‘Moonage Daydream’ directed by Brett Morgen (USA, 2022)
While this movie is an all the hits celebration of David Bowie’s extraordinary life and times it is far from being a conventional music documentary. Filmmaker Brett Morgen instead painstakingly adopts a more impressionistic and eclectic approach which entails deliberately not being slavish to the chronological sequence of events. Viewers are bombarded with a head-spinningly kaleidoscopic mix compiled as if Morgen were suffering from ADHD. These include clips of German Expressionistic cinema, silent films, Kabuki theatre, contemporary dance, art works, city life and space travel.
The main impetus seems to be to try to capture the thrill of what it must have been like to be inside the head of David Bowie. Amid the chaos Morgen does find space for some more reflective detail which ironically proves to be equally, if not more, revealing. I would have happily watched the whole of the 12 minute TV interview in 1979 with Mavis Nicholson.
Morgen’s audio-visual collage is most effective in scenes like a montage of dance moves from over the years to accompany a live performance of ‘Let’s Dance’. It does, however, produce forced and misleading juxtapositions. For instance, Bowie’s declared love for Iman, who he met in 1990, is sound-tracked by ‘Word On A Wind’, a song from the Station To Station album released 14 years earlier.
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