david bowie

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

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The consensus opinion on 1979’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is that it’s a mediocre document of a magnificent concert.  Even its recent re-release was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 London concert captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker, not the anniversary of the documentary.  The newly expanded and remastered version of the film cleans up Pennebaker’s footage in digital 4K resolution and includes additional backstage & onstage tidbits “lost” in the original, 90min cut (including brief appearances from Jeff Beck and Ringo Starr).  It was alternately referred to as Bowie ’73 in its original theatrical run, again stressing the importance of the event filmed rather than the film itself.  By ’79, Bowie had evolved past the Ziggy Stardust glam rocker persona, moving onto more depressive, cerebral projects like his Low collaboration with Brian Eno and his Iggy Pop collab The Idiot.  The Ziggy Stardust project was already a satellite broadcast from a distant past, and this 1973 concert was billed as the farewell to the persona and to David Bowie as the public knew him, with announcements on the PA declaring “For the last time, David Bowie . . .”  So, the logic goes that it’s worth suffering through this shabby, low-lighting footage just so there was some remnant of the Ziggy Stardust band on the record before Bowie transformed into something else altogether. 

I personally found the film much more substantial than that, at least in its new theatrical presentation.  All of the imperfections audiences have cited over the years are still present—if not expanded—in this restoration.  The 4:3 framing is frustratingly tight for a performer known for his galactic-scale glamour.  The dim lighting of the venue makes the crowd shots borderline incompressible, which undercuts the pleasure of scanning the faces & fashions of the audience.  The camera swings wildly around the room, finding a point of interest halfway into a shot instead of starting with a detail worth documenting.  Some shots go entirely black, the audio reel continuing to record while the film cartridges are switched out.  Maybe it’s my decades of being brainwashed by D.I.Y. punk aesthetics, but I found those grimy human fingerprints on Bowie’s pristine visual art to be a feature, not a distraction.  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a raw document of an immaculate art project, pulling great tension out of the disparate qualities of Bowie’s perfectionist songwriting and Pennebaker’s imperfect imagery.  The live arrangements of the Ziggy Stardust songbook work the same way, with guitarist Mick Ronson unraveling tight, familiar pop tunes into abstract, psychedelic noise.  The sweaty, sped-up performances of Bowie’s early bangers map out a solid bridge from glam to punk, which couldn’t be more direct by the time the band covers “White Light, White Heat” in raucous encore.

I suspect I had that rapturous, energizing experience with the Ziggy Stardust movie because of the newly restored sound mix.  Listening to a digitally cleaned-up, surround sound presentation of this concert in a modern movie theater is easily the best sound quality I’ve ever heard in a David Bowie recording, which certainly elevated the images captured by Pennebaker’s cameras.  This is the clearest case of “The work speaks for itself” that I can recall, given that a few minutes of Ziggy’s band performing “Moonage Daydream” in this shaky, cramped frame packs in more mystique & meaning than the entirety of the recent Brett Morgen documentary of the same name.  You do not need to dress Bowie up in iTunes visualizer kaleidoscopes to make his words & sounds intriguing to a modern audience.  He already dressed himself up in a slutty little kimono and put on a full show, so all Pennebaker had to do was show up with professional recording equipment, sit back, and gaze.  The low lighting of the venue and the chaotic movements of the camera evoke UFO conspiracy footage, desperate to catch a glimpse of this glam rock clown from outer space before he disappears back into the night sky.  Bowie often appears in orange monotone lighting against a black void, glowing as a strange visual object that just happens to produce beautiful music.  The sight of him is arresting, and so long-familiar tracks like “Changes” & “Space Oddity” are captivating in a way they haven’t been since I first heard their proper studio recordings on my sub-par headphones in high school.

