3.2 Cobain: Montage of Heck 41 4

M.A. Media Studies: Television and Cross-Media Culture Master Thesis

A Performance of Reality: Aesthetic strategies of new music documentaries by the example of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck.

by Anna-Lena Willems

Date of completion: 16.06.2017 Supervisor: Dr. Sudeep Dasgupta Second Reader: Dr. Jaap Kooijman Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1 2. Documentary in Theory 4 2.1 Documentary: Deﬁnitions and Genre 4 2.1.1 Introducing and Deﬁning Documentary 4 2.1.2 Periods, Movements and Modes of Documentary 7 2.1.3 Music Documentary 9 2.2 Modes and Aesthetic Strategies 16 2.2.1 Approaching Reality and Knowledge 16 2.2.2 Performative Documentary 17 2.2.3 The Performative Mode and Music Documentary 20 2.2.3 Aesthetic Strategies of New Music Documentary 22 3. Analysis 26 3.1 20,000 Days On Earth 27 3.2 Cobain: Montage of Heck 41 4. Conclusion 57 Bibliography 61 Filmography & Videography 63 Table of Figures 63 1. Introduction

Documentary is a versatile and constantly shifting film genre, that caused innumerable paradigm shifts and movements throughout the past century of its existence. What documentary films all have in common, is their attempt to create an audiovisual representation of a certain form of reality. Unequal though, is how they approach and understand reality, truth, and knowledge. The aesthetics and values of documentary films differ and range from objective to subjective, factual to sensual, observing to intervening, aestheticized to realistic. Depending on the subjects they treat, the relation between creative aestheticization, and on the other hand truthfulness and authenticity, requires to be bal- anced differently. Aesthetic subjects, so the assumption, require and allow for a higher creative treatment than factual subjects would do. This thesis wants to contribute filling the research gap about a particular sub genre of non-fictional film, the music documentary, and plead for its relevance for the development of contemporary documentary aesthetics. While there is a lot of research done about documentary film in general, there is a tremendous lack of academic attention towards music documentary. Although the emer- gence of music documentary dates back to the 1960s, the research field about the genre just slowly starts do develop within the current decade. The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop by Edgar (et. al. 2013) is one of the first comprehensive volumes that exclusively look at music documentary film, and argue to consider the genre as essential cultural artifact for documenting popular music and their stars and figureheads. Populäre Musikkulturen im Film, a German anthology by Carsten Heinze published in 2016 refers to this work and seeks to find a more precise definition of the genre, examine the roots of music documentary, specific traits, and subdivisions in detail. Heinze engages with the important question of what happens to the aesthetics and narrative strategies, when documentary film meets an inherently aesthetic subject like pop music. The performative documentary mode, as defined by Bruzzi (2006), understands documentary filmmaking as a performative act. The meaning and sense of a documentary is grasped as a reality on its own, that comes into being through the process of filmmaking, which basically is a negotiating conversation between the filmmaker and the actual reality. This mode allows for a great artistic license, interpretational freedom, and aesthetics that are suitable for the representation of subjectivity, performance, and cre-

1 ativity. In contrast to more traditional documentary modes, the performative documentary does not follow a realistic and objective paradigm, but grasps knowledge and reality as an embodied and highly subjective matter. In many other types of documentary, that treat for instance historical, social or political subjects, the creation of an aesthetic experience is not the primary concern. Those documentary films rather tend to base their representational capacity on the investigation of non-aesthetic, factual knowledge, and maybe even carry the demand for objectivity. In music documentary on the other hand, aesthetic experience is essential. To create an authentic representation of the reality of pop music and its social context, new music documentaries increasingly break with the traditions of the genre. Pop culture is understood as a music-centered cultural field. A conglomerate of music, style, media, strongly depending on performance and identification (Kleiner 25). Pop culture is a fundamentally performative and aesthetic culture. Performance constantly creates new relations between subjects and objects, performers and their audiences (23). While in the 1970s, most music documentaries were to categorize as rockumentaries, in which the filmmaker takes an observing, at most a questioner position, and portraits bands or music cultures out of a realistically observing distance, new music documentaries tend to be highly creative and make use of performative aesthetics, imagination and artistic stylizations (Heinze 171). Thus, performative documentary modes strongly relate to the qualities of pop music culture, and enables the films to use aesthetics and paradigms that can portray the aesthetics and performance of pop music from within. At the exemplary analysis of two recent music documentaries, this thesis wants to examine, by means of which aesthetic strategies new music documentaries incorporate the aesthetic and sensual experience of pop music, performance and creativity of their subject, and translate them into a cinematic documentary text. Two very recent research objects will be analyzed: 20,000 Days on Earth, released in UK 2014, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and Cobain: Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen, published in US 2015. Both documentaries, as will be shown in the close reading analysis, occupy hybrid and rather unconventional ways of storytelling. Brett Morgen recombines In Cobain: Montage of Heck, Brett Morgen recombines common elements of documentary like interviews, voice-over, archive footage with rather unconventional strategies. In multiple layers of animation, music and sound recordings, diary entries and lyrics, he creates an aesthetically loaded collage about the subject Kurt Cobain. 20,000 Days on Earth on the other hand, gives insight to the inner life of Nick Cave and his creative processes as an artist. One part of the documentary focusses on the fictionalized 20,000th day in Nick

2 Cave’s life, which constitutes the film a genre blurring example. The other part engages with the creative process of writing and recording of music, and uses less performative aesthetics. The chapter structure of this thesis will build up as follows. Chapter 2.1 will firstly introduce to documentary film and provide a general definition of the genre. Therefore, Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary (2010) provides the groundwork for the documentary discourse. An historic overview of the periods of documentary film will follow, including different paradigm movements and stylistic modes, with the purpose to emphasize the diversity and divergences of documentary film. Further, this chapter will provide general knowledge about the development of music documentary, elaborate the specifics of this aesthetic related genre, discuss contemporary debates about the qualities of music documentary, and draw a connection between performativity and music documentary. This part will widely draw upon the work of Heinze and his anthology Populäre Musikkul- turen im Film (2016). The following chapter 2.2 will take a closer look at performativity. In a first step, on the basis of Michael Renov (2004), different ways to approach reality and knowledge will be examined, as for example the comparison of subjective and objective perspectives, or factual and embodied knowledge. The next subchapter reflects upon the performative documentary mode, elaborated in two different versions by Bill Nichols (2010) and Stella Bruzzi (2006). Thereafter, the performative documentary mode will be related to the specific qualities of music documentary, especially bringing into focus why the performative documentary mode is suitable for the traits of pop music as documentary subject. Lastly, the chapter will list and examine various aesthetic strategies that are, according to Heinze, commonly used in new music documentaries. Those aesthetic strategies, namely multi-layered montage, self performance, home videos, re-enactment and enactment, and animation, will be used as analysis tools for the case study of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck. Subsequently, chapter 3 will provide the case analysis of the two stated research objects. Looking at both the overall structure of the music documentaries and their use of aesthetic strategies, it will be examined how both films use performativity to express the aesthetic reality and sensual qualities of performance, pop music and its social context.

3 2. Documentary in Theory

This chapter will provide the theoretical fundament of this thesis. Chapter 2.1 will define documentary film and discuss various modes, periods and movements, as well as provide a definition and the historic development of music documentary film. Chapter 2.2 will examine different approaches about the performative mode of documentary, set performance in relation to music documentary, and explain relevant aesthetic strategies that are commonly used in music documentary, and will be relevant as examination tools for the case analysis of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck.

2.1 Documentary: Deﬁnitions and Genre

2.1.1 Introducing and Defining Documentary

Documentary is a multifaceted film genre and there is a multiplicity of ideas about what a documentary exactly is. The variety of modes and aesthetics in documentary film make it difficult to cumulate them all in one precise definition. As Nichols emphasizes: „We might well wonder what, if anything, all these films have in common“ (6). One could suppose that documentary differs from fictional film by being non-fictive in the first place. But even this quality is debatable, considering the variety of documentary aesthetics that have no indexical relation to the represented reality. Music, reenactment, enactment, animation or set-up events are used in documentary and constitute the creative and aestheticized level of the genre. More conventional conceptualizations of documentary theory see a discrepancy between the aestheticization of a documentary and its validity. The traditional paradigm is: „the less polished the film the more credible it will be found“ (Bruzzi 9). The indexical image, the strict correspondence between the recorded imprint (images as well as sounds) and actual reality, constitutes, according to these approaches, the authenticity and value of a documentary film. This indexical quality of a document is what makes the documentary image „appear as a vital source of evidence“ (Nichols 35). „Documentary practice and theory have always had a problem with aesthetics - or to be more precise with aestheticisation“, states Bruzzi (9). However, as the majority of approaches subtend, documentary is not to equalize with a reality re- producing document, but to understand as a representation of reality. Documentaries use the evidence, the relation of their images to the real world, to interpret reality, make pro-

4 posals and offer perspectives about it (Nichols 35). While the validity of a reproduction, a document, is measured in its equivalence to the original, a representation is judged by „the nature of the pleasure it offers, the value of the insight it provides, and the quality of the perspective it instills“ (13). Thus, documentary can certainly not be defined as a replication of reality. Neither should replication be the aim of documentary film. So, what is the appropriate definition of documentary? A popular definition was proposed by John Grierson in the 1930s. The documentary film, he states, is a „creative treatment of actuality“ (Grierson in Nichols 6). Grier- son’s approach includes a diversity of forms and aesthetic qualities a documentary film can possess. To understand documentary film as a „creative treatment“ of the actual reality emphasizes that documentary is neither reproduction nor fictional invention. Nichols claims, that the division of non-fiction and fiction is a „matter of degree, not a black-and- white-division“ and depends on the degree to which the story is referring to actuality and to which it is created by the filmmaker (7). Nevertheless, documentaries must fulfill certain criteria that constitute them as documentaries. A direct reference to the historical reality distinguishes documentary from fiction film. As Nichols describes in his fundamental work Introduction To Documentary (2010), „the documentary form balances creative vi- sion with a respect for the historical world“ and further „draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective“. Following how Nichols interprets Grierson, documentary is a representation of actuality, always constituted in influence of creative decisions, perspectives of filmmakers or subjects, and the film-making process. Also fictional films can certainly address aspects of reality, but they also introduce new and unverifiable events that create fictional worlds and narratives (Nichols 7). Relevant for the distinction between fiction and non- fiction is the balance to which degree the story corresponds to actuality, and to which it is created by the filmmaker (12). Most documentary images and sounds stem from the actual historic world, or at least refer to people and events that belong there. Documen- taries respect known facts and provide „verifiable evidence“ (7), albeit they can follow varying notions of knowledge and truth, which will be examined later in this thesis. Another quality of documentary film that Nichols points out is that „documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform roles“ but a certain expression of themselves (8). Even though this might be considered as a performance that is exclusively acted out for the documentary camera, it differs from fictional performances in that the person of the documentary represents a version of his or her actual self. Self-presenta-

5 tion is always determined by the choice of details that a person wants to reveal of his or her personality. People in documentaries decide „to be frank or guarded, emotional or reserved, inquisitive or distant, all in accord with how an interaction unfolds moment by moment“ (Nichols 9). Equally essential, for Nichols, is the story-telling power of documentary. Documentaries „tell stories about what happens in the real world“, he states (10). The documentary narration has to be a representation of what actually happened. It does not matter which perspective the story takes or by means of which aesthetics it is realized, as long as it does not invent something imaginative. It is important to notice that „for any given event, more than one story exists to represent and interpret it“ (14). Ran- cière also engages with this quality of documentary. He points out that documentary differs from fiction film only by not treating „the real as an effect to be produced“ but „as a fact to be understood“ instead (Rancière in Baumbach 66). The aesthetics of documentary film are tools to construct meaning and perspective. Documentaries take images of the real as points of contestations, and use montage and aesthetics to create values and meaning, and foreground certain aspects. Therefore, the diversity of stories, arguments and perspectives, that a documentary can take for only single subject, is potentially endless. Documentaries engage with facts and knowledge, but the storytelling process gives meaning and interpretation to them (Rancière in Baumbach 66). For Rancière and for Nichols, reality is not self-evident. There is not only one truth that can be represented in a documentary narrative. Based on this arguments and his criteria of documentary film, Nichols proposes a detailed but still very integrating definition of documentary:

„Documentary ﬁlm speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible pro- posal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the ﬁlmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a dictional allegory“ (14).

This thesis will take this deﬁnition as a starting point. Although this version does not con- cretely distinguish different types and modes of documentary, it is able to include a large spectrum of documentary types that use different cinematic techniques, and is as such relatively resistant to the constantly changing boundaries of the genre.

