Ian MacKaye Introduces Nina Simone

Those in the DC area who can catch the Maryland Film Festival this week can see a little screened 1992 doc about Nina Simone called Nina Simone: La Légende. The draw: it will be introduced by Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye who will lead a discussion about the film afterwards. The doc was made for French television in and mixes and includes interviews and performances from a 1969 Peter Rodis short doc about Simone.

Film festival opens May 7; Ian’s screening is May 9 at 4 p.m. at Baltimore’s Charles Theatre.

Paid to Be Yourself?

Nearly eight years after Jay Bennett left the band Wilco, he’s suing lead singer Jeff Tweedy. At first glance, it seems like the typical unpaid royalty case — but there’s more! Bennett and Tweedy’s dissolution was chronicled in the doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. But Bennett also claims Tweedy did not compensate him for his appearance in the film and that Tweedy “never obtained the necessary releases for the use of Bennett’s performance in the film.”
Welcome the sticky part of doc filmmaking -the releases. Should docs be considered the truest type non-fiction like news, where real life doesn’t require a person to sign a release? At the same point, docs are a commercial endeavor (at least in theory). So should a participant consent to appearing in one via the release?
I think most filmmakers like to get releases if only to make sure there is no ambiguity about the participant’s willingness to be distributed in a film. But Bennett also says he wants “compensation.” That’s a whole other arena. Many documentarians never pay people for obvious reasons that if you’re documenting real life, the profit motive may cause people to act differently. How can a viewer trust that they’re getting an unvarnished life if people had ulterior motives to act a certain way?
Then again, for celebrities and musicians, their is little distinction between their public and private lives. Their private lives are their only form of currency and they’re already getting paid by a variety of entities to be themselves. Why should a documentary be any different than any other product that features them?
So is Bennett right to ask for compensation? He is asking for damages of at least $50,000.

UPDATEIn a very sad postscript to this story, Bennett passed away May 24, 2009. That we’ll not known the answers to the legal issues raised by this case pales vastly behind the loss of not hearing any more music from Bennett.

Potential Fun with We Fun

Saturday’s post about the Seattle scene made me nostalgic for other docs that profile hotspots as a source of musical exploration. Athens, GA Inside/Out (which I admit to seeing back in the day, even if my age can be more closely inferred) featured bands I absolutely loved like R.E.M., B-52s, Love Tractor and especially Pylon – all from that tiny college town. The film had that kinetic energy that made Athens feel like it was the coolest spot on the planet.

So it was kismet that I stumbled across the flick We Fun, which just debuted last week at the Atlanta Film Festival. Unlike Athens, I know little about the Atlanta scene aside from Mastodon (sludge or stoner metal) and have only a passing familiarity with the names of other indies like The Black Lips (flower punk) and Deerhunter (ambient punk). But the trailer makes a credible case for something happening down south with crammed clubs, a notable nightlife vibe (stuffed unicorns hanging from ceilings, lot of public underwear), record labels that double as club space and some really alluring music. As Alexandra Edwards writes in the Atlanta Music Blog review:

In order to be successful, it seems that rock documentaries need to feature three basic things: awesome music, copious alcohol, and a topless girl. Atlanta music scene doc We Fun has all three, and it’s pretty great.

I’ll definitely see it when I can as well as start downloading tracks so I can say I was hip to the new Atlanta first! (You never know…)

Doc Memories: 1991 The Year Punk Broke

You can view the whole thing in pieces in low res on YouTube. Or if you live in NYC, go to the Walter Reade theater on Monday May 4 at 8:15 pm and catch one of the best films about grunge 1991: The Year Punk Broke. Director David Markey was there at the beginning of the movement and has some super rare footage of bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., etc. doing their thing in Europe. Markey also kept an excellent tour diary, where regales behind the scene stories, such as the one where he himself was yelling out songs from offstage for Nirvana to play because they were too ’sroomed out to stick to their set list.