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May11
Don’t You have Docs? - The Takeaway Shows
by DYHD?
Pop music has long been a fertile subject matter for documentary filmmakers. Since D.A Pennebaker decided to ‘just watch’ Bob Dylan during his 1965 British tour and ended up with Don’t Look Back, observational documentary has allowed musicians to reach an audience with the performance of their daily lives.
It’s no surprise really, music and observational documentary have much in common. Spontaneity, serendipity and authenticity are at the heart of the best examples of each.This happy marriage is no more evident than during a scene of Dylan riffing upon the wording of signage outside a pet store in ‘Don’t Look Back’. A brilliant spontaneous moment captured in a raw and intimate fashion by Pennebaker’s camera.
The creativity, charisma and chaos that often surrounds these artists has continually proven itself a compelling spectacle through the years with a strong lineage of music documentaries that remain landmarks of the documentary genre. Among them are Gimme Shelter (Maysles Bothers, Charlotte Zwering), The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris), and more recently Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster(Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky). This month Don’t You Have Docs? presents a program of The Takeaway Shows, a Video Podcast created by Vincent Moon and Chryde in 2006 that is ostensibly the internet bastard child of this lineage.
Vincent Moon doesn’t make documentaries. ‘Films about music in which the artistis the subject’ is the working definition he uses to explain the majority of his work so far. Rising to prominence in 2006 through indie music site La Blogotheque The Takeaway Shows have since blazed a DIY trail across the world picking up momentum as they go. The format is simple, in each episode a musician or band performs spontaneously in an unorthodox space be it a park, elevator, subway or brothel. The camera work is primitive, one take, handheld, focus optional. This simple approach to capturing music has risen as the antithesis of the strongly commercial music video format. Circulated online for free under creative commons license the series has piggy backed on the rise of the blogosphere, being posted and reposted thousands of times across the internet and reaching a ever-growing audience.
What started as short video podcasts have grown into sprawling pieces of lo-fi cinema lost somewhere between observational documentary and experimental filmmaking. Moon’s rise as a cult filmmaker has been swift, producing several feature length works in recent times with bands like REM, The National and Kozuko Tomokawa.
TAKE AWAY SHOW #87 _ YEASAYER (FULL VERSION)
Capturing the moment is paramount in The Takeaway Shows. Consideration of the technical runs a distant second to allowing a performance to unfold naturally, with the resulting work rich in small but engaging details. The Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry ripping up a magazine rhythmically as the band plays in a cargo elevator, the clanging of bottles and cutlery on a subway train as Yeasayer deliver an a capella rendition of Red Cave, or Josh T Pierson’s calm and resolute refusal to move out of a car’s way on a Paris street as he commits a devastating version of Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ to camera. It’s these moments where The Takeaway Shows become more than the sum of their parts capturing our imaginations and buoying our belief in one of our purest forms of communication, music.
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