6 2.1.2 Periods, Movements and Modes of Documentary

For the purpose of this thesis, this chapter will only provide a briefly historical overview, limited on the key periods and movements of documentary, and the modes that will be helpful to understand the following arguments. There are for example the shifts that were prerequisites for the performative documentary mode to come into being, and the music documentary as a genre to develop. The pre-documentary phase begins with the first filmic recordings of non fictional events, like the iconic L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat of the Lumière brothers in 1895. The first actual documentary films date back to the 1920s, to the silent documentary period, which was superseded by the invention of sound synch in mid 1930s (Winston 2). In Introduction to Documentary (2010), Nichols divides different periods, movements and modes of documentary film. Periods are to be seen as historical timespans in which documentary films share common characteristics or qualities. The most important periods in the history of documentary are the following (29f):

• 1930s - 1950s: Documentary films focus on contemporary social or economic issues, and use voice-over commentary and arranged images. • 1960s: Lightweight camera and synchronous sound recording technology change the possibilities of filmmaking. Documentary makers are enabled with new mobility and focus more on social actors and participation in everyday life situations. In this period, observational and participatory documentaries become more popular than the expository mode and voice-over stylistics of the former period. • 1970s - 1980s: Documentary begins to treat historical subjects more, and make use of archive footage and interviews to enrich perspectives; the latter likewise for contemporary topics. Historical documentaries tend to take perspectives of ordinary people rather than taking perspective „from above“. • 1980s: The current „Golden Age“ of documentary begins and constantly readjusts the forms of non-fictional filmmaking since then. The boundaries of the genre broaden, audiences become increasingly international, and the voice of the filmmakers and authors are increasingly important. By now, documentary has entered the multimedia sphere, and ranges from cinema and television to an overall presence in online media (e.g. YouTube or interactive documentaries).

7 Movements in contrast are no historical category but formal or informal groups of filmmakers that share similarities regarding their filmic approaches and stylistics. When film movements arise, they often come up with a collective statement or Manifest that defines the group’s goals and principles (29). Nichols describes the most important movements of documentary film (28f.):

• The Soviet Union documentary film movement was pioneering on the development of the documentary genre from the1920s to early 1930s and committed to avant-garde aesthetics and techniques. • The British Documentary Movement of the 1930s, which also John Grierson belongs to, made documentaries for governmental purposes and political propaganda, especially in working class interests. • The Free Cinema movement, acting in Britain of the 1950s, focused on bringing a new aesthetic look on subjects of the contemporary life of the British. They veered away from the governmental influence of their predecessors but still were concerned with the representation of the working class people. • The observational filmmaking movement, cinema vérité or Direct Cinema, developed in the 1960’s America and adapted neutral and objective positions and featured an observing, non-interventionalist camera. With this observational style, filmmakers sought to represent reality more authentic and truthful. Although this approach is highly debated, observational documentary filmmaking persists until today.

The third category is Nichols’ popular differentiation of the six documentary modes, which most works in documentary studies refers to (31f). His modes are no historical classification but describe „viable ways of using the resources of the cinema to make documentary films“, that persist over different periods and movements (30). Nichols emphasizes that the modes are not stable but vary by national, periodical, and individual influences:

• Poetic mode: describes associative, tonal and rhythmic documentaries, following no conventional arrangements or narrations. Poetic documentaries often focus on personal experience and show experimental ﬁlmmaking qualities. • Expository mode: builds up a clearly structured argumentative narration that is emphasized by voice-over commentary.

8 • Observational mode: the camera aims to remain in an observing and unobtrusive position. Little arrangement and montage, and no use of commentary. Engaging with everyday life events mostly, enabled by the technological renewals of mobile camera gear in the 1960s. • Participatory mode: features the interactive relation between the subject and the filmmaker through interviews and conversations. For the means of historical subjects, archive footage is a common aesthetic. • Reflexive mode: enhancement of the participatory mode in which the filmmaker reveals, questions and debates the process of filmmaking. The viewer’s attention is called to the constructedness of the documentary and issues of representing reality. • Performative mode: emphasizes subjectivity and emotional expression of the subject. Performative documentaries involve the audience on a sensual and personal level and feature affect instead of objectivity. The performative documentary mode will be further examined in chapter 2.2.1.

2.1.3 Music Documentary

Based on the proposed definition, and with the key modes and periods of documentary in mind, the following chapter will approach the sub genre of music documentary. As the works consulted, the thesis focusses on music documentaries in the context of Western pop music culture. Music documentary has received no systematic academic attention by now, neither in film nor in documentary studies. Instead, the genre is often accused to pursue promotional intentions and serve fandom more than documentary values and qualities - and thus, to not be worthy of closer examination (Chanan, Edgar). Chanan stresses that this deliberate ignorance is no longer justifiable, not at least because the genre provided a variety of examples by now whose filmic qualities are „para- digmatic for documentary as such“ (337). The Music Documentary (2013), edited by Robert Edgar et. al, rates as the first essay volume that seeks to close this research gap, engaging with the diversity of music documentary, key periods, methodologies and cinematic techniques. Based on their book, and the referring volume Populäre Musikkulturen im Film (2016) by Heinze, this chapter will provide a summarizing history of music documentary, propose a definition of the genre and debate contemporary academic discourse about music documentary; the latter especially with regards to the controversial allega-

9 tion of music documentary to be a promotional genre and thus less valuable form of documentary ﬁlm.

Origin and Development of Music Documentary

The origin of music documentary takes place in the 1960s, favored by the new technical possibilities of filming (Chanan 338). Prior to the introduction of portable cameras and synchronous sound recording, music as a subject of documentary was of no interest for filmmakers. For the first time, technology allowed for capturing music right in its place of performance. Prior to the 1960s, documentaries were strongly expected to have primarily educational intentions. With the 1970s the acceptance of less scientific approaches and entertaining effects of documentary increased (Saffle 47). This development was equally essential for music documentary to establish, since music documentary breaks with many traditional qualities of the documentary genre. Caused by the aesthetic and sensational nature of the subject music, music documentaries „interrogate the more traditional depiction of the truth as stable, objective, and knowable“ (Grant/Slo- niowski in Saffle 43). As Chanan defines very vague, music documentary is more than the simple recording of musical performance. It has to capture the social contexts of music as well (341). The first films meeting this condition were the tour-documentaries Char- lie is My Darling (1965), a rockumentary by Peter Whitehead about the Rolling Stones, and the popular Bob Dylan film Dont Look Back [sic] by Don Pennebaker, released in 1967. Both are travelogues, consisting of verbal statements and musical performances. As common for early rockumentary, Pennebaker follows the observational credo of Direct Cinema. Whitehead additionally turns to interviews and montage techniques (Chanan 341). A quality ascribed to popular music is the ability to capture historical impressions of popular culture. Tony Palmer’s documentary series All You Need Is Love (1977) is regu- larly referred to as the first series to turn popular music history into a non-fictional narrative (Edgar et. al. xii). As Long and Wall quote Palmer: „When people want to know what it meant to be alive in 1965, they’ll listen to The Beatles“ (31). Following this idea, music documentary can be seen as a visualized time-witness of a socio-historical timespan, which is an essential quality for the genre’s relevance. Pointing to the vast stylistic variety in the contemporary music documentary - from autobiographic films and artists portraits, over festival documentaries and rockumentaries - Heinze registers a new international heyday of the genre in the current decade (153). This new forms of music documentary

10 exemplary show what Nichols describes as the „Golden Age“ period of documentary. They show that documentary in general has opened up for genre-blurring aesthetics and merging of stylistics and modes. Recently, music documentary has extended its quantity, the richness of its subjects, and the variety of its aesthetic strategies. Many new music documentaries use innovative techniques of narration and representation, that connect all different forms of past and classic music documentaries with each other. Techniques like re-enactment, animation or extensively artistic, multi-layered montage strategies create biographic myths and generate access into music history. Often, the ﬁlms take hybrid forms and consist of multiple image and sound sources that are composed to complex systems of association and reference (Heinze 171).

Deﬁning Music Documentary

In order to define music documentary more precisely, Heinze relates the specific qualities of music documentary back to Nichols’ documentary definition, and elaborates in which characteristics music documentary differs from documentary about other subjects. He emphasizes that music documentaries and documentaries in general propose perspectives on reality, constituted of cinematic footage that was taken from social reality and condensed to a certain assertion by a filmmaker (Heinze 164). Music documentary narratives are often told in essentially subjective perspectives. The degree of enactment and performance, that Nichols adduces as a benchmark to divide non-fiction from fiction, loses much of its importance. The genre is grounded on aesthetic and art, since pop and rock music is always based on the aesthetic performance of an artistic self, and on the sensual experience of music (Heinze 168). Therefore, the notion of truth and authenticity has to be rethought in music documentary, as it is all along connected to certain forms of creation and exaggeration. The clear differentiation between fiction and non-fiction, Heinze argues, is not one worth to maintain in music documentary studies, because the imaginary and illusionary is an inherent part of pop music culture. As an example, he names the creational process of producing songs and melodies, or the overall performance of an artistic personality (168). Concerning the first quality that Nichols proposes as essential for documentary film, „documentaries are about reality“ (7), Heinze stresses the importance of merging fact and fiction in music documentary. Genre-blurring elements are common features to represent the social context and extensively sensual reality of popular music. The pop

11 culture is highly related to the act of performance, and the generation of myths and iconic images of musicians and stars (170). Referring to Nichols’ second point, „documentaries are about real people“ who present themselves to viewer as themselves (8), Heinze emphasizes the special position that personalities of pop and rock musicians occupy. The personality of a musician embraces, next to the private one, a public version of self that is constantly acted in form of a pop cultural habitus. In music documentary, the performance of self can be seen as doubled, because the musician already performs the public version of self, which is performed again in the documentary context (171). „Documen- taries tell stories about what happened in the real world“ (10), as it is Nichols’ last fundamental feature of documentary film, emphasizes that documentary film not only observes reality but actively tells a story that represents actual events out of a certain perspective. Sometimes, documentaries tend to use personalization and sensual expressions to intensify the tangibility of broader dynamics to the viewer. Heinze states that the storytelling power of documentary, the narrative aspect, is of special importance for music documentaries, because the subject itself (the scene, band, or musician) gets its meaning and significance firstly through cultural and medial forms of narration. Summing Heinze’s arguments up, music documentaries:

• are about the performative reality of pop and rock music and its social context. • are about musicians and performers, that act out a pop cultural identity and habitus, and present themselves to the viewer in a performance of those. • tell stories about the cultural signiﬁcance of musicians, bands or scenes.

A typically dramatic composition of music documentary is therefore the musicians’ career, from its advancement to its decay (Heinze 171). Heinze sees the very fascination of music documentaries in their ability to lend a form of immortality to musicians and star figures. The fundamental desire of film to capture and conserve its own subject, is in the pop cultural context strongly related to the conservation of youth, since pop music is a highly youth-oriented environment (Heinze 162). Temporally seen, music documentary is a rather contemporary genre, compared to documentaries about political or social subjects (Saffle 43). Most of the films focus on living artists. A smaller strand of pop music documentary is made in retrospective, and tells the story of a musician posthumously. The latter films often use techniques like re-enactment or strongly focus on archive footage. A third part of music documentaries combines both recent and retrospective

12 sources. The use of music, as it is critically debated in other documentary types, plays obviously a different role in music documentary where it is part of the subject itself. Music can be used in different ways; either it is used in synchronous relation to the image, for example in live and on-stage situations, or extra-diegetic in highly constructive ways, say as emotionalizing background music, commentary, connective element between sequences of associative technique (Heinze 154).

Documentary or Promotion?: Academic Discourse about Music Documentary

The lack of academic interest in music documentary studies is often explained by a reproach. Several authors, as for instance The Music Documentary (2013) editor Edgar, debate about the genre’s fulfillment of documentary values. Music documentary is often accused to be a tool of brand and star promotion and thus not worth the academic effort in documentary studies. Is this stigmatization really justified? Firstly, star and celebrity cult plays a huge role in pop music culture, which is why most of the music documentaries focus on biographical stories about musicians and bands. According to Edgar, a basic principle of music documentary is to reveal the private person behind the star persona and thereby to „explode the myth“ that fan culture creates around musicians (18). Like celebrities use social media accounts nowadays, the documentaries would aim to give an impression of authenticity and in this way subliminally support the star brand. With promotional intent, Edgar argues, biographical music documentaries would set up a „questionable mise-en-scène“ about the musician that is not corresponding to actuality, and thus contradicting to the virtues of documentary. This reproach is targeted on main- stream related examples, just as on „more respectable quarters of music documentary“, how Edgar refers to Martin Scorsese’s portraits about George Harrison and Bob Dylan (19). Other authors, like Niebling, divide music documenting films into different categories: rockumentary and music documentary. To her, music documentaries follow more journalistic principles, and take a rather objective and distanced perspective on the subject. They question the stardom of the musicians and aim to „deconstruct any mythologi- cal pretexts“ (35f.). Rockumentaries on the other hand, whether depicting a band on tour, or a scene, are influenced by the filmmaker’s personal affinity to the subject (34). Al- though the first generation of rockumentary used to follow the observational credo of Di- rect Cinema, Niebling sees a promotional purpose in recent rockumentaries. She argues, rockumentaries „embrace and use the mythology by relying on concepts of stardom and

13 an overall emotional approach“ (35). Similar to Edgar, Niebling states that the films adapt mise-en-scène techniques and feature generic conventions of promotional quality, like sensual and emotional approaching of the subject, mystifications of the musicians or techniques as „excessive appearance of certain musicians as interview partners“ (34f.). For both Niebling and Edgar, the fact that most music documentaries, respectively rockumentaries, sustain and depict the stardom of musicians, and approach the subject of pop music in emotional and performative instead of matter-of-fact like ways, seems to be connected to a certain purposely falsification of reality. Thus, they regard the narrational qualities and aesthetics of recent music documentary as being at odds with the ideal qualities and values of documentary, and how it should represent reality.