My only lingering disappointment with this film is that I couldn’t get a better look at the crowd.  There’s enough strobe & disco ball lighting to catch glimpses of the queer nerds swooning in ecstasy over Bowie’s presence, but not enough to fully document their presence in the room.  Bowie’s sassy, talkative performances of “Changes” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” slow the momentum of Ronson’s guitar licks down to draw attention to the lyrics, which celebrate the eternal passion & progression of Youth Culture in a way I found genuinely touching.  So many of his early songs dwell on time, death, and impermanence that he comes across as a real Gloomy Gus, but he does take obvious solace in how those “changes” are a positive influence on the world from the perspective of youth.  So, I found myself scanning the youth in the crowd for their real-time reactions to his art – whether they were gently moshing to manic performances of “Hang Onto Yourself” & “Suffragette City” or they were awestruck by his genderless supermodel posing in various Space Age onesies.  It would’ve been nice to fully see those faces before the impermanence of time changed them into something unrecognizable, but there’s no way to fully go back and correct that mistake.  What this restoration was able to excavate & accentuate in Pennebaker’s documentary is well worth experiencing big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd of fellow Bowie obsessives.  Maybe the form doesn’t fully live up to the content, but in this case it’s difficult to imagine that any one movie ever could.

-Brandon Ledet

Moonage Daydream (2022)

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Some psychedelic, “psychotronic” cinema is great because it tests the boundaries of filmmaking as an ever-evolving artform, especially cinema’s unique ability to simulate the elusive, illogical imagery of dreams.  Most of it is just a cheap way to babysit stoners.  The new David Bowie “documentary” Moonage Daydream falls firmly in that latter category, earning a prize spot among the stoner-babysitter Classic Rock “classics”: Heavy Metal, The Song Remains the Same, lava lamps, Tommy, blacklight posters, the iTunes visualizer, The Wall, etc.  It’s more of a scrapbook in motion than a proper essay film or documentary.  Or maybe it’s just the Bowie version of your local planetarium’s Pink Floyd laser show.  I do think there’s some cinematic value to that kind of stoner-pacifying psychedelic filmmaking, but the rewards are pretty limited.  It paints a beautiful backdrop for your couch-potato bong rips, then gently puts you to sleep so you can’t get into too much trouble while you’re high.

Do not watch Moonage Daydream if you want to learn about the life, loves, and art of glam rock musician David Bowie.  Do watch Moonage Daydream if you want to hear Bowie intone Headspace app meditations about life, love, and art over a randomized slideshow medley of concert footage & movie clips.  Some of the sci-fi pulp ephemera used to illustrate his lyrical mumblings make sense as mood setting for Bowie’s “alien rockstar” period as his Ziggy Stardust persona.  However, as the never-before-seen concert footage is continually interrupted by selections as disparate as Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space long after Bowie’s moved on to more grounded, coked-out material, it’s clear those clips are only included to keep the otherwise repetitive imagery freshly varied.  Bowie’s reputation as a cineaste is cited as an excuse to roll vintage sci-fi footage that looks cool alongside his music; the use of William S. Burroughs’s “cut-ups” technique in his writing is cited as an excuse to randomly quote him at his most abstractly philosophical, with no discernible reasoning behind arrangement or progression.  The whole film is about as carefully planned out as the improvised “liquid light shows” projected behind Jefferson Airplane performances in the 1960s.  It’s a Bowie-themed novelty kaleidoscope, a psychedelic “action painting” with a glam rock soundtrack.

This is not the approach to Bowie’s life, art, and legacy that I expected from documentarian Brett Morgen.  His earlier film Montage of Heck deliberately de-mystified the ethereal rock star persona of Kurt Cobain, stripping away the self-destructive romance of his memory to show how sad & dysfunctional his drug addiction made his life on a practical, real-world level.  By contrast, this montage of glam is only interested in David Bowie as an otherworldly prophet with an uncanny ability to tap into the collective unconscious through his far-out music; it’s more interested in his stage personae than his life as a real-world human being.  That approach isn’t fundamentally wrong, but it leaves little room for tracking Bowie’s progress as an artist beyond noting his relocations from London to Los Angeles to Berlin to beyond.  Since Morgen was given full blessing and access by the Bowie estate, he finds some freshly striking imagery to mine for his psychedelic freak-out montage; I was particularly tickled to see Ziggy Stardust perform at length in a slutty little kimono, conscious of his newfound status as a sex symbol.  There’s just only so much Morgen can achieve by focusing on Bowie’s finely curated surface aesthetics, and it’s not quite enough to sustain 135 minutes of continuous abstraction . . . unless it’s used as background enhancement for other, more illicit hobbies.

