Martin Scorsese The Blues Watch Online

I of the most eagerly awaited documentaries of the year may too be ane of the near controversial. The Blues, the 7-function, ten-and-a-half-hour documentary series on the influence of blues music on our club, premieres on PBS this fall. Martin Scorsese, who directed ane of the episodes, is the executive producer. Alex Gibney and Margaret Bodde are the producers.

The series, Gibney relates, was built-in out of a conversation betwixt Scorsese and Eric Clapton while the old was producing a documentary on the latter. Both have a mutual love of dejection music. Scorsese's original plan was to executive-produce a feature film that would be directed by Charles Burnett on the history of the musical genre.

Gibney came aboard at this indicate when Bodde, who has produced several documentaries with Scorsese for more than a decade, enlisted his producing custodianship. "I mischievously suggested that perchance information technology might exist good to aggrandize the scope of the projection to do a number of films," Gibney says. "Ultimately, that's how the project expanded—not only to a number of different films, but to a huge number of CDs, a book, an educational component, a radio serial, etc."

Gibney terms Scorsese "a cultural preservationalist." As well his work with the Motion-picture show Foundation, which protects endangered films and restores their materials, Scorsese has produced and directed an impressive array of documentaries, including those on American and Italian film history.

Scorsese and Gibney gave creative autonomy to the six other directors of the series. Says Gibney, "A series has never really been done similar this before, where instead of having one person at the centre who says, 'Okay, first in that location'll be chapter one, and and so you keep in a linear fashion.' This one has a crude geographical and chronological structure, merely within that rough construction, and within certain territories, the directors have a tremendous amount of freedom to operate."

Those looking for a comprehensive history of the dejection will be frustrated. "Each film is very personal and impressionistic," Gibney maintains. The half dozen other directors on the projection are Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders. Each pic reflects the influence of blues music on the private filmmaker. None was designed to present a comprehensive history—à la Ken Burns' Jazz—of the dejection. Controversy will rage amongst critics and music and film buffs about the omissions as well as those who are included, either in archival footage, performance footage or interviews for the films. So perhaps this highly personal series should exist called "Riffs on the Blues."

Gibney, Burnett, Levin and Pearce discussed their personal empathy with the projection in phone interviews with International Documentary. Burnett, as revealed in his autobiographical motion-picture show in the series, Warming by the Devil's Burn down, has perhaps the closest and the almost visceral human relationship with the dejection. He was born during World State of war II in Vicksburg, Mississippi, into a family that was dominated by its own civil war. His religious grandmother called the blues "the devil's music" and made life and then difficult for Burnett's blues-loving mother that she moved with Charles to Los Angeles. Ironically, his grandmother loved music in church.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Burnett retained his Southern roots considering, as he points out, "Los Angeles was very segregated." In the 1950s, the recordings of Bessie Smith became a major influence on him because his mother played those records oftentimes. Considering religion and black ministers coalesced effectually African-American politics in the Civil Rights era, Burnett was aware of the reliance on the blues idiom in gospel. He "noted the contradictions that the blues posed" in those who dismissed it as the devil'southward music. Burnett recognized that church blues music and nightclub blues music had roots in common. In Pearce's pic, The Road to Memphis, musician Bobby Rush makes the aforementioned observation.

Burnett is the simply African-American filmmaker amid the 7. An ersatz eighth film in the series—a documentary of a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall of blues artists—is being directed by Antoine Fuqua, who is too black. The working championship is Lightning in a Bottle, and it will have a theatrical release. No women filmmakers are represented, yet, and the endeavor focuses in any case on male person blues singers. Manager Spike Lee had to bow out of the projection because of other commitments, and a host of other black filmmakers who were considered could not commit themselves because of either the low budget of the project or of schedule conflicts.

The situation was the same with negotiations with the women directors considered, although Leslie Harris, the African-American woman manager, was a scriptwriter on the series. Gibney admits that the directors involved sacrificed their time and coin to reach their films. Then, in a sense, The Blues represents a labor of dear for the participants.

However, another criterion was that all the considered filmmakers had to have distinguished themselves in the documentary form as well as in feature films. Gibney explains: "I personally had been involved in projects earlier, or knew people who had been in projects earlier, where forth thematic lines a number of feature-film directors were called to do documentaries. And those were non very successful, past and large, because the feature film directors chosen had never washed documentaries before. Either their work ended upwards having to be fixed past documentarians or information technology didn't turn out that well."