The Performative Reality of Pop Music

As it is the aim of this thesis to examine how the very reality of pop, meaning the aesthetic, emotional and sensual level of experiencing music and its cultural context, is transported and visualized in music documentaries, it will be argued against this criti- cism. The arguments of Edgar and Niebling about the commercialization and promotional character of music documentary miss out to reflect on the aesthetic nature of pop music as a filmic subject. The existing „overlap between the music documentary and accelera- tion of celebrity culture“ (Edgar 14) might easily lead to the assumption that music documentary contradicts to the traditional documentary values of objectivity and reportage, just in behalf of promotional reasons. This thesis suggests instead, that the reason for music documentary’s rejection of objectivity and other classical documentary values is located in the performative nature of the subject. Pop music and its context is an intensely aesthetic and subjective, experience-based subject, that is moreover related to personal identification, style emotions and taste. For this reason, pop culture and music require a different, more embodied and sensual approach of reality, that allows to audio- visualize the sensual and performative world of pop music and its context. Referring back to how Heinze describes of the characteristics of music documentary, the relation between reality and representation requires reconsideration. The mise-en-scène, that Edgar and Niebling criticize, has not necessarily the intention to promote the musician or band shown but is rather to understand as an expression if the performative reality of pop music culture. For a better understanding, pop culture will briefly be defined as the cultural context of pop music. Kleiner understands the notion of pop as „weit gefassten

14 musikzentrierten Traditionsbegriff“, as a broad concept that is centered in the field of music. The term gathers everything that deduces from the origin of pop, beginning with the first youth cultures of the 1950s. Pop culture is to perceive as an open field, an unstable „conglomerate“ of music, identification, style, scene and media (25). Essential is also its close reference to the present (which is why music documentary is contemporary). Pop culture is an everyday life culture, an ongoing process of creating meaning and signification. Therefore, it is to consider as an aesthetic culture of everyday life (22). Pop culture is (in contrast to art) a fundamentally performative culture, in which performance constantly creates new relations between subjects and objects, or performers and audiences (23). Through this definition, the significance of musicians as the performer-figures of pop becomes clear. Considering Heinze’s point about the storytelling in music documentary, the meaning and significance of a musician or band as figure(s) of pop culture, as celebrities or stars, is a pop cultural narrative in itself. Stars hold a very specific role for the reception of pop music, because they are the performative embodiment and communication of musical genres and style (Jost & Huwyler 150). Their appearance in the media (be it their music, journalistic interviews, television or radio appearances), determines their popularity and cultural significance. Jost and Huwyler speak of a „media biography“ that stars develops during their popularity, which is to understand as a fragmentary biography of the public self that becomes completed in the imagination of the audience. This cultural significance is what makes the musician a person of public interest and available for fandom. The persona cult in pop music is the reason why the most dramatic composi- tions of music documentaries focus on the biography and career of the musician (Heinze 171). As Heinze furthermore states, the personality of a musician is a specific case, because musicians already perform a public expression. Jost and Huwyler go further and suggest to acknowledge the media appearance of popular musicians as active construction and presentation of their identity. If a music documentary wants to represent the reality of pop music culture, it has to deal with all this specifics of a very performative and subjectively formed reality. The notion of authenticity and truth in music documentary is to perceive differently than in other documentaries. Generally, the question of modes and values is very reliant on the documentary subject. This thesis understands music documentaries as an extensively performative documentary genre. The creational aspect of music and the sensual level of experiencing pop culture is hardly representable without performative aesthetics and forms of subjectivity and sensuality. A distanced and fact-

15 based perspective on pop music, without a certain degree of mise-en-scène, is not able to represent the reality of pop. Music journalism, and also music documentary filmmaking, holds always a portion of subjectivity and taste, and is influenced by the sensual and emotional experiences of the journalist, respectively filmmaker, about the subject.

2.2 Modes and Aesthetic Strategies

This chapter will connect music documentary and performance with each other. In a ﬁrst step, a closer look is directed towards approaches of reality and knowledge in the documentary context. Afterwards, the performative documentary modes of Nichols and Bruzzi will be explained and then linked to the qualities of music documentary. At last, a selection of aesthetic techniques will be provided that are commonly used in performative documentaries, as the exemplary analyzed 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Mon- tage of Heck.

2.2.1 Approaching Reality and Knowledge

Having another look at the documentary definition by Nichols, examined in chapter 2.1.1, one can find multiple influences of subjectivity and perspective. Documentaries tell stories that are shaped and arranged by a filmmaker, that are presented in specific perspectives, in which real people decide about what to present to the viewer about themselves (Nichols 4). All of this is essentially influenced by subjective decisions and personal view on the reality. Nichols also points out, that „for any given event, more than one story exists to represent and interpret it“ (14). Two different documentaries about the same subject can therefore tell a totally different story in the end. To have a closer look at various understandings of reality and knowledge, an accurate distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is important. Renov explains, that the differentiation of objectivity and subjectivity in non-fiction film was historically linked to the scientific perception (173). The dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, developed by mid of the 19th century, connects objective to the attributes „factual, fair-minded (neutral) and hence reliable“ whereas subjective is „based on impressions rather than facts, and hence as influenced by personal feelings and relatively unreliable“ (Marcus in Renov 173). Since post World War II, objectivity was considered as main value for both non-fiction film and science.

16 Previously, the term subject has referred to the substance and to how things are in themselves, while objective described the way things are observed and perceived (Renov 173). The new dualistic distinction then, which is basically the exact opposite, came into effect as an orientation for non-fiction film as much as for journalistic reportage. Objectivi- ty became something rewarded; judgements and reports shall likewise not be influenced by any personal views. Taking this linguistic history into account, Renov points out, it is not very surprising that the community of documentary practice took subjectivity „as a kind of contamination, to be expected but minimized“ (174). Only in the last decades, the hierarchy between subjectivity and objectivity in documentary film is getting rearranged, and objectivity loses its position as the ultimate goal of documentary filmmaking. As already argued, the qualities of music documentary requires distancing from objectivity, to make the specific reality of pop music and pop culture tangible, and representable. The performative documentary mode is an approach that unites documentaries with a subjective and embodied understanding of knowledge. Performative documentaries focus on expressions, personal views and subjective interpretations of the actual world.

2.2.2 Performative Documentary

The performative documentary mode, as developed by Nichols and redeﬁned by Bruzzi, is a useful analysis tool for music documentaries. Knowledge and truth is perceived as embodied, as inﬂuenced by subjective experience and individual perspectives. The performative documentary mode is therefore able to transport and visualize the aesthetic and sensual experiences connected with the subject of pop music.

The Performative Documentary with Nichols

Performative documentary, as deﬁned by Nichols, challenges the predominant understanding of knowledge, comprehension and understanding in documentary studies (199). Unlike the Western philosophy, which describes knowledge as something abstract and disembodied, for instance factual information, performative documentaries perceive knowledge as a concrete and embodied matter. Abstract knowledge can be generalized, replicated and exchanged, while it maintains unaltered of personal inﬂuences. In the performative perspective, stemming from poetry and literature traditions, knowledge is based on personal experiences and can indeed be demonstrated and represented, but

17 not factually replicated (200). The general idea is, that many different factors alter the perception of the world, and constitute subjective meanings. „Experience and memory, emotional involvement, the precise context, questions of value and belief, commitment and principle all enter into out understanding of those aspects of the world most often addressed by documentary“, states Nichols (202). The performative documentary seeks to emphasize this subjective dimension. It includes personal perspectives, experiences and memories of the subject, as well as the perspective of the filmmaker. For this purpose, performative documentaries make use of narrative techniques that are rather un- usual for other documentary modes. Sometimes, even genre blurring elements, like fictionalized enactment, find their way to the narration and move the documentary away from „a realist representation of the historical world and towards poetic liberties“ (203). The term of performance, for Nichols, refers to the „tradition of acting as a way to bring heightened emotional involvement to a situation or role“ (203). The personal perspective becomes the viewers’ „port of entry“ to social or political issues (209). Compared to scientific and fact-based documentaries, performative documentaries request a higher en- gagement of the viewer to gain sense and understanding out of the narrative. Next to enactment, Nichols names some other fictionalizing aesthetic techniques that are commonly used in this mode. „Point-of-view shots, musical scores, renderings of subjective states of mind, flashbacks, and freeze frames“ are techniques that address the viewer in subjectiveness (206). Also, animation is a common aesthetic strategy in performative documentary, used as a device to express and visualize emotional and embodied knowledge (204).

The Performative Documentary with Bruzzi

Bruzzi offers in her book New Documentary (2006), partially referring to Nichols, a different perspective on the performative documentary. Her approach aims to challenge the prevailing understanding of documentary authenticity, and the relationship between reality and its representation in documentary ﬁlm. Referring to the literature of the past decades, Bruzzi observes a tension between the idealized image of an objectively indexical documentary and a simultaneous conscientiousness about its unattainability: „Re- peatedly invoked by documentary theory is the idealized notion, on the one hand, of the pure documentary in which the relationship between the image and the real is straight- forward and, on the other, the very impossibility of this aspiration“ (5). Bruzzi questions

18 the idealized attempt of the prevailing documentary conceptualizations and argues against the assumption that the valuableness of a documentary is to measure in its effort for objectivity and strict avoidance of aestheticization. With this assumption, she argues, documentary filmmaking is inevitably damned to fail (6). Bruzzi’s central thesis is that making a documentary is always „a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance“, an interpretation of reality out of a certain perspective (186). The viewer, she states, is well aware of this fact. While Bruzzi’s critique on the relation between documentary aesthetics and the representation of reality is relatively repetitive, her understanding of documentary film as a performative act in itself, is her innovation. A significant difference between Bruzzi’s and Nichols’ approach of the performative documentary is their reference to J. L. Austin’s notion of performance. For Nichols, other than for Bruzzi, the notion of performativity does not refer to Austin, who defines performative speech by its ability to change the nature of reality. A common example are a minister’s words at a wedding, „I pronounce you man and wife“, that actively perform the act of marriage. In contrast to Nichols, Bruzzi states that performative documentaries act in the same way. The parallel between the linguistic and the documentary performance is expressed in „the enactment of the notion that a documentary only comes into being as it is performed, that although its factual basis (or document) can pre-date any recording or representation of it, the film itself is necessarily performative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality“ (186). For Bruzzi, not the representation of a pre-filmic reality is essential for documentary, but the creation of meaning through the negotiating performance between the filmmaker and the reality. The performative act of creating a filmic perspective or an argument about reality constitutes the meaning and sense of a documentary. Some performative documentaries emphasize the constructedness of filmmaking by means of their own aesthetics. What is usually a hidden aspect in classical documentaries, reveals „the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation“ (185). Thereby, the performance, as it is used in a non-fictional context, evokes an alienating reaction for the viewer. It functions as a „distancing device“ that calls attention to the constructed nature of non-fictional film. Performative documentaries, Bruzzi writes, can make their construction visible in two different ways. Either, they are a performance of the filmmaker, who actively reflects the process of filmmaking (which is very similar to Nichols’ reflexive mode and is exemplified in the documentaries of Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield) or, the second option, the documentary deals with a performative subject and is in itself aesthetically

19 highly stylized (which applies to most recent music documentaries). Both variations likewise create alienation. By being „frequently in conjunction […] with an elaborate and ostentatiously inauthentic visual style“, they make sure not to pretend being an objective representation of reality (186). Bruzzi’s and Nichols’ approaches of performative documentary follows the same understanding of knowledge and truth. When reality is understood as depending on subjectivity, experience and personal meaning, documentary inevitably can only be a representation of a perspective, and thus a filmic construction but never only observing. The performative documentary breaks with traditional documentary concepts and the realist opinion that the production process and creational part of a documentary film has to maintain transparent (186). To accept the idea that non-fiction film is as authored and constructed as fiction film, allows the performative documentary to engage with subjective perspectives and to be more aestheticized and „self-consciously arty and expressive“ than documentaries that are committed to indexicality (197).