-Brandon Ledet

Hunky Dory (2011)

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There’s certainly other cinematic comfort food just as laidback & eager to please as the 2011 high school drama Hunk Dory, but rarely does it look this nice. Set in 1970s Wales, the film looks like a sunlit Polaroid dipped in honey, a perfect amber hue to capture the stoney-haze nostalgia of high school summers. This is a slow-moving hang-out picture molded after the Linklater tones established in Dazed & Confused and Slacker, but one that makes little effort to match those films in narrative complexity or character development – instead choosing to find its own distinct voice in the basic pleasures of its sights & sounds. The tendency of most 1970s nostalgia dramas would be to over-indulge in playing dress-up & recreating the era’s lingo. Hunky Dory instead busies itself by capturing mood, searching for the perfect tone of sun-damaged, over-exposed photographs so that it looks like a memory. Even its soundtrack of 1970s glam & stadium rock standards are mutated to feel like nostalgic memory & mood instead of being presented as original-recording needle drops. It’s cinematic comfort food in its deliberate embrace of narrative & thematic simplicity, but also just in the way it feels like an afternoon nap in a hammock.

Minnie Driver stars as a high school drama teacher struggling to hold her teen students’ behavior together at the tail end of a troublesome semester. She encourages them to examine & process their emotions through a class project that reimagines Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a jukebox musical featuring then-modern rock numbers by groups like ELO, Roxy Music, and Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders from Mars. There’s a twee tinge to the instrumentation behind those glam rock covers (recalling those early 2010s YouTube clips of grade school choirs taking on acts like Beach House & Tame Impala), but the musical performances are thoughtfully arranged & relevant to the themes of The Tempest in a remarkably rewarding way. Less remarkable is the hangout character drama that fills the languid spaces between performances: teenage runaway crises, minor romantic betrayals, Driver arguing for the academic value of artistic expression to her more narrow-minded colleagues, etc. Anything that’s lacking in those conflicts is easily paved over by its endearing “Let’s put on a show!” dramatic structure, so that when the film concludes with a glam rock, outdoors staging of The Tempest it’s all smiles & warmth. The only frustrating thing is that you can’t watch the stage play in full.

Hunky Dory introduces its characters as if you already know them from a pre-existing television show or stage play, spending way more time on the “Where are they now?” wrap-up in the end credits than in opening minutes’ exposition. It mostly gets away with it too, since its archetypal depictions of 1970s teen behavior feels instantly familiar despite the specificity of its Welsh setting. The frustrated violence, denim-on-denim make-outs, and low-key hedonism of high school brats verging on summer break are so familiar that sketching out individual character traits among this sprawling cast of fresh faces is almost unnecessary. The film easily gets by on capturing the mood of the time without weighing itself down in specifics. This is accomplished mostly through sights & sounds: honey-dipped digital photography & choral arrangements of nostalgia-inducing ear worms. Hunky Dory is marketed as being “from the producers of Billy Elliott,” which should give you an accurate expectation for what you’ll find in its unambitious, but perfectly endearing nostalgia-drama indulgences. Its greatest sin is that the full-length staging of its glam rock Tempest isn’t included as a DVD extra, since the song selection & arrangement of what’s included in the film is thoughtfully planned out enough to indicate that it could be done.

