‘The moonage dream’: Bowie’s boundless (and immortal) genius

Major Tom. Ziggy Stardust. Aladdin Sane. Pierrot Fine White Duke. Blind Prophet. The Messiah of alien rocker “Glam”. Alcoholic astronaut. Neo-expressionist painter. Omnivorous in love. Elephant Man on Broadway. Cyberbug. All of these identities and personalities—and many more—collapse beneath the ambiguous signifier we know as David Bowie, who died six years ago after spending his life constantly reinventing himself.

Moonage daydream’, bold cinematographic tribute to her figure most recently offered Cannes Film Festival Out of the competition and released in theaters on Friday the 30th, the film reflects on this four and a half years of continuous metamorphosis. He directed thousands of hours of archival material in five years. Brett Morgen, Expert Documentary In his previous feature film ‘Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck’ (2015), he already addressed the impressionist approach conveyed by the new film.

atomized information

In other words, the ‘Moonage dream’ It doesn’t offer a biographical narrative, just bits of information atomized with fragments of the conversations Bowie had in his life.many of them are of a spiritual and philosophical nature – “I was a Buddhist on Tuesday and became interested in Nietzsche on Friday”, at one point in the film he is heard commenting on the transience of existence, an ever-changing collage. Never-before-seen for artists such as Méliès, Kubrick, Murnau, Eisenstein, Oshima, Kandinsky, Pollock and Bacon, abstract animations and visual allusions run through the ages through succession and overlay of images.

Also, clearly, pieces of musical performances abound.From the concerts of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars in the early ’70s to their tour with the albums ‘Outside’ and ‘Earthlings’ in the mid and late ’90s.

music treasure

In total, 48 songs share more or less assets; ‘Hello space boy’ playing first and ‘Memory of a free festival’ ends the movie. Morgen’s choice is inevitably different from what other fans of the artist would choose—this historian misses the addition of ‘Station to station’—but it’s brilliant anyway. To the rhythm marked by that treasure of music, ‘Moonage daydream’ moves fast through the 140-minute filming without interrupting the viewer. That might mean it will wear out audiences who aren’t particularly ready to catch up, but die-hard fans will be upset that it didn’t take another 140 minutes. There is no doubt that Bowie will love her; As a result, as he explains in the movie, he understood his music as an “idea pudding” and tried to “start the 21st century in 1971”.

David Bowie in an image from the documentary ‘Moonage daydream’. NEON


The big idea the movie expresses is that Bowie’s life is a pendulum.causing him to oscillate between the need to connect with people and the need to distance himself; This explains why, for example, his compositional experiments with Brian Eno in Berlin led him to turn to populism with songs like ‘Let’s dance’ and ‘Modern love’ that made him a superstar. After years of persistently trying to impose his own tastes on the public, he had decided to start giving them what they wanted.

personal life

Of course, Bowie kept going through phases and regained his desire to experiment, but the ‘Moonage dream’ is tiptoeing through them. Same way, the artist’s raids on his personal life are minimal. Therefore, one who captures the spirit of his hero, but does not do so by David Bowie -Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Blind Prophet, etc., etc., etc. It is a deliberately incomplete portrait that presupposes to encapsulate that vastness called a dozen movies.

Source: Informacion

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