The Best And Worst Of The 2016 Sydney Film Festival, Reviewed
Sorry, the movie about Daniel Radcliffe's farting corpse is a bit of a stinker.
The Film That Will Make You Miss Rock Eisteddfod
Contemporary Colour, dir. Turner Ross and Bill Ross
Starring: David Byrne, Ira Glass
Reviewed by: Lauren Caroll Harris
There is a niche for everyone hidden in the sprawl of the 50 states and 300 million-strong populace of the United States of America: uber-orthodox Jews, hunting maniacs, gunshow enthusiasts, Amish purists. This doco opened my eyes to a subculture clustered around Colour Guard: an activity which involves high-school teams from around the country competing in synchronised contemporary dance sequences. The shows are like steroidal Eisteddfods — big stages, glitter eyeshadow, shiny leotards, ribbon-twirling, self-serious dance teachers — but fronted on a huge scale and clearly with loads of money behind them.
Talking Heads front-man David Byrne must have come across a Colour Guard show on TV at 2am one night, because he’s now really into it. He organised a super-special one last year, teaming the Colour Guard dancers with artists like Nelly Furtado and St Vincent, who all wrote original music for the night. This American Life host Ira Glass is involved too, and he’s as nerdy and sweet as you’d expect.
Byrne helped perfect the concert doco genre with Jonathon Demme in 1984 with Stop Making Sense, so this new film project is an interesting match and should be appealing to fans of the genre. The thing about documentaries like Contemporary Colour — observed, attentive to detail, faithful to the subjects — is that they can collect and display a lot without bringing any specific perspective to the material. The directors, the very young Ross brothers, play things pretty straight like a long MTV video clip: it really is a record of one night of performance, with the film’s structure following the proceedings sequentially from the show’s start to finish. The production values are endlessly high, with the editing synched rhythmically and beautifully to the music and dance plunging us right into the sweaty, high pressure atmosphere.
Because the Ross brothers are so obsessed with fidelity to the show, they miss chances to delve into the performers’ lives and motivations, and Byrne remains a distant figure glimpsed only a few times. I wanted to learn more about this little sliver of subcultural life. I suspect that the film will reinforce whatever worldview you bring to it: Colour Guard fans will see it as a devoted rendering to their artform, while people like me who are new to it all will come away thinking that the US is a place where people’s maddest obsessions are indulged and supported.
The moments when Contemporary Colour diverts from the onstage performances and moves to abstraction are the brightest. It imagines one performer dancing under a streetlight in her hometown, and another backlit by the fluoro beam of his garage. It captures the techies’ expressions of incredulity and performers’ glances of wonder off-stage while Byrne wanders the halls singing like a nutty uncle and spectators make the most of their beer and hotdogs. These are the mundane moments in which you realise the depth of the USA’s strangeness, and subsequently, its great appeal.
For fans of: concert docos, music videos, Sparkle Motion.
Opening in Australia: TBC
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