2.2.3 The Performative Mode and Music Documentary

The performative documentary is for several reasons a suitable mode for music documentary to express the performative reality of pop music. The way in which the performative documentary mode, of both Nichols and Bruzzi, deals with the notion of knowledge and truth goes along with the reality music documentary engages with. With the generation of cultural meaning and signiﬁcance of pop musicians, and the aesthetic experience of music and its culture, knowledge is something not primarily logical or factual but embodied and sensual, connected to the subjective truth of cultural meanings. Beat- tie expresses the conditions of knowledge production in music documentary very accu- rately:

„The form of knowledge produced within this mode [the music documentary] is subjective, affective, visceral and sensuous and as such is a part of broader visual culture which ‘acknowledges appeals to the senses as a form of knowledge production. This form of knowledge production is distinct from appeals to the intellect or cognitive faculty. For the intellect, logic prevails over affect; for the senses the converse holds, bringing with it a distinct form of knowledge.’ In these terms ‘[t]he visual is no longer a means of verifying the certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically. The visual now constitutes the terrain of subjective experience’“ (134).

20 Like Heinze (2016) equally states for the music documentary, indexicality and objectivity of the image and representation is not relevant for the generation of knowledge and expression of meaning. Taking Bruzzi’s notion of performance into account, there is another parallel to the performative reality of pop music. The significance of a pop or rock musician, or a scene, is just as performed as the meaning of a performative documentary. Both performances are negotiations that create meaning, either between filmmaker, reality and viewer, or between a performer and the audience. Looking at the two different types of visible performativity in documentary that Bruzzi distinguishes, music documentaries fit into the second category; they deal with a performative subject and are heavily stylized and aestheticized. Performing musicians generate a double-layered performance in music documentary. First, there is the performative enactment for the documentary camera, and then there is the performance of music on stage or as a cultural habitus: „Making music is a form of behavior that already involves the whole person in an act of expressive communication“, states Chanan (341). The camera, in most circumstances, can observe the musician in the same way the audience does, without further affecting the situation. In music documentary, factuality always implies performance, while the degree of display is depending on the approach of the filmmaker and the production circumstances (Niebling 34). The performative documentary mode offers both plenty of space to visualize performance and to visualize in performative aesthetics. Genre blurring is a common technique that Heinze (2016) lists in the context of music documentary and Nichols (2010) likewise for the performative mode. Music documentary requests the abolishment of a strict border between fact and fiction, not at least because aestheticization plays a significant role. Bruzzi describes the aesthetics of the performative documentary as very arty and self-conscious (2006). The subject of music and pop culture, understood as an aesthetic and music centered culture of everyday life (Kleiner 2013), is best visualized with a a high degree of aesthetic freedom. Music documentary is a visualization of a pop cultural subject that overcomes the struggle to represent the aesthetic experience of pop in a verbal or merely non-aesthetically informational form (Long and Wall 37). Specific for music documentary aesthetics, in comparison to other documentary categories, is the representation, use and visualization of music. As music is an audible and elusive but not objectively representable sound phenomenon, it is a controversially discussed topic of documentary studies (Corner in Heinze 154). It is a question of aesthetics, how a sound phenomenon can be transformed from a tonal aes-

21 thetic experience into a audiovisual one (160). While music in the documentary discourse is often blamed for being a fictionalizing element, it has an essential function for the construction of filmic reality in music documentary. To perceive documentary just as constructed as any other type of film, like the performative documentary mode does, allows for a higher creativity in the use of music, too.

2.2.3 Aesthetic Strategies of New Music Documentary

New music documentaries arrange their narratives in multiple layers of performative aesthetics. This chapter will therefore examine different aesthetic strategies that are used with the intent to express subjective and sensual experiences. The following list is not exhaustive but focusses on techniques that Heinze (2016) names as common aesthetics for new music documentary, and which thus are relevant for the following ﬁlm analysis.

Multi-layered Montage

Depending on the degree of artistic freedom, Mundhenke points out that the structure and arrangement of the documentary film-footage can be considered as an artistically performative or experimental act by the filmmaker (207). The degree of influence can range from extensively stylized montage, that rearranges the order of the non-filmic actuality in total, to very marginal interventions that do not get noticed. The artistic montage is not to understand as fictionalizing element but more in the category of media-art. In any case, montage is a filter and arrangement for the purpose of storytelling, and always takes influence on the filmic reality (Mundhenke 207). Heinze names the multi-layered, associative composition of image and sound, often even stemming from various sources, as an aesthetic strategy that often is used in recent music documentaries (171).

Self Performance and First-Person Narratives

Self performances or also ﬁrst-person narratives are suitable strategies to represent embodied, subjective perspectives and experiences, as well as transport emotional or sensual subjects. The subjective documentary style ﬁrstly emerged after the 1960s period of documentary making, when the objective paradigm had opened up. A political shift in the

22 1970s directed a new focus on the politics of everyday life, such as second wave femi- nism. Driven thereby was a new „interrogation of identity and subjectivity and of a vividly corporeal rather than intellectualized self“ which led to increasingly subjective and personal documentaries as well (Renov 171). The pop music context, understood as a culture of everyday life, is in a similar way connected to issues of identity, subjective meaning and identiﬁcation. Better than any perspective from the outside, a person itself can express this subjects. Self performance and ﬁrst-person storytelling can transport subjective perspectives and emotions immediately on its own terms. The audience engages with the subject though a subjective perspective, told by the person itself.

Home Videos

The phenomenon that amateurish home video material is used in documentaries has started in the 1990s (Orgeron 102). This „primary footage taken by the subject(s)“ of themselves is used as a „narrational and illustrative tool“ to represent history and memory. Home videos are (auto)biographic forms of memory-collection and are always subject to the editorial decisions of the videographer. He or she is the one who decides about the inclusions and exclusions of what to represent from his or her personal life (853).There- fore, the home video is not less constructed and performative as other footage. The director of the documentary then, occupies a rearranging role. He edits the primary video footage a second time, and interprets it while embedding it into the documentary narration and context. Thereby, the documentary maker is reliant on the pre-made decisions of the videographer. Making home videos became a trend hobby of American families post World War II and even increased with the technological development of portable video cameras in the 1980s and 90s. Caused by this, published home videos often show American family life and parenthood. Used in documentary, this video material „facilitates the narration of the domestically centered melodramas“ - which does not necessarily have to underpin the perfect-family image that is often associated with home videos (853). In many examples, as Orgeron points out, home videos show the exact opposite and „expose the family in various states of decay and dissolution, capturing the antithesis of domestic harmony“ (854). The primary video footage of the subject has certainly a pri- vacy revealing element, that constitutes its fascination. It carries the „promise of a glimpse beyond the surface, an invitation to see the unlovely elements typically con- cealed by the curtain drawn on private lives“ (857).

23 Reenactment and Enactment

As reenactment, Nichols defines the „more or less authentic re-creation of prior events“ in documentary (2008:72). Reenactment was commonly used, until the cinéma vérité movement of the 1960s claimed that „everything expect what took place in front of the camera without rehearsal or prompting to be a fabrication“ was inauthentic and thus contradicting to the principles of documentary. Today, reenactments is a frequently used aesthetic again, reflecting the temporal aspect of documentaries as much as the „presence of fantasy“ (2008:73). Temporally seen, something past is enabled to „rejoin the present“ (2008:79). Nichols emphasizes, that reenactment always „introduces a fantasmatic element“, because the repetition of history can only be created by the filmmaker through constructed representations or reenactments that has no indexical bond to the historic event itself (2008:74). Reenacted images are „clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth“ (2008:80), which shows the performative aspect of the reenactment. Nichols distinguishes different types of reenactment. The „realist dramati- zation“ is a dramatic reenactment in the most closely realistic style, used for instance in flashbacks and docudrama. „Typifications“, as the name already reveals, do not refer to an actual historic event but rather show typifications of „past patterns, rituals and rou- tines“. „Stylizations“ then are creatively stylized reenactments, like animated documentary, which do not „serve any indexical linkage to the actual event but give voice to the acutely selective […] perspective“ from which it is experienced (2008:84f). If a documentary denies a clearly visible distinction between reenactment and enactment, the question of fiction becomes an issue. Enactment does not refer to a certain past event but describes fictitious acting. As Nichols emphasizes, many performative documentaries make use of enactment: „The free combination of the actual and the imagined is a common feature“ (202). The same can be said about music documentary (Heinze 2016), in which genre blurring aesthetics stay in context with artistic expressions of music and performances of a musicians.

Animation

Animation can be another useful aesthetic strategy for performative documentary. Nichols describes animated documentary sequences as a „powerful tool“ for the purpos-

24 es of the performative mode (204). In traditional documentary discourse, animation is seen as a controversial technique that breaks with the notion of the realist image and the indexical relationship between the filmic image and the actual event that it represents (Nichols in Honess Roa 216). Animation is neither observational, nor, as it is always connected to creativity, can it be objective. Since performative documentary already refuse these presumptions, animation as an aesthetic strategy does not stand at odds with it. Animation in documentary can function as a substitution for absent filmed material. The animation stands in for scenes that would either be impossible to visualize by live-action footage, or it stands in for footage that is hard or impossible to get, like of past events (Honess Roe 226). In the latter case, the animated sequence can be seen as a re-enactment that, in most cases, aims to „closely resemble“ the look of a live-recording of a historic event of which no original record exists. For its closeness to the look of reality, Honess Roe calls this mode of animation mimetic substitution. Another version of animation is non-mimetic substitution, in which animation does not seek to create an illusionary look of filmed images but rather is a loose interpretation of the soundtrack, for instance an interview. Non-mimetic animation grasps animation as a „medium in its own rights […] that has the potential to express meaning through its aesthetic realization“ (226). When animation in documentary is used to represent past events, it necessarily does so in an extensively stylized way that „clearly possess a strongly subjective, even expressionistic, quality“ (Nichols 14). Through its subjectivity, animation is far from “any standard sense of documentary realism“. Nevertheless, the reference to reality remains plausible as a visual representation of a subjective state of mind. The last function of animation, evoca- tion, is not a substitution for absent material but visualizes the non-representable aspects of life (Honness Roe 227). In terms of „concepts, emotions, feelings and states of mind“, animation functions as „a tool to evoke the experiential in the form of ideas, feelings and sensibilities“, mostly in symbolic or abstract styles and aesthetics. Here, animated sequences enable the audience to experience a subjective perspective of somebody else. Evocative animation comes often to use as a visualizing layer for original soundtrack of interviews and helps for a better understanding of the film’s subject (228). By all three modes, animation „broadens the epistemological potential of documentary“ and is a way to expand documentary’s focus on „the world“ on an „enhanced perspective on reality by presenting the world in a breadth and depth that live action alone cannot“ (229).

25 3. Analysis

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how new music documentaries deal with the performative aspects and sensual experiences of pop music culture, and which aesthetic strategies are used to transport and visualize this performative and aesthetic reality. In the following two case studies will be made that provide a close analysis of a recent music documentary. The first example will be 20,000 Days on Earth, a genre blurring documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard about musician and author Nick Cave which was released in 2014 (UK). The second object is Cobain: Montage of Heck, a 2015 (US) documentary about Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, directed by Brett Morgen. Both films focus on the musician respectively performer himself and offer a biographical perspective. The documentaries are to understand as performative, although each in a different way. 20,000 Days on Earth is a very cinematic music documentary with a highly performative subject, blurring the boundaries of feature film and documentary. Nick Cave presents himself in a filmic performance that pulls the viewer deep into a poetic expression of his inner life and the process of creative writing. Cobain: Montage of Heck is a performative documentary that is aesthetically highly stylized. Brett Morgen creates an audiovisual, multi-layered collage, made out of various media documents provided by relatives and friends of Kurt Cobain. The outcome is an authored interpretation of the reality about Kurt Cobain, combining interview footage, archive material and animated imaginations about Cobain’s history. Both films follow biographic attempts about the respective musician, and play with the boundaries of the documentary genre by pursuing very creative film aesthetics. They are two examples that appropriately represent the bandwidth of common themes and aesthetics of the contemporary music documentary genre. The analysis will refer back to the genre discourse provided in chapter 2, and especially discuss the role of performativity for the two music documentaries. It will be examined if the films can be understood as performative documentaries, as well as how the performative nature of pop music is transcribed into documentary representation and visualization. Beyond, there will be a close analysis of particular scenes and the overall aesthetics that visualize pop music as aesthetic experiences, and transport the process of creativity and the reality of being a performer to the viewer. The aesthetic strategies elaborated in chapter 2.2.3., multi-layered montage, self performance, home videos, reenactment and animation, will function as tools in order to analyze how the two films are a hybrid mix between traditional and performative documentary.

