Film Carew: Clash Of The Legendary Rock Frontmen

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

The ‘rockumentary’ is as predictable as any genre. Find a cult act —preferably dead— and recruit the regular interview-circuit talking-heads —Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins, Bono— to wax rhapsodic about how great said cult act was; and, preferably, how back-in-the-day —1969, 1977, 1991— was so much better than the pathetic age we now dwell in.

20,000 Days On Earth marks a conscious attempt to shake off the shackles of such a restrictive form. It’s a scripted-documentary co-written by its very subject, Melbourne’s great rock’n’roll saint Nick Cave, in which the normal narrative is hung on the frame of his fictionalised 20,000th day alive. Like Mrs. Dalloway, this singular day will span an entire lifetime, and such a sense of structural ambition and playful performativity is a marker of the film’s desire to approach the rockumentary’s requisite elements from artful angles.

Rather than having Cave talk-to camera in staged interview, he sits down with psychoanalyst Darian Leader —a bespectacled and calmly-nodding interlocutor who almost borders on parody of the psychoanalyst — who gets to ask him about his first sexual experience, memories of his late father, his greatest fears, his belief in God, etc. Rather than digging up old biography and video, Cave instead visits the likely-fictional ‘Nick Cave archives’, in which he goes through old trinkets mailed home to his mum in his Berlin days. And rather than having celebrity talking-heads testimonialise its subject’s greatness, instead we have Cave, driving around Brighton, having conversations with the imagined phantoms Ray Winstone, Blixa Bargeld, and Kyle Minogue; the latter’s presence in the backseat of a car bringing with it pleasing Holy Motors associations.

Cave’s spoken voice-over is archly-poetic —sometimes a little too so, striving for the grand metaphor at every turn— and, when talking extemporaneously, he’s eloquent and considered; whether detailing distant memories or his philosophies on songwriting. Befitting someone too conceptually-minded to subject to the regular rockumentary treatment, Cave is fantastically self-aware: realising the necessity and limits of his rockstar persona, the deep neediness in himself, and how art offers a place for escape; the stage the forum in which he can forget himself.

We see Cave on stage, briefly, for a small club crowd in London, and then at the Sydney Opera House fronting a full orchestra and children’s choir. We spend more time with Cave and cohorts at work on 2013’s Push The Sky Away, the tedious grind of studio recording receding with an electric live-recorded version of the snarling, swaggering Higgs Boson Blues. There’s moments of banality both staged (Cave and twin songs eating pizza watching Scarface on the couch) and not (Warren Ellis on an aerobic stepper!); and Cave and Ellis, a pair of longtime collaborateurs now worn and familiar, are constant companions, swap great anecdotes about Nina Simone over yet another shared lunch.

Ultimately, as its title attests, the film can only turn towards thoughts of mortality; of the turn towards old age for a man now 56. Songs, Cave posits, are a way of battling mortality, confronting the inevitability of its author’s imminent demise. They’ve been his way grappling with the primal nature of man, the darkness and desire left out of polite conversation; but they’ve also been a way to fight against the spectre of death. Songs will, after Cave shuffles off this mortal coil, be the legacy of his life, of all its days. And 20,000 Days On Earth bears the fingerprints of a subject greatly concerned with that legacy, and making sure it’s preserved with his artistic integrity intact.

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS

Like 20,000 Days On Earth, Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets wants to detonate the regular rockumentary clichés. It may be based around Pulp’s final-ever (for the moment) concert at a stadium in Sheffield in late 2013, but its title lets you know this isn’t a hagiographic portrait of rock gods slaying adoring fans in an arena spectacular. Its maker is Florian Habicht, the enthusiastic New Zealander last seen serving cereal out of his concave chest in 2011’s writing-the-movie-as-it-goes docudrama Love Story. Habicht has made a curiosity-filled career out of oddball experiments that oft blur lines of fact and fiction, and his impish sense-of-humour —and sense-of-adventure— is a perfect match for the shrugging drollery of the band themselves; forever embodied in the presence of wry frontman Jarvis Cocker.

Habicht spends plenty of time with Cocker and his bandmates, but he’s more interested in their fans; and the relationship those in Sheffield have to these hometown heroes. So Habicht, wandering the streets of their town, talks Pulp with newspaper venders and fishmongers, council-estate kids and pensioner choristers. He identifies with the fans who speak of how much Pulp’s music means to them because he, too, shares their fandom. In regular rockumentaries, fandom leads to toothless and non-critical hagiographies in deference to it star, but here Habicht achieves the opposite: rendering its subjects mundane and mortal, and putting the audience on equal footing.

The result is something that manages to tape into the inclusivity of music, the communal gathering of performance. When Cocker and co take to the stage for their grand finale, they play the hits for the screaming masses, sure, but Habicht spends as much time filming people in the crowd —some familiar faces we’ve already met, some fleeting figures he fixates on— as he does the band-members themselves. Through Pulp, Habicht forwards that simple truism: that music may begin with a band, but once it’s on tape, it enters the lives of others in unexpected and amazing ways.