an animated documentary which tells of the debut performance of the iconic '60s band as they supported ‘The Myddle Class’ at Summit High School in New Jersey. During their infamous three song set, they emptied the school hall but for a select few whose curiosity and staying power paid off. Using first-hand accounts as voiceovers to the stunning “zine-style” animation (Think Ah-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ video crossed with Richard Linklater’s Rotoscoping technique from ‘A Scanner Darkly’) it creates a vibrant and evocative soundscape that really brings to life the dizzying experience of discovering this band. The screening was hampered by a sound glitch at the venue, which diluted its impact somewhat, but the film is outstanding.
Next was ‘You Are Here’ (Dir: Jones, N. 2018), a short documentary in the observational mode with some expository input by it's subject Tony Rogers, keyboard player from The Charlatans. If music documentaries should traditionally feature flamboyant subjects with an excess of charisma, this fly-on-the-wall doc first appears to have missed it's mark with Tony Rogers, a down to earth, soft spoken farmer who appears at home away from the limelight. This is of course the film’s USP, Jones is a charming and gentle soul whose love of his animals and the beautiful landscape he farms is infectious. The autumnal tones of the cinematography and stark sound design soon give way to the lurid neons of stage lighting, with the pulsating indie swagger of The Charlatans’ live music as we see Jones’s alter-ego playing to a swirling sea of cheering festival crowds, before again dissolving back to life on a farm in all its bloody and placenta-strewn reality. The birth of a calf is pretty gross I can tell you! This is fantastic documentary making with a humanist streak, simultaneously letting a witty subject take centre stage as a character study, whilst beautiful cinematography evokes a wonderful dichotomy in Jones’s dual identity.
‘The Birth of Afrobeat’ (Dir: Okeyo, O. 2017) also stood out. This was a profile of musician Tony Allen, a pioneer of Afrobeat, told in talking heads interspersed with live footage of his band performing. It was a lively and interesting film with one standout technique; As Allen was given time to explain how his style evolved the documentary makers opted for a witty and vibrant animation to bring his storytelling to life. It worked perfectly.
On Thursday the festival had re-located to HOME and I attended a screening of ‘Never Stop: A Music That Resists’ (Dir: Caux, J. 2017) which is a feature length expository documentary about the Detroit Techno scene, charting the rise of independent labels through four interviews. I can honestly say that I have never seen a documentary fail so comprehensively as this. It is directionless in every way: with meandering talking heads that offer no insight whatsoever, a funereal edit pace that is contrapuntal to the pulsing music that is its subject (of which there is painfully little in the soundtrack), lingering shots of DJ sets that fundamentally resist putting the audience inside the experience of the club-goers and a turgid insistence on ponderous shots of Detroit’s decaying post-industrial landscape, which would be relevant but by the end, appear to just be filler. Seriously, one shot taken through the front windscreen of a car (with no techno soundtrack, just the hum of the vehicle) spends so long showing us a generic highway junction to Toledo (there is no mention of that city at any point in the interviews!) is so long that I honestly feared that we’d just be silently driving all the way to Toledo for the next two hours. This is a case where the filmmaker needed to admit defeat and realise that they simply did not have a film, because there was nothing of any competence on display here.
The festival closed, again at HOME, with ‘Sepultura Endurance’ (Dir: Juliano, O. 2017) a reassuringly loud and energetic portrait of Brazil’s foremost thrash metal rockers. I only booked this review because I remembered that a close friend had a poster of Sepultura on his wall at university, so I hoped that this would coax him up to Manchester to join me. Alas he was busy “metalling” or whatever it is called at a gig in London. So I was quite daunted by the prospect of watching 100 minutes of a niche music form that is not only alien to me, but quite obnoxious. Thankfully this documentary was the polar opposite of ‘Never Stop: A Music That Resists’. It immersed the audience in the music and the band’s live performance whilst offering a comprehensive biography of the band’s emergence and evolution over their 30 year career. The test of a good music documentary from a novice’s (and sceptic’s) point of view should be that I form a greater appreciation of the music, even if I am not a convert, and I can honestly say that Octavio Juliano’s film did exactly that. It is loud, well-paced, littered with talking heads from a range of viewpoints and full of well-chosen archive material. This is so full of standard ‘Rockumentary’ tropes that I enjoyed making some snarky comparisons to ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. However, there is no denying that this is a film for fans, made by fans, so after the screening I made a point of stopping some audience members sporting Sepultura T-shirts and asking if the film had delivered the goods for them. With all the wide eyed enthusiasm of people who have just disembarked a rollercoaster, their response was unanimously “Oh yeah!!”.
The Doc N Roll Festival arrives in Glasgow on 27th June and their excellent programme of screenings can be found on www.docnrollfestival.com. I am looking forward to its return to Manchester in the near future.
Reviewer - Ben Hassouna-Smith
on - 2/6/19
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