(Las Vegas) An experimental David Bowie documentary, with never-before-seen footage and narration by the late star himself, premiered at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday, ahead of its Cannes screening next month.
Posted at 8:41 p.m.
Moonage Daydreamdue out in theaters next September, is the first film officially approved by David Bowie’s rights holders, who have given director Brett Morgen access to thousands of hours of archival footage.
“You can’t define Bowie. You can experience it,” says the filmmaker.
” We built Moonage Daydream as a unique cinematic experience to live in theaters, to offer the public what they could not obtain from a book or an article”, he develops.
Neither a biopic nor a traditional documentary, the film mixes songs by David Bowie, excerpts from his concerts, images taken by fans and a series of abstract and surreal images to create an “acoustic and visual spectacle”, summarizes producer Bill Gerber.
Brett Morgen will have spent two years scouring the drawers of David Bowie’s archives.
Attendees of the CinemaCon festival, which opened on Monday in Las Vegas, were able to see long excerpts from the film where Bowie notably performs his songs Hallo Spaceboy and heroes.
“I think we took responsibility for creating the 21and century in 1971,” Bowie can be heard explaining in the commentary.
“We wanted to blow up everything that came from the past. We questioned all the established values and all the taboos”, continues the artist, for whom “everything was nonsense, and when it is nonsense it is wonderful”.
The film will be distributed in the United States by Neon, which also took advantage of CinemaCon to present excerpts from Crimes of the Future by David Cronenberg, one of the pioneers of horror films playing with the human body and its transformations.
A shock trailer featuring Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux has been released, including images of a woman splitting a torso in half with her fingernails and a man with extra ears grafted onto the skull.
This film signed by the director of Crash and of The Fly imagines a world in which human beings are forced to accelerate their evolution with organ transplants and other bodily modifications to survive environmental upheavals.
The film, which will also premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, was “a difficult film, an extreme film perhaps, an unusual film”, said David Cronenberg.
“The Cannes Film Festival is the perfect place for that,” he added.
Crimes of the Future are “really a meditation on what the world is becoming, where the environment is heading, how it affects the body”, continues the filmmaker.
“It’s not a film about climate change but it’s about the current situation, and it’s interesting because I wrote the screenplay twenty years ago,” he says.