BEFORE: I'm headed back to work today, after about 12 days off - the annual summer slow-down is in effect, which is why I applied for other jobs and had one interview, but no news on that front yet. Today there's a double-screening of "Jurassic Park Rebirth" and "28 Years Later", but I'm not in the mood to watch either film, plus I'm managing the screenings, so I can't. I'll have a lot of time in the office to catch up on blogging and e-mails.
This film was on my list for last year's Doc Block, but I postponed it, I can't remember if it didn't fit into the linking or if I just cut one doc for timing reasons. Either way, it looks like I made the right move because this year I was able to watch "A Complete Unknown" about a month ago, and that serves as a proper lead-in, maybe, the fictional version before the documentary.
Martin Luther King Jr. carries over from "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes".
THE PLOT: Legendary singer and activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back and a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large, history-making life and the personal struggles she's kept private.
AFTER: This film is another split format - this one into thirds, maybe. One third is interviews, one third is family photos and journal entries from when Baez was a teenager and in her 20's, and one third is concert footage from three stops on her 2018 Farewell tour, filmed at stops in upstate New York, near Selma, Alabama and Oakland, ending up at the Beacon Theater in NYC. I guess that's coming full circle, in more ways than one.
It's not really chronological, like the archive stuff sort of starts in college, where Baez developed her performing skills in cafes around MIT and Boston University, which she attended for about 6 weeks, but her father worked at MIT. He was a former preacher in Brooklyn, but also studied mathematics and physics at Stanford, and he was the co-inventor of the x-ray microscope. His hobby seemed to be taking his family on long car-trip vacations and recording audio journals along the way. The family converted to Quakerism at some point, which was sort of a pre-cursor to Joan's support of pacificism as an activist years later. Of course there's also footage from Martin Luther King's march on Washington and the "I Have a Dream" speech, as she and Bob Dylan performed "When the Ship Comes In" at the event. Some participants pointed out that most of the performers at the event were white, which maybe was an odd choice.
So now we can see the March on Washington from Joan Baez's perspective, and also get her take on the relationship with Bob Dylan. She points out that he needed a lot of help in those days, he was focused on songwriting so much that he needed help with getting from place to place, finding food, all the normal day-to-day stuff, and she felt the need to be the mother figure. She admits they both acted like kids, though, so it seems they had some good times together over his first few years of performing, and then they kind of drifted apart, as people tend to do. Before Dylan it seems Joan Baez dated a woman for several years, and sure, that tracks, it's more common now than it was then but that doesn't mean it didn't happen then too. It's certainly not the most shocking revelation in this doc.
Her career continued in both music and activism, which sometimes went hand-in-hand. She toured or played concerts in support of Amnesty International, civil rights, prison reform, gay rights, environmental causes, Occupy Wall Street and against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Somewhere during all of that she married David Harris, who she had met in jail after being arrested during a protest. Their son is now an adult and was part of her band on this farewell tour in 2018 - I'm guessing maybe that COVID delayed the production of the documentary, which wasn't released until 2023.
Late into the film, things get very problematic when Baez starts talking about having multiple personalities, or what we now call dissociative identity disorder. She list a bunch of animal-based spirits who are part of her, and the function that each one serves or the quality it represents. Then on top of this, she mentions the repressed memories of possibly being molested by her father as a child, and when you factor that in to the depression that she and her sisters suffered from, other unexplained stomach aches and bi-polar issues over the years, combined with an inability to connect to people on an individual basis, it could all be tied together. Plus, we're always supposed to believe the victims, right? Well, maybe not, because if you have to dig deep down through therapy and hypnosis to find memories of the incidents, things get a little uncertain and it's maybe unclear if the therapy technniques used caused those memories to exist. Joan's parents denied any abuse after her memories surfaced, but it's also possible they were in denial of her father's actions. The effect by itself is hardly proof of the cause, when you factor in her DID and the possibility of "false memory syndrome", and that's all I'll say on the matter.
Directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle, Karen O'Connor
Also starring Joan Baez, Pauline Baez, Bill Clinton (last seen in "Join or Die"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Gabriel Harris, Michael Moore (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Dirk Powell, Sarah Schneider, Grace Strumberg,
with archive footage of Christiane Amanpour, Albert Baez, Joan Baez Sr., Kim Chappell, Bob Dylan (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Mimi Farina, Richard Farina, David Harris,
RATING: 5 out of 10 quaaludes (which is probably too many)
No comments:
Post a Comment