26 3.1 20,000 Days On Earth

“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small pre- cious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, ﬁrst creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.” (Nick Cave in 20,000 Days On Earth)

20,000 Days on Earth is a British music documentary about the Australian musician and author Nick Cave, best known as the singer and songwriter of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The film was directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and released in 2014. The narration is split up in two interwoven cycles. One which is the enactment of the 20.000th day of Nick Cave’s life, and is therefore to see as a genre blurring docu-fiction element, and one which deals with Nick Cave’s creativity and documents the creational process of the Bad Seeds album Push The Sky Away as well as several live performances. In the following, the former will be referred to as day-cycle and the latter as creative-cycle. Performance and narrative play a very central role in this documentary. Already the intro sequence makes references to the performative quality of Nick Cave’s life as a musician and public figure, as well as it points to the biographic attempt of the film. Beginning with the sound of a baby’s scream, the intro shows a counter running up to the number of 19.999, and presents Cave’s life enroll on an arrangement of multiple TV screens (see Fig.1). The video samples and the sound collage give the viewer an impression of how much Cave’s biography depends on media representation, on being a public person and performer, by interweaving private videotapes with television footage, film samples, and concert pictures. Here one can rediscover what Jost and Huwyler refer to as the media-biography of stars (cf. chapter 2). The viewer gets immediately thrown into the narrative of Cave’s personality as a popular rock musician. Bruzzi’s definition of the performative documentary will be a crucial concept for this analysis, as she understands the performance of a documentary as the production of meaning and reality. The aesthetic strategies of the previous chapter, especially montage, self-performance and enactment, will be used to close read the documentary.

27 FIG. 1 „INTRO SEQUENCE OF 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH“

The day-cycle in 20,000 Days on Earth

The quote at the beginning of this chapter emphasizes how important the aspect of performance is especially in the view of Cave, presenting himself to the viewer as the inventor and narrator of his own story. As Nick Cave took part in the writing process of 20,000 Days on Earth, the enacted day-cycle becomes an overall poetical performance of his artistic identity. Self performance, used as a rhetoric device in documentary, as examined in chapter 2, is able to express embodied and subjective forms of knowledge, experiences, and emotions. Visually, the day-cycle is best described by the term neo- noir, since it stands out with a gloomy mood, low-key lightning and rather cold colors. A compound of performative elements and aesthetics functions as a window to Cave’s inner life and gives access to his creative mind. The narrative starts with a close-up on Nick Cave’s face, showing him lying in bed next to his wife; the alarm clock rings. Ac- cording to Bela Balázs, close-up angles „isolate the human face from distracting contexts“ and „function as thresholds to the human soul“ (Hongisto 75), and thus beam the focus towards the inner aesthetics, such as emotions, moods, and thoughts. Simultane- ously, a ﬁrst-person voice-over monologue fades in, that will remain the common theme of this narration based, ﬁctitious cycle.

28 Nick Cave: „At the end of the 20th century, I ceased to be a human being. That is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a thing. I wake, I write, I eat, I write, I watch TV. This is my 20,000th day on earth“.

In the subjective voice-over, Cave describes his everyday life as not commonplace, and the process of writing as the most essential part of his being as a musician and author. In the same time, his monologue is stylistically very poetic and can be understood as a performance and narration in itself. Self-performance and first-person narrative, referring back to the theory chapter, is an aesthetic strategy used to represent subjective and embodied perspectives. Renov emphasizes the capacity of this device to depict a „vividly corporeal rather than intellectualized self“ (171). The decision to let Nick Cave tell his story himself, allows for close insights to his inner life and emotions. This matches with the quality of pop music culture, as it is closely related to identity and identification, the development of creative processes and the sensual experience of music. „There’s a world I’m creating“, he says, before the following sequences stage him in his creative writing process, writing on a typewriter and ending with a match-cut to playing his piano’s keyboard. 20,000 Days on Earth portrays a performative, creational picture of Nick Cave, using a cinematic film style and a poetical layer to express the creative process of the musician. The film does not break with the sacred pop cultural myth of him as a performer and a celebrity. Cave extensively expresses the relevance he feels in building up a transcendent narrative about himself, in creating a remaining memory about him in this world, as he for instance describes the loss of memory as his biggest fear. His own con- tribution to the documentary script can be seen as an act of commemorative culture, just as his songwriting aims for the same: „For a very long time I’ve been building up a kind of world through narrative songwriting. It is a kind of world that’s created about those pre- cious, original memories that define our lives“. Cave’s performative expressions in 20,000 Days on Earth are retelling the mythology about him as a rock star, and show the urgent need of Nick Cave to not only create but constantly retell his own narrative, and generate a memorable story and a transcendent version of himself as an artist. Here, a first reference to Heinze can be made, as he characterizes music documentary through the specific quality of musicians as documentary subjects. A musician’s personality consists of a public version of self that is constantly acted in a pop cultural, performative habitus. The performative expression of self is performed again in the documentary context (171). Nick Cave’s self-performance therefore allows this documentary

29 strand to be an enacted and ﬁctitious narrative, because the character Nick Cave is already a performance of his image as an artist and musician of public interest. In an interview with the British television channel Film4, director Iain Forsyth makes a statement about the decision to uphold the myth about Nick Cave in his documentary 20,000 Days on Earth:

„You know, the mythology is the story, I think that’s the thing. The conceit somehow that you can see behind the mask of a rock star is kind of bizarre when you think about it too much, because, you know, a rock star, as Nick says in the ﬁlm, if they’re any good, the mask is gone, there is no mask. They are the thing that they’ve created, there’s no mask to take away. You know, Nick spent 35 years that we know of in public, creating the character that is Nick Cave, and who knows of how many years in his bedroom as a teenager before then, and he is the thing that he has created“.

While in non-music related documentaries, according to the definition of Nichols, actual people present themselves to the viewer as themselves (8), musicians as persons in documentaries continue performing their pop cultural habitus, states Heinze (171). As Forsyth explains in case of Nick Cave, the act of performance can become a permanent and very essential part of the personality of a musician, or even become one with the artist’s identity. It would therefore be wrong to claim a music documentary is only then to be understood as documentary when it reveals the „actual“ person behind the pop or rock star image. The reality of Nick Cave is the narrative about the fictional character that he has invented himself. The creation of „Nick Cave“ as a rockstar persona, constitutes his significance as a public person and therefore, as pointed out in chapter 2.1 earlier, the relevance to shoot a documentary about him in the first place. While authors like Niebling or Edgar criticize that some music documentaries would refuse to reveal the actual person behind the star masquerade for promotional reasons, Forsyth describes Nick Cave as the embodiment of his performative star figure. In the performative reality of pop, Nick Cave functions as a communicating instance of pop music culture. Like Jost and Huwyler pointed out (150), star figures acquire a special cultural relevance as the performative embodiment of the pop music scene and style. Further, as Heinze also emphasizes, the public relevance and pop cultural significance of the pop musician arises from the cultural narrative surrounding that person. The act of storytelling and creating narratives occupies an especially important role in music documentary, because it is a form of cultural narrative that constitutes the significance

30 and meaning of the musician in the pop cultural context. The pop cultural story, the narrative of Nick Cave, is told in form of media representations, acted in live performances, and anything that works as cultural performance platforms of a musician, band or scene. If music documentary seeks to represent this very reality of pop music, it necessarily has to understand the performative reality of pop culture as the actuality of its subject. In this , also the signiﬁcant role of creativity is to consider. At one point, Nick Cave touches explicitly on the creational process of songwriting:

Nick Cave: „Do you wanna know how to write a song? Songwriting is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key. Putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks ﬂy. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don’t know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle and again you wait and you watch. And if that doesn’t do it, you shoot the clown.“

This poetic description of songwriting, accompanied by close-up images on handwritten lyric sheets and scribbles Cave had drawn, straightly points to the imaginative aspect of writing. To Heinze, the creational part of pop and rock music is one of the reasons that make a clear distinction between fact and fiction less relevant in the context of music documentaries than it is for less performative documentary subjects (168). The sensual and individual experience of music, and the strong interrelation of pop music and aesthetics, narration, creation, and also imagination, elude a strict definition of truth and reality in the pop music context. As a concrete example, Heinze names the imaginative process of songwriting, that Cave refers to. Next to the self performance, 20,000 Days on Earth uses enactment to tell the story of the fictitious 20.000th day of Cave’s life. Uncovered as such, this cycle of clearly plays with the boundaries of documentary. To Nichols, „the documentary narration has to be a representation of what actually happened“ (10), and thus exclude imaginative and fictional stories from the documentary narrative. Nevertheless, he also emphasizes that many examples of performative documentaries use „the free combination of the actual and the imagined is a common feature“ (202) to visualize the non-factual, the embodied and subjective experience. This is the case in 20,000 Days on Earth, as the film is told in the sensual and subjective perspective of Cave’s inner life, that can much better be visualized by means of performative aesthetics than it could be expressed by rather factual and observational representation. Thus, despite the fictional elements, 20,000 Days on

31 Earth can be considered a documentary; a performative documentary, that is strongly based upon narration, fiction, and imagination. Coming to Bruzzi’s approach of the performative documentary, one can understand the film as a „negotiation“, a performance between the subject Nick Cave, the filmmakers Forsyth and Pollard, and the actual reality. Bruzzi divides between two categories of how performative documentaries can make their performativity visible. This case belongs to the category that creates alienation by being heavily stylized and featuring a performative subject. The highly cinematic style of 20,000 Days on Earth and the self performance of Nick Cave emphasize the constructiveness of the film, and make clear that it is not at all about an objective representation of reality but rather concerned with the subjective reality of the musician. To Bruzzi, the meaning and sense of a documentary is performative as well. The argument first comes into being through the negotiation between the reality and the filmmaker. In 20,000 Days on Earth, the stylistic decision of the filmmakers to blur the boundaries between common documentary style and fiction film aesthetics, as well as the intensely performative participation of the subject itself shape the argument of this music documentary: the creation of a sensual and subjective insight to the creative mind of Nick Cave. Referring back to the theory about the aesthetic strategies of new music documentary, and the three types of re-enactment defined by Nichols, this example be classified as „stylization“. The day- cycle is a creatively stylized reenactment that does not „serve any indexical linkage to the actual event but give voice to the acutely selective […] perspective“ from which it is experienced (2008:84f). The enactment of Nick Cave’s 20,000th day on earth is not a real historic event but provides a platform for the first-person perspective of Nick Cave. Or, how Nichols puts it, the stylized enactment is „clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth“ (2008:80). In this example we can see, why the performative documentary can be especially efficient to visualize an aesthetic and sensual subject like pop music and its contexts. Content-wise, the day-cycle tells much about the musical history of Nick Cave’s bands as well as his family life. The story behind Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is told in dialogue scenes that show up intensely staged and artificially aestheticized. Driving through Brighton in his car, Cave tells the story of how he became attached to the rainy city of Brighton, and how this place influences his music ever since. At different points of the film, the dialogues scenes with the actor Ray Winstone, the former Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds member Blixa Bargeld, and musician Kylie Minogue take place in Cave’s car. None of the persons is introduced to the viewer, and the voice-over monologue will

32 continue during the conversations. To the end of each talk, the respective person sud- denly disappears within a cut, leaving the viewer questioning if they ever were actually present. In scenes like this, 20,000 Days on Earth appears in its ﬁctionalized qualities, and creates the impression of rather being a feature ﬁlm. The conversation with Ray Winstone (see Fig. 2) reveals more about the complex structure of Nick Cave’s felt identity and performative attempts:

Nick Cave: „I can’t reinvent myself.“ Ray Winstone: „Do you want it?“ Nick Cave: „No. I don’t want it, but I think that the rockstar you gotta be able to see from distance. It’s something that you can draw in one line. […] They got to be godlike. Even that is all an invention. But it happened early on for me.“

Ray Winstone: „Do you love performing still?“ Nick Cave: „I live for it. And it’s that moment I can get to be that person that I always wanted to be“.

FIG. 2 „NICK CAVE IN A CONVERSATION WITH RAY WINSTONE“

Once more, the ﬁlm refers to the exceptional qualities of musician’s personalities as Heinze describes it. Being a pop- or rockstar is always related to a certain form of enactment or an „invention“ of public self, as Cave puts it. It is the moment of performance where the public and artistic identity of a rock star comes to life. As a performative music documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth does not break with the pop cultural habitus of his personality. This is what some might critique as the brand-promoting purpose of music

33 documentaries, but this thesis rather understands as the conscientious representation of pop culture reality. The documentary exhibits the actual, performative identity of Nick Cave as a musician. Thereby, the ﬁlm simultaneously functions as another platform to perform and enact the image of the rockstar identity. In this sense a double layer of performance occurs, one for the documentary camera, and one even before that, of Cave performing his pop cultural being. The driving scene with Blixa Bargeld, founding member of the Bad Seeds and popular as the singer of the post-industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, reveals much about the band history. In the conversation with pop singer Kylie Minogue, with whom Nick Cave performed the commercially successful duet Where The Wild Roses Grow in 1995, focusses on how he stepped into Minogue’s life like a „myth“ and how she describes him as a performer Cave and awe-inspiring personality. The presence of other musicians as interviewees is a common feature in music documentaries. What Edgar (et. al.) again tend to identify as another potentially promotional instrument of music documentaries, is here suggested to see as the decision to represent voices of people that might best describe the music scene and pop cultural context from within, than analyzing it out from a distance.

