Critics reviews

What Gomis has uncovered in these rushes is fascinating, proof of the confines of bourgeois culture an artist such as Thelonious Monk was forced to endure in his time... Rewind & Play restages the record of an artist, subtly illustrating an imagined response to misinterpretation across decades of a masterful career of music.

The director Alain Gomis, having gained access to the complete footage (including outtakes) of a 1969 French TV documentary about the pianist Thelonious Monk, crafts a moving portrait of the artist and a damning view of the high-handed filmmaking that he endured.

“Rewind & Play” dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.

The revelation of such raw, frustrating, occasionally revealing footage of one of American music’s major figures—a document of his treatment at the hands of the press and a satisfying recording of a soulful solo performance—makes Rewind & Play a worthwhile experience, even if the film itself amounts to little more than the sum of its parts.

With Gomis’s arrangement of footage, viewers bear witness to Monk as he subtly challenges his interlocutor, as well as the image that white Parisian television tries to construct, the process of its falling apart, and ultimately Monk’s effortlessly innovative compositions.

The concert footage is the best thing about it, but the parts that are supposed to leave us angry are precisely the very segments the producers of the show decided not to include when the show first aired. In other words, they agreed then with us now. Sometimes interviews just don’t work out and are better left on the cutting-room floor.

But in those moments, when Monk isn’t verbally grilled by Renaud, there is the beauty of music, the language in which Monk expresses himself best. With the melodies swelling and falling, everyone in the background fades out, the agitated talking of the crew in the background becoming merely a low-key nuisance.

Rewind & Play endeavours to redefine Monk, not solely as some unimpeachable genius who is universally respected by his peers, but rather someone who has been the victim of similar challenges as many of his contemporaries... The film reconfigures the past without changing reality, but rather carefully reshaping it to be more accurate to a valuable perspective that would most likely have been entirely lost had it not been for the director’s admirable efforts to retrieve lost time.