Major Tom. Ziggy Stardust. Aladdin Sane. Pierrot. Fine White Duke. Blind Prophet. alien rocker Christ’slight‘. Alcoholic astronaut. Neo-expressionist painter. Omnivorous in love. Elephant Man on Broadway. Cyberbug. All 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 Presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival this Tuesday, the film reflects on these four and a half years of continuous metamorphosis. He directed thousands of hours of archival material in five years. Brett Morgen, Senior 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 that have been atomized with bits of Bowie’s conversations 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 impermanence of existence – an ever-changing collage. Abstract animations and visual allusions to artists such as Méliès, Kubrick, Murnau, Eisenstein, Oshima, Kandinsky, Pollock and Bacon run through the ages through the succession and superimposition of never-before-seen images.
Also, clearly, pieces of musical performances abound.From the concerts of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars in the early ’70s to the tours they did 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 insertion of ‘Station to station’—but it’s brilliant nonetheless. To the rhythm to which that musical treasure points, ‘Moonage daydream’ moves fast through the 140-minute shoot 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”.
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, for example, that his composing 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. In addition, the artist’s raids on his personal life are minimal. Thus, it is a consciously incomplete portrait that captures the spirit of its hero, but that David Bowie—Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Blind Prophet, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera—supposes to epitomize that vastness that is called a dozen movies.