FIG. 3 „NICK CAVE AND SONS ARTHUR AND EARL WATCHING A MOVIE“

Another story that is told in the day-cycle offers insight into Cave’s family life as a father and husband. In one scene, we can see Cave and his two sons Arthur (deceased in 2015) and Earl watching a movie (see Fig. 3). The scene looks heavily set up und cine- matically stylized, as the camera angle ﬁlms them from above the screen. An alienating impression is created, as all three wear black clothes and white shirts underneath, which

34 does not really fit in with a cosy homelike atmosphere, and at one point start to talk un- naturally synchronously to the film dialogue. Although the film presents some insight into Cave’s family life, the viewer never comes to the impression that the person behind Nick Cave’s star persona, if there is any, is fully revealed. Regardless the potentially intimate scenery, the film never breaks with the myth that surrounds the rockstar and distances the audience from the performer.

FIG. 4 „NICK CAVE IN A SESSION WITH PSYCHOANALYST DARIAN LEADER“

What aims to reveal more of Nick Cave’s intimate thoughts and profound personality is a therapy session with psychoanalyst Darian Leader, that takes place in a gloomy room, in front of a chimney. During the conversation, Cave talks about intimate and private memories, concerning the relation to his father who passed away, his first sexual experiences and childhood days. The scene creates just a performative impression as the other sequences of the day-cycle. The therapy session shows up in a neo-noir like low-key light composition, is shot in shot-reverse shots and a medium shot on both conversation partners (see Fig. 4). It might be best understood as a part of the Nick Cave self performance, to decide which information about the private person Nicholas Edward Cave shall overflow into the public image of Nick Cave. In the Film4 interview „20,000 Days On Earth Interview Special“, Nick Cave states the following about the documentary by Forsyth and Pollard: „[The film] reveals more than I think has been revealed in anything about me before. But at the same time, creates more mystery by revealing that“. Despite being largely fictitious, he concedes the film’s ability to represent a large amount of his personally perceived, subjective reality. In the same time he refers to the alienating quality of the documentary. As Cave constantly appears as a (self-) performing artist,

35 which is strongly supported by the stylized aesthetics and enactment of the day-cycle, he appears as a mysterious, opaque person that is not to grasp as a whole but constantly self-controlling his demeanor. Nick Cave is thoroughly a performer. One scene reaches out to the biographical attempts of 20,000 Days on Earth. The sequence in which Nick Cave drives into an archive is all about memory. He meets up with a team of researchers, about whom the viewer gets no further information, and explains to them the contexts of and details about several old photos that his mother Dawn had sent to them, showing Nick in his childhood and youth, in early band years and his time in Berlin of the 1980s. Through the archive material, the viewer learns about the foundation of Cave’s former band The Boys Next Door who quickly renamed as The Birthday Party, and much about his biographic history, all told by himself in a lecture-like manner. Once again, the value of memory to Nick Cave, of being memorable himself, is stated very clear. An old version of his last will and testament even reveals that he, as he was younger, wanted to found a „Nick Cave Memorial Museum“ with all his assets. In this about 10 minute long scene, he presents photos, old handwritings and objects, to the archive staff, and in the same time to the viewer. An almost museum-like impression is created, that shows the ability of music documentary to preserve pop cultural history. Aesthetically, multi camera use is very present in this sequence, clearly expressing that the scene is staged and the camera motions planned instead of witnessing a spontaneous unfolding situation. What the viewer gets is a composed selection of what Nick Cave wants to tell about himself, and how the filmmakers are willing to present and interpret it - a negotiation. It is also the day-cycle that supplies the final sequence of 20,000 Days on Earth. Cave’s voice-over monologue closes the film, after an impressive concert scene, showing him walking at Brighton’s famous Palace Pier and saying:

Nick Cave: „In the end, I am not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words. Truths that rise up without warning like the humps of a sea monster, and then disappear. What performance and song is to me, is ﬁnding a way to tempt the monster to the surface. To create a space where the creature can break through what is real what is known to us. This shimmering space where imagination and reality intersect, this is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.“

36 Cave describes performance and songwriting as his way to create new aesthetic reali- ties. Songwriting is able to bring to the forth what is an embodied and invisible kind of truth, consisting of subjective and sensual forms of knowledge. Coming back to the performative reality of pop music, as examined in chapter 2, the day-cycle is an example for the aestheticized and performative realization of pop music culture as a documentary subject. This cycle shows that subjectivity, identiﬁcation, emotional access and experience are essential aspects for the reality and the performance of pop. This kind of truth can best be represented by aesthetic devices that are performative in the same way, and make creativity and performance audio-visually accessible.

FIG. 5 „NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS RECORDING THE ALBUM PUSH THE SKY AWAY"

The creative-cycle in 20,000 Days on Earth

The second cycle in 20,000 Days on Earth is not so much at odds with conventional documentary values, since it focusses less on the representation of embodied and subjective reality. The creative cycle foregoes ﬁctional enactments and goes without a dramatically aestheticized style. Instead, it deals in a rather observational than staged way with the musical performances of Nick Cave. Viewers can attend the studio recording of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ album Push The Sky Away, experience archive footage of old live performances as well as a concert on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. The creative cycle represents Cave as a professional musician, and portraits him and his band from an outer, observational perspective. Also in stylistic matters, the sequences distinguish from the day-cycle, and create the viewing impression of witnessing

37 a situation unfold as it actually has happened in the past. In this sense, the creative-cycle much more refers to Nichols definition of documentary, in that he states that a documentary narrative „has to be a representation of what actually happened“ (10), instead of showing imaginative and fictional stories. Thus, other than the day-cycle, this part of 20,000 Days on Earth is less performative, and brings a rather observational character to the fore that much more goes hand in hand with traditional documentary paradigms. The camera work is more spontaneous, some pictures are even a bit blurry or shaky, and do not hide the focus-pulling of the camera men. It seems like, especially in the recording studio, there is only available light used and no additional film light set up, whereby the creative-cycle moves away from the dominant neo-noir style of the day-cycle. One can hear background noise and ambient sound, whereas the soundtrack of the day-cycle is very isolated, free of distorting factors, and focussed on what is important for the narration. In the interview with Film4, Nick Cave says about the scenes of the creative-cycle: „The live stuff, some of the performances of the songs, some of that rehearsal stuff […] That was really natural, that was really true“. Director Jane Pollard describes this part of

FIG. 6 „NICK CAVE PERFORMING LIVE IN LONDON AT THE CLUB KOKO“ the ﬁlm as „a journey of a song from the moment that the lyrics pop into Nick’s head or the melody begins to take form on the piano, all the way through demoing, rehearsals, and then onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House“ („20,000 Days On Earth Interview Special“). The documented recording session of the album Push the Sky Away shows the creational process between Nick Cave and mainly Warren Ellis, the violin player of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and a longtime friend (see Fig. 5). The titles Higgs Boson Blues or Push The Sky Away are shown in how they are recorded form scratch, as Pol-

38 lard describes it, from the first piano samplings, over the final studio recording in full length, to the end version performed on stage. The recordings scenes consist of many details shots of the musicians, instruments and studio equipment, and include the full un- interrupted version of the respective songs. Compared to the day-cycle, who shows all qualities of a performative documentary in Bruzzi’s and also Nichols’ sense, the creative- cycle is rather to classify as a rockumentary element, which is characterized by an observing Direct Cinema camera and non-interfering into the unfolding situations. The rockumentary part of 20,000 Days on Earth treats the viewer as a regular music audience, experiencing the musical performance of a rock star from an outer and distanced perspective like fans usually do, without gaining insight into the inner process of the musician himself. As a matter of course, this equally counts for the concert recordings, of which the creative cycle includes several. Shot in multi-cam, the viewer sees Cave inter- acting with the first row of his audience in London’s concert venue KOKO (Fig. 6), performing his songs live and with full enthusiasm and passion on stage. The concert scenes that were recorded for the documentary itself are frequently intercut with historic images of old Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds video footage. In most cases they are presented in match cuts (see Fig. 7), emphasizing the long timespan in that Nick Cave’s is already successful as a popular rock musician. The final concert scene is a big show in the Sidney Opera House where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform the songs of the Push The Sky Away album including a children choir.

FIG. 7 „MATCH CUT OF AND OLD (LEFT) AND NEW (RIGHT) NICK CAVE PERFORMANCE“

Coming briefly to how 20,000 Days on Earth deals with music, one can find two of the three options Heinze describes of how music is used in the context of music documentary (154). In the creative cycle, Nick Cave’s songs play synchronously to the film images. In the studio moments and in all live concert and stage situations, the creation and performance of music is the documentary’s subject itself and the process of music- making is kept in the documentary footage and presented on screen. Pollard explains his intentions regarding the decision of presenting Nick Cave’s songs in 20,000 Days on

39 Earth in such long sequences: „We used the music as a way of enhancing some of the kind of beats, the moments in the ﬁlm, and give you a break from endless philosophical thought and theory, or storytelling“ (Film4 „20,000 Days On Earth Interview Special“). In other occasions, music is used extra-diegetic, and functions as emotionalizing background for the gloomy mood of the day-cycle narrative, and creates an associative link to Nick Cave’s musical work, as 20,000 Days on Earth exclusively uses Cave’s own songs.

Conclusion of 20,000 Days on Earth

Stylistically, 20,000 Days on Earth makes no effort to create the illusion it might show captured reality as it actually had unfold. The cinematic style, the widescreen for- mat and the gloomy neo-noir lightning, the creative camera operation, like many slowly tracking shots and close ups, are all of them qualities of feature film. But as Bruzzi points out, and the majority of contemporary documentary theory agrees on, the objective representation of reality in documentary film is an illusion in any case. To Bruzzi, every documentary is a performance between the reality and the filmmaker, and Heinze states that music documentaries have not to attach too much importance to the boundaries between fact and fiction anyway, because creativity, performativity and the illusionary is an essential part of the reality of pop music. The day-cycle of 20,000 Days on Earth is entirely enacted, and includes many set-up situations and scenes that normally would be ad odds with the predominant documentary values. Mise-en-scène can be read, as Niebling, or Edgar et. all suggest, as a falsifying element, that seeks to gloss over the star image of the musician or band. Documentary with mise-en-scène is said to not attend it’s duty of revealing the actual reality behind the star image. But in the case of 20,000 Days on Earth, the mise-en-scène and the enactment of the fictional day in Nick Cave’s life is used as a platform for his performance. The performative act of Cave gives the viewer access to his embodied knowledge, and his very subjective approach to the world, the meaning and sense of creativity and performance in his life. 20,000 Days on Earth merges qualities of the performative documentary and rockumentary genre to a biographic and performative picture of Nick Cave and his pop cultural significance. Forsyth’s and Pollard’s documentary is a hybrid mix between traditional documentary approaches, expressed in the rather observational creative-cycle, and performative documentary, as the analysis of the day-cycle could show. On the one hand, documentary is realized as the representation of reality, how common definitions of the representational paradigm

40 propose. Nichols for example states that documentaries „tell stories about what happens in the real world“, and represent perspectives on pre-existing historic events (10). On the other hand, documentary is understood as a performance in the sense of Bruzzi. Con- sidering the day-cycle, not the representation of a pre-date event is essential, but the performative process to create „meaning by they interaction between performance“, meaning both the self performance of Nick Cave’s and the creative act by the ﬁlmmak- ers, and reality (186).

3.2 Cobain: Montage of Heck

„Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there's my dad. He's larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal. If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible . . . But he wasn't. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt. He became even bigger after he died than he was when he was alive. You don't think it could have gotten any bigger. But it did.“ (Frances Bean Cobain qtd. by Fricke in Rolling Stone „Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death“)

Cobain: Montage of Heck is a music documentary about Kurt Cobain, frontman and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana, who died in 1994 at the age of 27. The ﬁlm was directed by Brett Morgen and released in 2015. The title Montage of Heck refers to a musical collage of the same name that Cobain recorded in the late 1980s, and simultaneously indicates the overall collage-like aesthetic of the music documentary. Montage of Heck starts with an insert saying: „The following ﬁlm is based on art, music, journals, Su- per 8 videos, and audio montages provided by the family of Kurt Cobain“. Morgen worked in close cooperation with Cobain’s widow Courtney Love, while his only daughter Frances Bean Cobain, cited in the quote above, was co-executive producer on the documentary. Montage of Heck can be seen as a multi-layered aesthetic experience about Kurt Cobain, creatively arranging interviews, private video footage, material of public media sources, animated sequences, artwork and lyrics, music and sound recordings to a dense impression of the musician. Brett Morgen condenses the information about Kurt Cobain’s life to a performative documentary that aims to give the viewer an idea of how Kurt Cobain was seen in the eyes of both his relatives and friends and the public, before he committed suicide. Despite the multiple layers, Montage of Heck follows a chronologi-

41 cally arranged narrative that starts with the birth of Kurt Cobain and ends with his last living days. The documentary tries to propose a perspective about the mental reality of Cobain, that was similarly influenced by his popularity and personal family issues, and symbolically emphasizes Cobain’s restless and troubled personality by means of a sometimes chaotic and rapid arrangement of the film’s fragments. The typology of common aesthetic strategies in new music documentary, that was elaborated in chapter 2.2.3, will be used as analysis tool for the aesthetics of Montage of Heck. The film shapes the image of Kurt Cobain with a variety of aesthetic devices and storytelling strategies - especially animation, home videos, and a highly artistic montage style - that constantly remind the viewer on the constructedness of the documentary. Morgen very much comes to the fore in his role as the author and creator of the film. Frances Bean’s quote of the interview with the Rolling Stone magazine indicates the cultural, and to this day undoubtedly iconic, significance of Kurt Cobain for contemporary pop music culture. Despite his drug abuse and his choice to abandon his family by suicide, Cobain is a worshipped public figure in „our culture“, meaning the Western pop music culture, due to his status as a famous rockstar and generation-inspiring musician. Cobain: Montage of Heck aims, as Frances Bean Cobain states, to not reproduce the popular mythology and prevailing romanticism about her father. Instead, Brett Morgen’s film shall be seen as „emotional journalism“, representing personal experiences of and with Cobain. This already points to the performative quality of the documentary, that treats knowledge as embodied and subjective matter. According to Francis Bean Cobain, the documentary seeks to be „the closest thing to having Kurt tell his own story in his own words - by his own aesthetic, his own perception of the world. It paints a portrait of a man attempting to cope with being a human“ (Fricke „Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt’s Death“). Subsequently, this analysis will state otherwise. Comparable to the representation of Nick Cave in 20,000 Days on Earth, Kurt Cobain is portrayed as an out- standing personality, struggling with his role as an ordinary member of society. While Cave expresses this for himself, literally saying that he had „ceased to be a human being“, Cobain obtains his sacral status through the cultural mythology about his death. Cobain’s daughter further states: „Kurt has gotten to icon status because he will never age“ (Fricke „Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death“). The existence of a pop cultural romanticism surrounding early deceased artists is manifest in the popularity of cultural inventions like the so-called „27 Club“, a list of popular musicians and artists that died at age 27, mostly as a result of drug abuse or suicide. There is no contemporary

42 musical work of Cobain that would explain his ever-lasting popularity. Cobain’s signiﬁ- cance in contemporary pop culture is constituted of his memorability and the romanticized myth of the forever-young rockstar. Montage of Heck refuses to discuss what has happened after Cobain’s death, but focusses on his lifetime only. The documentary tries by various means to represent Kurt Cobain’s private life and especially his mental struggle with Nirvana’s popularity. There- by, it seeks to ﬁnd reasons that had led to Cobain’s decay, trying to represent the full picture, including the perspectives of his close relatives, as for instance widow Courtney Love, Cobain’s parents, sister, stepmother, ex-girlfriend, and fellow band members. Due to the fact that Cobain was already dead for 21 years when the documentary was released, Montage of Heck forgoes the opportunity to let the musician speak and perform for the documentary himself. Substitutively, archive footage, unreleased sound record-

FIG. 8 „KURT COBAIN’S PERFORMANCE ON READING AND LEEDS FESTIVAL 1992" ings and animation is used to include Cobain’s point of view. In the following, this chapter will provide a close analysis of the different layers in Cobain: Montage of Heck, with a focus on how the aesthetic strategies convey Cobain’s personality as a rockstar, his certainly troubled and self-destructive character, his role as a public ﬁgure of pop music culture, and his artistic work as a musician. The documentary starts with an archive video sequence, showing a bizarre scene of Cobain, ﬁlmed from behind, how he walks up on a concert stage while wearing a blonde wig and white hospital gown. The handheld, shaky

43 camera films Cobain at the beginning of the popular Nirvana gig at the British Reading and Leeds festival in 1992, where Kurt got on stage in a wheelchair and pretends to be in a physically and mentally disordered condition (Fig. 8). The performance was meant as a dig on the public drug abuse rumors about him at that time. Just in the beginning, the documentary offers an impression of the tensions between Cobain’s personal problems and his popularity, respectively the public’s expectations to him as a performer. The scenery is intercut with interview sequences of family and band members that talk about their personal impressions of Cobain. The film titles are presented in form of a multi-layered artistic collage of feature film extracts and commercials, galaxy images, atom explosions, pop cultural associations like Frankenstein and Godzilla, all musically underlaid by Nirvana song Territorial Piss- ings. As Mundhenke points out, referring back to chapter 2, stylistic freedom in the structure and arrangement of documentary footage can range from a minimum of montage, that aims to structure a narrative, up to very artistic arrangements of non-fictional footage, like it is the case in Montage of Heck. Not only in the intro sequence but throughout the whole film, music, artwork, interviews, concert videos and archive material of many different media sources create the narrative about Cobain’s private life, his media presence and pop cultural relevance. Highly creative montage aesthetic is, according to Mundhenke, not to assess as a fictionalizing element that falsifies the represented reality, but rather in the category of media-art (207), and as such, producing a reality on its own. Montage is to see as a filter that determines the storytelling of the documentary, and thus takes huge influence on the film’s perspective and argument. Through the predominant montage style, the authorial voice of Brett Morgen is highlighted and he becomes recognizable as the artist of his documentary. This exemplifies Bruzzi’s approach of the performative documentary, in that „an elaborate and ostentatiously inauthentic visual style“ (186), like Montage of Heck certainly implements, calls attention to the constructiveness of documentary film. The highly stylized aesthetics lead away from the attempt of objective reality representation but instead emphasize Brett Morgen’s proposition of an argument. Reality is understood as depending on subjectivity, experience and personal meaning, and thus can only represent a certain perspective. Montage of Heck’s aesthetic structure reveals that meaning and signification of the film are shaped by the filmmaker’s negotiation and interpretation of reality, and his decisions to arrange it in form of audiovisual images (186). As Heinze examined, a multi-layered structure and associative composition of image and sound, is a common aesthetic fea-

44 ture in the music documentary genre (171). This makes much sense, since the form of knowledge produced in music documentary widely corresponds with the performative documentary paradigm. According do Beattie, most music documentaries perceive knowledge as „subjective, affective, visceral and sensuous“, due to the aesthetic and sensual subject itself, and „acknowledge appeals to the senses as a form of knowledge production“ (134). The associativity and highly creative aesthetic of Montage of Heck appeals to the senses, and displays the performative and artistic quality of the documentary. According to Nichols, performative documentaries gain sense and understanding by aesthetic techniques that hold forms of subjectivity, like musical elements, states of mind and flashbacks (206), which all are to find in Montage of Heck. Overall, the interviews that were exclusively taken for the documentary provide the chronological frame of the narrative, and lead the viewer through the story of Kurt Cobain from different subjective perspectives. Beginning at the pregnancy of his mother, relatives and close friends tell Cobain’s biographical story from within. The statements are highlighted and supplemented by archive footage, old family photos and videos, rather randomly mixed with Super 8 videos of Aberdeen, the city in Washington where Cobain grew up. The viewer sees Super 8 footage of Kurt’s first birthday parties, sum- mer-days on the playground and in the garden, birth documents and drawings. Accom- panied by Nirvana’s song All Apologies in a childlike music box version, the private and public personality of Kurt Cobain merge together. The combination of official documents, archive footage and classical interview scenes are all classical techniques of documentary filmmaking, that support attempts of realism. Nevertheless, there is a tension between this explanatory approach and the artistically stylized and multi-media arrangement and the use of music. The revelation of Cobain’s private life is scraped together with his being as a performing musician. His mother introduces the viewer to the social difficulties Kurt had to deal with in his adolescence, like his hyperactivity, his rejective father, and the divorce of his parents in the 1960s, that triggered his unruly behavior as a teenager who never felt welcome in his parent’s lives. The interview sequences with father Don Cobain and stepmother Jenny Cobain support this perspective and especially emphasize Cobain’s desperate need to be part of an intact family. All future psychologic problems of Kurt Cobain are said to come from this. This statement is supported throughout the film, also in the interviews with Courtney Love, Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic, and Cobain’s ex-girlfriend Tracy Marander. They all together draw a picture of a very vulnerable and fragile Kurt Cobain who's biggest longing was loving family sup-

45 port, and who was drowning in in the overwhelming success of his band, that in the same was his only way of self-expression and creative fulﬁllment. Relating back to Frances Bean Cobain’s statement, the documentary clearly tries to explain the truth behind Cobain’s suicide. Montage of Heck, at least content wise, seeks to reveal and expose the unmasked truth about Kurt Cobain. This stands in a sharp contrast to 20,000 Days on Earth, that refuses to make a division between the private and the public Nick Cave, and pictures him as the embodiment of creative performance. However, the realistic attempt to reveal the facts about Cobain’s private personality is contradictory to the highly stylized aesthetic of the documentary, and the emphasized performative constructedness of Montage of Heck. The realistic approach of the interview content does not ﬁt in with the

FIG. 9 „BIZARRE HOME VIDEO OF COBAIN, LOVE AND DAUGHTER FRANCES SINGING TO- GETHER“ artistically constructed and creative style of the film on the whole. Considering that the interviews focus on the reasons for the most mystified story about of Cobain’s, his suicide, they equally end up contributing to maintenance of the romanticism about his early decease. The full picture collage of Montage of Heck shows an interpretation of subjective opinions about the private Kurt, but sets all this in relation with his pop cultural relevance as a grunge rockstar. Although focussed on revealing, the interviews equally support the public speculation about the truth behind his suicide and reduce Cobain to his romanticized image as forever-young and eternally iconic rockstar, if they are seen as one single element of this very performative documentary film.

46 Another strong aesthetic element that creates tension between the realism and performance of Cobain: Montage of Heck, is the use of private home videos. Super 8 ﬁlms represent Cobain’s childhood, while his family life with Courtney and daughter Frances Bean is shown in camcorder videos. In both cases, the home video footage was provided by family members, and creates the impression of a private and exclusive insight to Cobain’s family life. As emphasized in chapter 2 with Orgeron, the amateurish home videos, taken by Cobain and Love themselves, function as a narrational tool to represent biographic memory and family history. They are both subject to the pre-decisions of the videographer, in this case family members of Kurt Cobain, and the ﬁlmmaker who selects and arranges the home video footage into the documentary narrative. There- fore, despite the promising impression of a particularly truthful insight to the subject’s life,

FIG. 10 „CLOSE-UP OF A HOME VIDEO SCENE THAT SHOWS COBAIN AND LOVE INTIMATE- LY KISSING“ the use of home videos is not to consider less performative and constructed, as footage that was directly taken for the documentary. As Orgeron further states, home videos in the documentary context often tell melodramatic family stories that are not necessarily positive but can expose decay and dissolution as well (853f.). While the Super 8 videos of Cobain’s own childhood show harmonic family life, the home videos of his marriage with Courtney present Cobain in-between his excessive and troubled personality and his role as a loving father and husband. The best example for this tension might be a bizarre scene in which Courtney and Frances are sitting in a rocking chair (see Fig. 9). Kurt

47 stands beside them, lethargically and half-naked, when they loudly start singing Amazing Grace. Cobain is obviously absent and under influence of drugs. Other sequences are clearly romanticizing the love between the drug addicted couple. The home videos fluc- tuates between moments of close intimacy (see Fig. 10), and scenes of alarming excess that indicate their alarming dependency on drugs and the feeling of love. Notwithstanding the domestic setting of the home videos, moments like this ostentatiously refer to them both as musicians, living on the edge, and destroying guitars in their own flat as if they were constantly performing on stage. The aesthetic strategies to use home videos in Montage of Heck is another moment of realism at the first glance. The impression of revelation and real insight yields, if the videos are looked at as a part of the performative argument that the film constitutes. Seen in a whole, all home videos show him in situations that emphasize either his tragic drug abuse or his desperate wish for family and supportive love. The collage-like montage technique includes the domestic home videos into the arty, creative picture, where they contribute to the performance of the main argument about Cobain, which is the story of his vast success as musician and memorability as an eternally dissatisfied youth. Seen as part of the performative act by Brett Morgen, they are not to understand as representation of actual historic reality but rather get their meaning and significance through the implementation in the performative style of the documentary. Only in connection to the other elements, they gain sense. Coming back to Bruzzi, this is where she states that performative documentary produce reality though performance. The negotiation of Brett Morgen, his interpretation and arrangement of an argument about reality, is the moment where the argument comes into being and reality is performed. A huge part of Cobain: Montage of Heck is animated. Animation is, as examined in chapter two, a very performative aesthetic device and necessarily highly creative due to the missing indexical link. The majority of animated sequences function as a substi- tute, and stand in for absent film material of past events in Cobain’s private life. Due to the decades gone by and the death of the subject itself, there is of course no opportunity to visualize or re-enact them with live-action footage. The comic-style animation re-en- acts the stories that interview partners tell about Kurt Cobain in a first person perspective. The subjective voice-over is sometimes original sound recordings by Cobain, in other occasions first-person texts, probably diary entries, that are synced by a speaker. One animation sequence shows how Cobain recorded his tape project Montage of Heck, in the days when he still lived together with his ex-girlfriend Tracy (see Fig. 11). The anima-

