All types of music have an appointment from February 16 to 20, 2022 at the 8th edition of Fame, an international festival of films on music which takes place at the Gaîté lyrique (and at the Center Wallonie Bruxelles). From Congolese rumba, honored with three films, to the French touch (the film Why Versailles?), this festival listens to and probes all the convulsions of the world via sound waves. This year, however, has beena little special. The pandemic has disrupted the machine and sabotaged the pace of productions and releases“, explains the co-programmer Olivier Forest to us. “Usually, films that premiered at a major festival, such as those at Cannes or Sundance, then come to us. This year, many films have been released directly online. For example, Todd Haynes’ documentary on the Velvet Underground, which I had been waiting for five years, went straight to Apple. The model is evolving and one of our new missions is to establish a dialogue with these platforms.“
“There is also a real evolution of formats”, emphasizes Olivier Forest. “A lot of music documentary production is in online formats. There are very long things like the series Get Back about Peter Jackson’s Beatles. We are very careful about that. At Fame, a day dedicated to professionals will also study the explosion in the offer of musical documentaries, very clear for a year, a phenomenon that is really due to platforms. They understood that this attracted new subscribers and for their part the music labels seized on it to regain control over the story-telling of their artists and expand their audience.In the genre, the Fame programs the documentary on the pop star Charli XCX: Alone Together, which shows her performing an entire album during confinement with the help of her fans, via social networks. Another way to deliver your intimacy in a self-staging that is as much about creativity as self-promotion.
Here are five films from the program that caught our attention.
“Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché”
If the group X-Ray Spex only made one album, Germ Free Teenagers (1978) and a handful of singles, including the classic Oh Bondage, Up Yours, this English formation remains an emblem of the punk movement. Its figurehead, the Métis singer Poly Styrene, who influenced many artists such as Neneh Cherry, the Riot Grrrrl and the Afro-punk scene, deserved a documentary. Co-directed by his daughter Celeste Bell, this film tells the extraordinary trajectory of a punk icon but also the chaotic childhood of his daughter, and his long road to reconnect with this extraordinary mother, swept away by cancer in 2011.”Five years after his death, I finally immersed myself in his affairs and was blown away by his artistry“, says Celeste Bell in the documentary. “I liked putting together the pieces of the puzzle she had been before she had me.“.
Born Marianne Elliott-Said in 1957, Poly Styrene grew up in Brixton, a poor area of London at the time, and started a band after attending a Sex Pistols concert. Her lyrics are unique, subversive, feminist, critical of consumerism. Even among punks, her look stands out: bright colors, plastic dresses, claiming her curves and tooth bracelets. The success is major, in Great Britain and in New York, and the story gets carried away. But at 21, this hypersensitive was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic (she was actually bipolar), and was interned. Her life takes a tragic turn, and, including a detour to India to the Hare Krishna sect, her daughter will pay the price. Very rich in visual archives (videos, photos, drawings, song lyrics), this film is a beautiful nuanced portrait, both of a singular artist, of a deviant mother, but also that of her mirrored daughter and the of an era as a backdrop.
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché by Paul Sng and Celeste Bell (2020, 1h33). Paris premiere Friday February 18, 2022 at 8 p.m. at the Auditorium
“A Symphony of Noise – Matthew Herbert’s Revolution”
“sound is life“: this is, in broad strokes, the credo of Matthew Herbert. This British artist, whose life was revolutionized by the purchase of a sampler at the age of 16, made himself known at the late 90s, as a remixer within the wave of “electronic hackers“. Since then, this obsessed with sounds has marked the spirits with the album Today’s special (2005), based on sound samples of cooking and food then with One Pig (2011), which told, still in sound, the destiny of a piglet, from its birth to the plate. “I think my responsibility as an artist is to change listeners’ perceptions“, says this musician who could record the grass growing.
