Bowie, the star who came from elsewhere


Lhen the death of David Bowie was announced on January 10, 2016, the author of these lines was with an English friend living in Los Angeles, the city where Bowie confessed to having lived “the darkest years of his life” – in In fact, he had only stayed there for a few months, under the influence of cocaine, in 1975. Upon learning of his disappearance, the said friend had quietly affirmed: “But David Bowie cannot die! This is indeed the conclusion that comes to mind before Brett Morgen’s documentary, Moonage Daydreamdedicated to the pop star with the support of the David Bowie Foundation.

If Bowie loved the cinema, which had greatly influenced him and where he interpreted some memorable roles (in particular in the furiously homoerotic Furyo by Nagisa Oshima), he had always refused to see his life unfold on the big screen, whether it was the subject of a fiction or a documentary.

Todd Haynes, director of carol Where Dark Waters, knows something about it, he who had wanted to shoot a biopic on the decade 1970-1980 of the artist (the most fruitful), but who had come up against Bowie’s refusal for the exploitation of his songs. Haynes had therefore been forced to create an original soundtrack, signed in particular by Thom Yorke, the leader of Radiohead, and to propose the biography of a pop-star inspired by the life of Bowie, while naming his film all the same Velvet Goldminea title of… David Bowie period Ziggy Stardust. Released in 1998, Velvet Goldmine was largely filmed under the dual patronage of Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet, central figures in Bowie’s universe, but left him rather skeptical.

Epilepsy collages

All the complexity of the object Bowie is that the singer, trained in the school of mime and kabuki, staged himself from the start of his career, accumulating avatars and doubles (Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack…) to make them disappear better, before beginning a drastic and lasting media cure during the 2000s. His illness had moreover remained a remarkably well-kept secret until the announcement of his death, a tour de force in the panoptic era of social networks. Also Brett Morgen, the director of Moonage Daydream (a title once again taken from the album Ziggy Stardust), did he find himself faced with an almost insurmountable challenge: to reveal the life of one of the most important artists in all of 20th-century pop culture?e century, which had spent a great deal of time, energy and creativity in sprinkling it with trompe-l’oeil and dead ends, in order to undermine any biographical undertaking that escaped its control.

Morgen took an alternative path, as he told us, still suffering from a painful jet lag, during the recent Deauville Festival where the film was presented: “I spent two years immersing myself in tons of documents, then eight months writing my script. And then one night, I removed all the chronological and biographical sequence that structured it. It occurred to me that this method, which let David talk at length, without interruption, would better describe his spirituality, his fluidity and his approach to the creative process. »

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And in fact, in Moonage Daydreamyou will not find any testimony (family, collaborators, disciples) outside Bowie to recall the genius of the creator of china girl and Modern Love, which speaks very well for itself. The voiceover is provided by the singer, over unpublished archives to which the singer’s family has therefore granted access for the first time. These images alternate with sometimes epileptic collages of film clips by Fritz Lang, Carl Dreyer, Tod Browning or Federico Fellini, plays (where Bowie plays himself), concert scenes and even stellar visions.

“I have nothing against documentaries where someone talks about someone, but I think it has more room for home viewing,” says Morgen. “For my part, I have always wanted to use the language of cinema for my films. It was when I discovered the French New Wave, then experimental documentaries in ethnology and anthropology in the 1970s, that everything changed for me. There’s something artificial about nonfiction that you’ll come up with a more accurate and complete picture by seeking an outside perspective on someone than by letting them tell their own story. »

Stunning sequences

This story, Bowie therefore tells it, during sometimes staggering sequences. Like this limousine trip in the Californian desert with a ghostly and frighteningly thin Bowie, who compares his stay in Los Angeles to that of a lost fly in milk, or even this anonymous, enigmatic wandering and nightlife in the streets of Bangkok. For those unfamiliar with Bowie’s biography, Moonage Daydream will hardly help them to find their way around, despite a tenuous chronological thread that Morgen compels himself not to completely cut.

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But the interest of the film is elsewhere. “It is possible to find on Wikipedia or thanks to any search engine all the events relating to the life of an artist. I didn’t want to make a movie about David Jones [le vrai nom de Bowie, NDLR], but to propose something else, which is not linear. My approach is anthropological, from a certain point of view. I observed and treated David as if he came from a culture very distant from ours, even from another planet. Like an alien. »

The image could not be better chosen, because it ultimately crosses Bowie’s entire career, from his first hit in 1969 with Space Oddity until his last album Blackstar released a few days before his death, passing through sublime titles like Life on Mars, Starman and space boyor his role as a depressive Alien in 1976 in The Man Who Came From Elsewherethe film by Nicolas Roeg.

The editing of the film in the form of fragments evokes the method of cut up popularized by William Burroughs, namely the cutting up of sentences or words which are then randomly associated. Bowie had borrowed it from the beat writer and adopted it for the writing of some of his albums, notably the Berlin period trilogy (Low, heroes, lodger), during which Bowie lived with Iggy Pop as a roommate (!) between 1977 and 1979. “It was not difficult to choose from all the material of images and documents placed at my disposal. However, it was more difficult to know how to fit them together, like in a puzzle – and I’m very bad at puzzles! The transitions therefore had to be provided by David’s voice, and his songs of course. »

physical experience

We come out of Moonage Daydream as one would come out of a Greek tragedy, where the performance of the actors was much more aimed at meaning (William Marx thus evokes “the true physiological action of tragedy” in The Tomb of Oedipus) only to the reason of the spectators. Physically marked, but undeniably captivated. “I knew that David was interested in the technique of cut up, but it joined my own interest in the collision of images and their impact on the viewer. The helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now with the music of Wagner was for me one of the most exciting moments of sexual orgasm when I was a teenager in the cinema. »

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The soundtrack, of astounding depth and quality, was moreover supervised by Tony Visconti, Bowie’s historic producer who accompanied him from his first album in 1969 until Blackstar. Bowie’s phrases, between haikus and Nietzschean aphorisms, follow the titles, famous or more unknown, of the artist, while his performances as a painter pass before our eyes (his Ingres violin, on which he nevertheless remained with a extreme discretion) or on stage (he played an unforgettable Joseph Merrick-Elephant Man between 1980 and 1981 on Broadway), which also reflect the constant coexistence of order and chaos in his home. There is no rosebud to hope in Moonage Daydream, no revelation that would lift the veil of the Bowie mystery. This was indeed the most beautiful tribute to pay to the total artist that was the Thin White Duke.

Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen, in theaters September 21.

Bowie, the star who came from elsewhere