And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
One More Time with Feeling (2016)
You're an African doctor harvesting tear ductsYou believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief nowYou're an old man sitting by a fire, hear the mist rolling off the seaYou're a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don't you see?
One More Time with Feeling is a 2016 British documentary film directed by Andrew Dominik. It documents the recording of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' sixteenth studio album, Skeleton Tree, in the aftermath of the death of Nick Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur.
When you start watching "One More Time with Feeling," you are suddenly dropped into the eye of a creative storm that began after the death of Arthur Cave, one of Australian rocker Nick Cave's two sons. This deeply moving concert doc concerns that loss, but only indirectly. We join Cave before the release of Skeleton Tree, his latest album with decades-old band The Bad Seeds. But by the time director Andrew Dominik films Cave (using a 2D camera and an advanced black-and-white 3D camera) and his band in their Brighton recording studio, it seems as if the bulk of Cave and his band's creative decisions have been made. Still, anxiety permeates the studio: how will people receive Skeleton Tree, a characteristically intimate, but highly conceptual album that only addresses personal loss in the abstract?
"One More Time with Feeling" is a uniquely cinematic documentary, one that actively blurs the line between fact and fiction. Sometimes Dominik's 3D camera drifts through solid surfaces, including people, doors and walls. Sometimes it snakes around Cave while 2D videographers film Dominik at work. Once or twice, voiceover narration of Cave's innermost thoughts—recorded after the events filmed—give us a hyper-real window into his thought process. This isn't really a movie about creativity, though it is that, after a fashion. Instead, this is a movie about the pause before the end of a creative obstacle. We join Cave moments just after he's decided to continue struggling without his son. Arthur's death still weighs on him, as it would any parent. But Skeleton Tree is now out in the world, and cannot be contained by Cave's subconscious
Dominik's film owes a great deal to experimental filmmaking techniques that Jean-Luc Godard used in the Rolling Stones not-quite-doc "Sympathy for the Devil" and avant garde musical "A Woman is a Woman." In those films, Godard constantly deconstructs the narratives he employs as a means of provocatively suggesting that language can only fitfully express truly profound meaning/revolutionary thoughts/sublime joy. Dominik's film is similarly about Cave's need to express himself without sounding trite or platitudinous. He does not want to escape from Arthur's death, but he also hesitantly tells Dominik, during incisive interview footage, that he doesn't want to commemorate his son through sentimental truisms, like "he lives in our hearts," a saying he spits out because "[Arthur] doesn't live at all."
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/one-more-time-with-feeling-2016
MORE ABOUT FILM
Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition Trailer
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Jesus Alone
You fell from the sky
Crash landed in a field
Near the river Adur
Flowers spring from the ground
Lambs burst from the wombs of their mothers
In a hole beneath the bridge
She convalesce, she fashioned masks of twigs and clay
You cried beneath the dripping trees
Ghost song lodged in the throat of a mermaid
With my voice
I am calling you
You're a young man waking
Covered in blood that is not yours
You're a woman in a yellow dress
Surrounded by a charm of hummingbirds
You're a young girl full of forbidden energy
Flickering in the gloom
You're a drug addict lying on your back
In a Tijuana hotel room
With my voice
I am calling you
With my voice
I am calling you
You're an African doctor harvesting tear ducts
You believe in God, but you get no special dispensation for this belief now
You're an old man sitting by a fire, hear the mist rolling off the sea
You're a distant memory in the mind of your creator, don't you see?