Like Burnett, Levin also has emotional connections with the music. Gibney has produced at least 3 films with the managing director: the drama Brooklyn Babylon (2000) and the documentaries Speak Truth and Power and Soldiers in the Regular army of God (both 2000). Growing up in New Jersey, Levin was a music insubordinate in a nonetheless musically vanilla America in the 1960s. Paul Butterfield and the Blues Ring changed his life and his aesthetic. "I think that I wanted to exist a musician, simply I became a filmmaker," he says. Godfathers and Sons, his film in the series, explores the connection betwixt the blues and hip-hop in terms of patrimony. Chuck D of the rap grouping Public Enemy and Marshall Chess, son of the founder of Chess Records, joined forces in Chicago to produce an album of veteran dejection players in unison with hip-hop musicians. Levin, who directed the landmark hip-hop picture show Slam (1998) regards both groups of musicians as storytellers with definite godfather, if not begetter, connections.

Electric Mud, the much-maligned Dingy Waters album from the tardily 1960s, is the symbolic connection between the two widely separated generations in Levin's picture. Waters, who is also a graphic symbol in the Figgis film, Red, White and Blues, essentially lost his following in America in the 1960s, and the innovative Electric Mud was misunderstood until information technology was championed by the hip-hop generation. "A new technology created hip-hop, but the storytelling and the stars are like," Levin explains. Whether it is urban blues or hip-hop, "the lyrics themselves are virtually street credibility."

1 of the strengths of the Levin motion picture is the music connectedness between black musicians and Jewish lodge and record visitor owners. Both were joined in a struggle against an American religious correct.

Civil Rights-era African-Americans regarded the dejection as state music, and retrogressive, preferring instead life-affirming and invigorating soul music or the Motown Sound. Waters also influenced the British rock audio, and one of the highlights of the Figgis film, which is about British stone and blues, is the footage of Mick Jagger and Muddied Waters in a duo concert advent. "One of the revelations in Mike's film," Pearce notes, "is that he really traces the development of the British blues scene from earlier than most people know nearly-going back to a guy named Humphrey Littleton who had a melody chosen 'Bad Penny Blues' with a riff that turns upwardly in [The Beatles'] 'Lady Madonna' equally an homage riff."

Pearce, after producing music films earlier in his career, relished the thought of making a motion-picture show "without someone looking over my shoulder," and in his native Due south. The documentary form is less collaborative than a dramatic movie product, which relies on tight coordination with the scriptwriter, actors, cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, et al. Pearce and his sound engineer traveled with mod bluesman Rush on his tour bus to create The Road to Memphis, which juxtaposes the careers of Rush and the legendary B.B. Rex. King is a giant whose career in the '60s was fading with black audiences until white audiences made him a superstar. Rush, on the other manus, tours nigh non-stop on the chitlin circuit earlier African-American audiences. The picture culminates with a concert in Memphis, an important city for the blues, featuring King, Rush, Ike Turner and other blues artists.

The Wenders movie, The Soul of a Human being, has a Stanley Kubrick touch in its imagery of a missile sending the blues into outer space on a vinyl disc (although the question remains how aliens will notice a turntable to play the music). The scenes showing Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James are poetic fictional re-creations just create the country atmosphere of the dejection necessary to comprehend the meaning and the message of the other segments.

The Scorsese episode, Experience Like Going Home, digs deeper into the mythology of the blues in both Mali, Africa and the Deep South in performances by African and African-American musicians Ali Farka Toure, Salif Keita, Habib Koite, Taj Mahal, Corey Harris and Otha Turner. "It explores music connections both between Africa and Mississippi and their ii-way musical connections," says Gibney.

The premise of the Eastwood film, Piano Blues, is his life experience with piano blues, first with Fats Waller recordings. Eastwood is known more for his appreciation of jazz, and so his segment expands our perceived concepts of the dejection.

Every bit Levin quotes from one of the musicians he interviewed, "The blues are the roots, and everything else is the fruits," a thought perhaps in the hearts of the usually artless United States Senate when they declared 2003 "The Twelvemonth of the Dejection."

Kevin Lewis is a contributing editor to International Documentary and has written for DGA Magazine and Editors Guild Mag.

Source: https://www.documentary.org/feature/white-men-film-blues-pbs-project-skimps-color-and-gender

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