Festival report

Every doc for itself

4. Music docs, and the award-winners that got away

Unsurprisingly, given the marketplace, Doc/Fest was almost as strong in music documentaries as in green-themed films. It even brought in Israeli conductor Itay Talgam to present his ‘legendary’ masterclass Music as Multilayered Storytelling, in which clips of diverse conducting personalities from Ricardo Muti to Richard Strauss to Leonard Bernstein were adduced to probe the ambiguities of (more or less) collaborative authorship. Exactly whose story were they telling? It was a question that underpinned many of the more interesting documentaries in the festival.

I caught two of the music docs. The more polished, appropriately enough – Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck’s PianoMania – was the fruit of a year spent in the company of Steinway Vienna’s top piano tuner, Stefan Knupfer, as he sources the right instruments for various different-minded grand pianists and prepares for Pierre Laurent-Aimard’s new Bach recordings. Unlike the slightly incredulous sound engineers at the recording, Knupfer is an analogue man, ready to deploy scalpels, glue or tennis balls to get the sounds his clients want, and he makes you hear it, too. It made for an ear-opening portrait of genial, slightly eccentric perfectionism.

Form also followed function in Omar Majeed’s Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, a comparatively ragged portrait of America’s proto-Muslim-punk-rock scene. You could play it in a double-bill with last year’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad (S&S October 2008), sure, but the film was both looser and richer – and a little less gobsmacked.

Whose story was it telling? Partly that of the various Islamic punks who have taken up guitars against a world that stereotypes them; partly that of their erstwhile prophet, the white rebel Islamic convert Michael Muhammad Knight, whose 2003 book The Taqwacores anticipated just such a movement before it existed. He follows them on a road tour of the American north-east states (culminating in a bust-up at the bland Islamic Conference of America, whose organisers take exception to the tour’s only female performers: “‘Islamically appropriate’ means no women singers”). Later some of the acts travel to Lahore, play a couple of rooftop gigs and smoke cheap pot while Knight goes chasing memories at a nearby super-mosque, and takes class issue with the conservative euphemisms (‘good families’; ‘bad values’) of middle-class Pakistanis. Pulling itself different ways, the film was a little shapeless, but a pretty sharp yell.

After all this, the punch line to my own festival visit was that I hadn’t managed to see a single one of the award winners. (Thankfully at least the Innovation Award winner, Patrick Bergeron’s dizzying split-screen travelling montage ‘Loop Loop’, is up online.) It certainly sounds like I missed out on Erik Gambini’s Special Jury Award winner Videocracy; then again, the final tally of audience favourites seems to bear out that this was a particularly diverse collection of movies, with little sense of groundswell or convergent tastes. And that may be the way the movies are moving. Here’s to an even more varied 2010.

1. Campaigning pains>>

<<3. Character observations

See also

To the bitter end: Tim Lucas on Hara Kazuo’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (October 2007)

Documentary: shaking the world by Mark Cousins (September 2007)