What is the sound of love? What about the financial system? What does a tree hear when one of its fellows is cut down? Matthew Herbert has a lot of questions. Very critical of society, often fascinating but sometimes tedious to follow in his reasoning, he does not, however, give any lessons: “I’m as much part of the problem as anyone“, he acknowledges. For this documentary, the director has followed this original in his adventures for ten years. We see him on and off stage, developing siphoned devices, recording on the tomb of Gustav Malher or in a fish and chips ( and fry a trumpet), but also put together The Brexit Big Band, a group of singers and musicians from all over Europe”to do the opposite of Brexit, something open and generous“. Today, he is moving to the next level: teamed up with an astrophysicist, Matthew Herbert has taken it into his head to listen to the universe…
A Symphony of Noise – Matthew Herbert’s Revolution by Enrique Sanchez Lansch (2021, 1h33), Paris premiere Saturday February 19, 2022 at 1:45 p.m. at the Auditorium
“The positive energy of the gods”
“It bothers me the medicine, the blue pill, when are we going to stop it?Kevin asks, over a few piano notes.What makes me angry is when people laugh at me“, enrages Stanislas over an energetic deluge of sound. In the group Astéréotypie, a project that is both educational and artistic set up in 2010, there are four singers who take turns: Yohann, Stanislas, Aurélien and Kevin. Four young autistic people whose lyrics atypical and lunar phrasing attracts the ear to a kind of energetic post-punk sometimes drawing on garage-rock or noisy. Ponyo on the cliff, The cachet, Marie-Antoinette, Alphabetix : their songs, in which these hypersensitive people share their anxieties and their enthusiasms, really hold up, especially on stage where the mixture, both surreal and inhabited, moves madly.
This film, already rewarded at the Champs Elysées Film Festival, plunges us into the heart of their creative process, in the company of Christophe L’Huillier, patience of an angel and sacred guitarist, who watches over this human and musical adventure like milk on the fire. . He manages the writing sessions, the rehearsals and the concerts but also the moods, the difficulties and the omissions of each other, and he also gives everything on stage, in the company of three other musicians, carrying high the “spoken word ” singers. While a new album by Astéréotypie is expected this year, the group performs after the screening at the Gaîté Lyrique. Certainly one of the highlights of the festival this year.
The positive energy of the gods by Laetitia Møller (2020, 1h10). Screening followed by an Astéréotypie concert, Saturday February 19 at 5:45 p.m. in the Great Hall.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhuHeD62CoQ
“Mirano 80, the space of a dream”
In Paris in the 80s, night owls revelers had Le Palace. In Brussels, “the place to be“, it was The Mirano Continental.”There was a wind of renewal, we wanted to breathe creativity into all areas“, summarizes one of the witnesses of this adventure. Eclectic music, image projections, light show, crazy decorations, concerts, fashion shows, happenings, themed costume parties: everything was good to impress and allow clubbers (and passive observers) to have fun, like during this Roman evening that has remained in the annals, with its extras disguised as gladiators and its audience who played the game of glamor and self-reinvention to the fullest.
This faded documentary immerses us in the unbridled atmosphere of the 80s, meeting the small band of young Belgians who, inspired by Club 54 in New York, created this flamboyant space where the imagination in power pushed ever further the limits of feasibility. Nestled in an old abandoned cinema from the 1950s and still in its original condition, this club was, like Le Palace, “a place of transgression essential to societal balance and the emancipation of youth“, analyzes a speaker. But all good things come to an end: for not having seen house and techno coming, this institution in the Saint Josse district also became “has been”.
Mirano 80 – The space of a dream by Luc Jabon, Thomas and Purcaro Decaro (2021, 1h17). French premiere in the presence of the directors followed by a concert by Mathilde Fernandez and a DJ set by Olivier Gosseries, at the Center Wallonie Bruxelles (127-129 rue Saint Martin in the Beaubourg district) Wednesday February 16 at 7:45 p.m.
“The Bug Doug”
With this short fiction film, the young director Théo Jollet, for whom it is the end-of-study project at ENSAD, is charting a very promising singular path. It’s hard to talk about this film that caught our eye without risking saying too much. A group of young people who rap in freestyle mode, hit the ball and hang out from wasteland to small harbours, will see their routine upset by the appearance of a supernatural creature. Everything is audacious and successful in this film: the story, the narration, the actors, the photo, the editing. But also the music, from the rap of the small band to the R&B of the creature. Music signed by the mysterious (or the mysterious) OGRASK. We would have loved a concert to crown the screening.
The Bug Doug by Théo Jollet (2020, 25 mins). Paris premiere in the presence of the film crew, Saturday February 19, 2022 at 7:15 p.m. at the Auditorium (with two other short films).
The 8th edition of the FAME festival takes place from February 16 to 20, 2022 at La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris)