Rewind & Playdocumentary by Alain Gomis presented Thursday at the opening of the 25e edition of the International Documentary Meetings of Montreal (RIDM), is revolting, and in that, successful. “Thank you very much, I am very happy that you found it revolting, because it is”, answers the Franco-Senegalese director in an interview with the To have to. “And I’m also very happy that you enjoyed the long passages where we see Thelonious Monk play, because that’s what was most important to me: that we manage to hear him, since what matters , above all, it is to remember that Monk is a very great musician” who was made to spend a humiliating afternoon in a Parisian television studio in the fall of 1969.
Alain Gomis, whose feature film Congratulations won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2017, is currently developing “a fiction about” Thelonious Monk, monumental American composer, improviser and jazz pianist, “someone whom I find quite fascinating because he retains a part of mystery, even if we know a lot about him – not only in his way of playing, but in his way of being, with a kind of absolute honesty and integrity that fascinates me”. As part of his research, Gomis listens to and watches everything he can find in connection with his subject and has therefore turned to the National Audiovisual Institute, which has kept this episode of the series. Jazz Portrait, recorded in Paris in the fall of 1969.
“To my surprise, I was also given the rushes of the show”, nearly two hours of footage. “Usually all these rushes are erased; somewhere, someone said to himself: “That, we keep it.” It’s a small miracle. A small miracle that the director uses to create this documentary, which reveals a lot about Monk’s personality… and also about the feeling of superiority and the condescension of the production team of this show.
What we find there is appalling. Monk, whose genius was revealed in the early 1950s, this improviser with a percussive touch and a refined compositional intelligence – we owe him several standards of modern jazz, such as ‘Round Midnight, Straight No Chaser, Blue Monk, Epistrophy, and so on — is treated like dirt by the show’s host, Henri Renaud, and the rest of the technical team. Footage shows the legend, left alone to sweat in the spotlight, playing (beautifully) to pass the time while his hosts are busy with other things.
A painful moment
Then come the segments where Renaud has to interview Monk. A series of silly questions, weighed down by the host’s stereotypes about the musician. A key figure on the Parisian jazz scene from the 1950s, Henri Renaud was also a composer, arranger and pianist, having signed five albums as a leader and hosted sessions in the jazz cabarets of the time (Ringside, Tabou , chameleon). As an interviewer and host, he is despicable.
“It’s not going well at all”, sees Gomis immediately. ” [Renaud] feels it, gets stuck, it’s painful — for Monk, but also for him. And in Monk, there is something very lonely. We hardly pay attention to him and that is, at the same time, what makes him extremely endearing to me. His great patience, his great tenderness, he never gets angry, and that makes the moment even more painful. »
“The first thing about these images is that I was actually seeing Monk, the person; then I saw this mechanic [télévisuelle]this machine for crushing people and making products”, like this alleged portrait of a jazzmanwhich will allow us at least to hear him play, between two close-ups where Monk is visibly flabbergasted by the attitude of the film crew and the stupid questions of his interlocutor.
Is it racism that Thelonious Monk fell victim to in this Parisian studio, on this greyish afternoon? “Yes, I believe so,” said the director. In any case, a form of racism. Not necessarily something done with the intention of racism — that is, done with a conscience, with the intention of doing harm. There, we rather see someone [Renaud] of admiration, who really loves Monk and his music, but who, to speak of him, never ceases to lock him up in stereotypes of an eccentric composer”, creator of a work presented as “difficult”, stereotypes that followed Monk throughout his career.
“Monk is very embarrassed by that, and that’s what is painful for me in the film, says Alain Gomis. We see someone who fights against the image we have of him, against stereotypes, but at the same time, he does the job”, offering luminous interpretations of his classics which, on their own, deserve the we focus on Rewind & Play.
Rewind & Play, by Alain Gomis, will be presented on November 17, at 7:30 p.m., at the Imperial cinema. The Montreal International Documentary Meetings continue until November 23.