-Brandon Ledet

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

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After watching Todd Haynes gradually shift towards traditionalist, Douglas Sirk-inspired dramas like Carol & Far From Heaven, it’s been fascinating to return to the wild, fractured, untamed excess of his earlier, more transgressive works. Haynes’s debut feature, Poison, was a roughly assembled, anxiously queer anthology that covered territory as widely varied as 1950s mad scientist B-pictures & Jean Genet’s masterful, poetic smut Our Lady of the Flowers. Before that debut, his name-making short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story re-imagined a high profile celebrity tragedy through hand-operated Barbie dolls. It’d be near impossible to reconcile the two disparate ends of Haynes’s beautifully improbable career, the controlled drama & the wildly fractured art film, if it weren’t for his magnum opus, Velvet Goldmine, a glam rock opera that somehow encapsulates the totality of what the director has accomplished to date in a single picture. Velvet Goldmine remains Haynes’s grandest achievement by somehow elevating his youthful passion for melodrama, disorder, and camp to the level of the Oscar-minded prestige productions he’d later settle into as he aged within the industry, all while remaining aggressively, unapologetically queer. It’s overwhelming to watch a filmmaker this ambitious throw every possible tone & technique he can achieve at the screen, but drowning in Haynes’s chaotic, yet glamorous sensibilities is a pure, intoxicating pleasure.

Christian Bale stars as an ex-Brit reporter working out of NYC on an investigative assignment about the publicity stunt “murder” of a glam rock star he had worshipped religiously as a queer teen. It had been a decade since British rocker Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) faked his own death onstage & disappeared from the public limelight. It seems as if the glam rock lifestyle, with its outrageous gender-androgynous costumes & conspicuous absence of sexual norms, had died along with that persona. Through the relatively dull framing device of watching Bale’s gloomy reporter research the missing Slade, Haynes opens up the wild world of glam rock past in a series of disjointed vignettes following Slade’s life from birth to “death”. The film is primarily concerned with Slade’s musical collaboration & bisexual affair with American proto-punk icon Curt Wilde (Ewan McGregor), an obsessive relationship that wrecked his sobriety, his closeness with his wife (Toni Collette), and his overall ambition to change the world through the transformative power of rock n’ roll. Haynes crafts a deliberately messy, loose story out of this rock n’ roll romance by employing every tool he had in his arsenal: the Barbie doll performances of Superstar, the James Bidgood tableaus & Jean Genet allusions of Poison, the Douglas Sirk melodrama of Safe & Far From Heaven, flesh on flesh pansexual erotica, etc. He also conjures glam rock’s natural mystique by allowing X-Files style record company conspiracy theories & supernatural claims that Oscar Wilde’s origins as a space alien changeling to inform his narrative without batting an eye. The only restrained-feeling aspect of the plot is Bale’s investigative framing device, but even that boasts the perverse virtue of essentially reimagining Citizen Kane as a glam rock opera.

Although narratively loose & ambiguous, Velvet Goldmine clearly evokes two real-life romances/collaborations in this patchwork plot: David Bowie’s affair with Iggy Pop & Britain’s affair with American rock. Slade is a clear Bowie stand-in, a connection deliberately referenced in the title & unappreciated by Bowie himself, who threatened to sue before the script went into rewrites. The film mostly follows the Ziggy Stardust & post-hippie eras of Bowie’s career before his romace/heroin-sharing/music collaboration with Iggy Pop unraveled those glory days. It’s a relationship that’s understood more through myth & rumor than confirmed, openly admitted fact, so Haynes is smart to abstract any 1:1 comparison, even if it was a decision inspired by threat of a lawsuit. Bowie’s life story is blended with other pop stars like Marc Bolan & Buster Poindexter to create the figure of Brian Slade, while Curt Wilde emerges as a similar blend of Iggy Pop & Lou Reed. This abstraction & democratization of their characters leads to the film feeling like a larger, more mythical tale of American & British rock n’ roll’s endless back & forth romance & collaboration than an affair between two queer men in the 70s & 80s. A childhood Little Richard drag routine Slade stages in his parents’ living room feels just as essential to his stage persona evolution as any of the film’s Oscar Wilde space alien weirdness, making this moment in time shared between British & American rock to feel like a smaller thread in much larger tapestry, albeit an essential one. Velvet Goldmine depicts glam rock as less of a craze or a passing fad than a failed revolution that very nearly topped the world in a flood of glitter & lube before it lamely succumbed to the pitfalls of heroin & romantic jealousy. Bowie & Iggy were useful figured for that story, but the overall effect is much larger than anything two men could amount to alone.

Velvet Goldmine was a box office bomb that was met with middling, confused critical response upon its initial release. It’s the exact kind of overly ambitious, insularly passionate art picture that’s doomed for cult status over wide appeal, but I selfishly wish that were the kind of art Haynes were still making today. As much as I appreciate Carol‘s intoxicating allure, it feels like a film that could have been pulled off by any number of visually skilled, queer-minded craftsmen. Velvet Goldmine, by contrast, is undeniably a Todd Haynes film. The same way Citizen Kane posits that a man’s full persona can’t be contained by a single picture, Velvet Goldmine argues the same for the spirit of glam rock at large. Haynes structures this argument around a sprawling all-inclusive clusterfuck of every weird, passionate idea he’s ever projected onto the screen in his life. It’s a magnum opus that makes room for drag queens, Barbie dolls, Bowie worship, Oscar Wilde conspiracy theories, an extended cameo from glam-revivalist band Placebo, and Ewan McGregor’s spread-open butt cheeks. It’s risky, go-for-broke cinema that doesn’t have a 100% success rate in its individual elements at play (Christian Bale’s gloomy sulking is a lot to stomach), but consistently impresses in its visual beauty & sheer audacity. It’d be a cultural tragedy if we never see Haynes working in that mode again.

-Brandon Ledet

Three Hidden Gems in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986)

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EPSON MFP image

Recently, the Prytania Theatre (Louisiana’s oldest operating single-screen movie theater) had several special screenings of Labyrinth as a tribute to the late and great David Bowie. Bowie has had a pretty interesting acting career, starring in films such as The Hunger and Absolute Beginners, but Labyrinth is without a doubt the film he is best known for. His character, Jareth (the Goblin King), has been the source of so many sexual awakenings due to his mysterious aura and dashing appearance (not to mention that giant codpiece), but more importantly, the music that he created for the film is extraordinary. The soundtrack to Labyrinth is definitely my favorite film soundtrack of all-time. Each song has a lot of heart, a lot of fun, and a whole lot of Bowie.

Needless to say, watching this film on the big screen for the very first time was an unforgettable, life-altering experience, and viewing such a familiar film in a different setting caused me to notice a few things I never caught before:

1. The image of Jareth’s face appears in different areas in the labyrinth during several scenes, but it’s very well hidden (for the most part). His face can been seen a few times in the following places: the walls and floor of the labyrinth, the rocks in the tunnel, and the trees in the Bog of Eternal Stench. After doing some quick research, I found out that the hidden faces were put in the film for the DVD release. Whoever decided to place these hidden “Easter eggs” throughout the film is a genius.

2. Within the first few minutes of the film, you get a quick tour of Sarah’s bedroom. There are quite a few items throughout her room that become part of her labyrinth experience (stuffed animals that resemble Sir Dydimus and the Fireys, bookends that resemble Hoggle, etc.), but I never noticed the newspaper clippings of David Bowie attached to her vanity’s mirror. Also, directly on the side of the clippings is a doll that looks very similar to the Goblin King. How did I miss this all these years?

3. There is a fountain in the Goblin City that is basically a circle of  Hoggle-like goblins urinating. When Sarah first encounters Hoggle, he’s peeing in a fountain. I’m not quite sure what this connection means or if it means anything at all. My guess is that it is a sign that her journey is ending. Once Sarah enters the Goblin City, she’s coming close to finishing her quest. The Hoggles in the fountain look similar to her Hoggle-like bookends back in the “real world,” so this could be a sign that change is coming. Or this could simply be a goof. The world may never know.

-Britnee Lombas