48 FIG. 11 „SUBSTITUTIVE ANIMATION OF KURT COBAIN RECORDING HIS MUSICAL PROJECT MONTAGE OF HECK“ tion resembles a relatively realistic look, despite the comic-strip aesthetics. In Honnes Roe’s categories of animation, it is therefore to classify as mimetic substitution. Like Nichols stated, substitutive and re-enacting animation comes, due to its inevitably highly stylized character, always with a subjective and expressionistic quality (14). Indeed, the animation scenes mostly focus on the subjective perspective of Cobain, his emotional states and feelings. In a rather monotone and gloomy voice-over, accompanied by a violin version of Nirvana hit Smells Like Teen Spirit, the viewer also learns about Cobain’s first try to kill himself as a teenager. Just as in the interviews, the animation supports the image of Cobain as a broken figure. It expresses the first person perspective on his self- destructiveness, and suggests his musical talent as his only possible way of self-expression, and the outlet for his issues. By all the tragic that is closely related to the musical work of Nirvana and the creative processes of Kurt Cobain as an exceptional musician, the film romanticizes his suicide in the end. Nichols allocates the aesthetic technique of animation in the spectrum of performative documentary, since it mostly expresses subjectivity in a highly creative way, and the images hold no indexical relation to real events (204). Animation contradicts to documentary paradigms that stay in for strict realism, but it does not necessarily aim for that anyway. At the example of Montage of Heck, one can understand the animation parts as one element of the artistic collage that Brett Morgen arranged about Kurt Cobain. Since the first-person perspective that is presented in the

49 animation sequences is not verifiably Cobain’s position, Montage of Heck shows Brett Morgen’s interpretation of it. This interpretation is a negotiation on basis of the original sound recordings and personal notes by Cobain, all information he gets from relatives and friends, and what is known as the public image of Kurt Cobain. Thus, the animation is a performative device, one of the various aesthetic strategies that Montage of Heck uses to visualize a private and pop cultural expression of Cobain. Not only in terms of the animated sequences, but there in particular, the documentary is to perceive as an imaginative act. Referring to Heinze, this is a common and suitable method for films that deal with pop music culture, since the creational act, of both music and the respective film about it, always holds the process of imagination, acting out creativity, inventing aesthetics (168). Truth and reality of the pop music context are to perceive as very sensual. Further, Heinze describes the significance of pop musicians as arising from cultural narratives about that person in the first place, which is why the creation of narratives in music documentaries holds an especially pregnant role, since the cultural relevance and meaning of the musician is the story itself. Besides the substitutive animation, Morgen’s documentary includes a lot of animated artwork. Some of it relates to the musical work of Nirvana, for example handwritten lyric sheets or guitar tabs of Nirvana songs, or an animated version of the cover artwork of album Incesticide (see Fig. 12). Some of these examples provide visualization for sound recordings of Cobain. When the viewer hears him talking about his stomach sickness that, according to Cobain, had led to his heroin addiction, animation of a handwritten or diary entry is shown that concerns the same topic and thus emphasizes the heard information. This is an example for non-mimetic substitutive animation, that does not create an illusionary look of reality but functions as interpretative visual layer to the spoken soundtrack. Further, the documentary includes animations of childhood drawings made by Kurt Cobain, very artful animations of body cells, organs and sperms, or Nirvana tour posters. Various Nirvana songs function as background music in these artistically montaged sequences. Important to mention is, that there is never concrete information or even a hint of which source the artwork or soundtrack actually stems from. Referring back to Mundhenke once more, the artwork animations can be considered as media art, and blend in with the overall feel of artistic freedom and performative montage of the film.

50 FIG. 12 „ANIMATION OF THE THE NIRVANA ALBUM COVER OF INCESTICIDE"

The first direct link to the musical work of Cobain is made rather lately, in minute 27 of the documentary. Private videos recordings of his adolescence are providing the visual layer to an interview soundtrack of Cobain, who expresses that feelings of anger and alienation were the driving force to engage with music in the first place. The musical work of Nirvana and the pop cultural context and significance of the band is represented in a mixture of private archive pictures and videos, and public media sources. Early videos of band rehearsals, concert photos and film recordings of live performances, newspaper articles, excerpts of television interviews, cutouts of music magazine headlines and radio interview pieces represent throughout the whole documentary the media attention towards Nirvana in the 1990’s, and the dependence between public media and the narrative of rock- or popstars (see Fig.13 & Fig.14). The story of Nirvana is mainly told in fragments of what Jost and Huwyler refer to as the media biography, the fragmented biography of the public selfs of the musicians, that their audience and fans complete by imagination. Montage of Heck shows how interwoven the narrative of the public rockstar persona and the private reality of a performer are, by continuously linking it to one another. Apart from a few exceptions, the documentary exclusively uses songs by Nirvana, of which most are written by Kurt Cobain, and thus represents the musical work of the documentary subject. Sometimes, songs are modified into commentary versions, like for example in the Super 8 video scenes of Cobain’s childhood, when a music-box-version

51 of All Apologies provides the background sound. Other than that, the soundtrack fits in with the general aesthetic of the documentary, switching between off- and on-screen music, voice over fragments, background sounds to artwork visuals or the original performance sound of concerts. The musical success of Nirvana is always a bit overshadowed by Cobain’s social problems that were enforced by the pressure of public expectations on him. The interview part with his mother expresses particularly this aspect. When she first heard the master-cut of Nirvana’s most successful album Nevermind, she states, she got afraid, knowing that it will change everything in her son’s life, what he was not ready to stand. In an archive interview recording, Cobain himself stumbles over the question how he himself deals with the negative parts of becoming that famous. During that, pictures of a video shooting show Cobain lying in-between an ocean of red blossoms, accompanied by a dramatic choir version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, intercut with slow- motion footage of Nirvana, theatric flames and a ballet ensemble. Scenes like these emphasize how the documentary connects his early decease to his being as a musician, supporting the 27-club epos of the talent that passed way too young.

FIG. 13 „KURT COBAIN AND NIRVANA DRUMMER DAVE GROHL AT A TELEVISION INTER- VIEW FOR MTV“

In many concerns, Montage of Heck is a rather atypical music documentary, looking the speciﬁcation of Heinze. The most signiﬁcant difference to the majority of other music documentaries is, that the documentary was made posthumously and thus cannot include an intentional self-performance by the artist. The self-performance aspect is lim-

52 ited on the animated sequences that visualize inner processes of Cobain, and Morgen’s composition of archive footage of the musician. Typical for music documentary though, as Heinze states as well, the film deals with the pop cultural significance of Kurt Cobain and reproduces the cultural narrative about him as the face of Nirvana and the most popular figurehead of grunge music. By means of personalization, by representing various subjective perspectives on Cobain, and sensual aestheticization, by the collage-like arrangement of music and images, Montage of Heck tells the story about the pop cultural meaning of Nirvana and the mythologic narration of the ever-young rockstar idol. Cobain is not so much presented as the perfect and untouchable rockstar, but rather in an anti- hero light. The story of a troubled but exceptionally significant musical talent, that drowned in the success of his band, because he actually was only longing for love and safety. In this way, the documentary reproduces the tragic and romantic myth about

FIG. 14 „KURT COBAIN AT THE PHOTO-SHOOTING OF NIRVANA ALBUM NEVERMIND“

Cobain. Coming back to the quote of Frances Bean Cobain in the Rolling Stone interview, the documentary does not break with the pop cultural image of Cobain. Instead, he is shown as the incarnation of the „live fast, die young“ credo of rock music, and presented as „the voice of a generation“, how he is called several times, that he actually did not want to be. Montage of Heck does, like 20,000 Days on Earth, not question the performative and aesthetic-based reality of pop music but moves within this bounds.

53 With the closing sequence, the documentary briefly sums up the overall argument of Montage of Heck again, and relates the revelation of his suicide reasons back to his childhood and to the musical history of Nirvana. The most frequently made statement in Montage of Heck is probably, that Cobain was urgently longing for family support and overstrained by the expectations on him as a popular musician. In every single interview, and also in the animation and public media content, the story leads back to his troubled soul and drug problems. Also Krist Novoselic, band member of Nirvana, describes Cobain as a sensitive character who was driven by his wish for an intact family life and overstrained by the public attention on him as the frontman of Nirvana and the „voice of a whole generation“. This is a very selective focus, but all the more shows that Brett Mor- gen seeks to propose a very clear argument. Even though the film ends before the media-popular suicide of Cobain, the personal decay of the musician is treated extensively. In the last few minutes of the documentary, Cobain’s mother reveals unpleasant details about the downfall of her son, as how his stomach sickness and heroin addiction made him lose weight, and how she wanted to confront him with his problems. A live performance of All Apologies at the MTV unplugged concert of Nirvana blend together with old video’s form Kurt’s childhood, and the home videos of him, Courtney and baby Frances. In a further interview inserts, Courtney Love tells how sensitive Cobain had been in their relationship, and how he almost killed himself when he felt rejected by Courtney. News- paper articles about this incidence blend with the Nirvana cover of Where did you sleep last night, a popular song that commentary lyrics are about cheating in a relationship. The film switches again to the MTV Unplugged concert performance, before the screen turns black and an insert fades in, saying:

„One month after returning from Rome, Kurt Cobain took his own life. He was 27 years old.“

As Heinze describes, the fascination of music documentary lays in its ability to lend musicians a certain form of immortality and memorability (162). In this last sequence, all the aesthetic elements used throughout the ﬁlm merge again into a rapidly cut collage, that pulls the viewer through the whole tragic biography of Cobain again: his childhood, his familiar problems, the drug abuse, the rise of Nirvana’s success and ﬁnally his despairing suicide.

54 Conclusion of Cobain: Montage of Heck

As this analysis could show, Montage of Heck contains both aesthetic elements that stand close to the tradition of realistic documentary attempts, like the interview frame, the home videos, and archival pictures and documents, and aesthetic elements that have a performative nature, like the artistic montage style and two different types of animation. Montage of Heck is therefore, comparable to 20,000 Days on Earth, a hybrid music documentary. Due to the diverse mix and arrangement of aesthetics, Montage of Heck is an example for a performative documentary all the more. As earlier described in chapter 2 with Beattie, the approach of knowledge and reality in music documentaries is not primarily a logical or factual, but strongly connected to subjective experiences and the sig- niﬁcance of cultural meaning. As she states, music documentary „acknowledges appeals to the senses as a form of knowledge production“ (134). Cobain: Montage of Heck, understood as a collage by Brett Morgen, as an aesthetic experience about the subject Kurt Cobain, does pursue a sensual form of knowledge transfer. In the end, the ﬁlm itself refers to the subjective and embodied approach of knowledge that Cobain: Montage of Heck pursues, giving the following information in the credits:

„The statements made by the interview subjects in this film reflect the recollections and opinions of such individuals and do not necessarily reflect the views of the filmmakers and are not presented as historical facts.“

Also the visual aesthetic of the documentary is not longing to necessarily verify the truth of facts but rather transports the subjective experiences that different people made with Kurt Cobain. Also, it tries to re-create the personal experiences of Cobain himself by using aesthetic techniques like substitutive animation. The overall atmosphere of this multi- layered arrangement, especially the overlapping and rapidly cut images and sounds, create a mood that commentary reﬂects on the picture of Kurt Cobain’s restless and un- sorted character. Whereas the public media content, of music videos, journals and television excerpts, transports the broader picture of the pop cultural signiﬁcance of Nirvana and Cobain. The documentary follows an emotional approach to represent this very subjective reality, and could even be read as a tribute. Montage of Heck makes its own constructedness visible by the predominantly stylized montage and creatively animated artworks and archive footage. Referring back

55 to Bruzzi, this is one way in which performative documentaries draw the viewer’s attention to the filmmaking process. The documentary alienates the impression of factual representation of reality be being „frequently in conjunction […] with an elaborate and ostentatiously inauthentic visual style“ (186). Although most of the images in Montage of Heck are non-fictional and stem from the actual pre-filmic reality, the meaning of this documentary is not constituted through the representation of the specific events shown. Rather, the meaning of Brett Morgen’s film arises out of his performative interaction between his own interpretation and reality. With Bruzzi, the sense and meaning of the documentary results in the negotiation between the filmmaker and reality. In this sense, Montage of Heck, and also 20,000 Days on Earth, show parallels to the performative reality of pop music culture, where the significance of stars, as the public embodiments of pop culture, is as much a negotiation between reality and cultural constitution. Montage of Heck approaches the topic of Cobain’s pop culture relevance and his dramatic biography in a highly artistic and aesthetically stylized manner, based on embodied and subjective forms of knowledge. Brett Morgen draws on a huge artistic license with which he interprets, or like Bruzzi would say negotiates, the different perspectives and the potential truth about Cobain. He arranges them to an integrated whole that finally constitutes the filmic argument. His multi-layered montage technique and the performative look and feel of the documentary generates a sensual and emotional access to the subject. Even though the single aesthetic elements, specifically the home videos and the interviews, claim to reveal and uncover unknown private facts, the documentary is to read in its overall presence as an artwork. Other aesthetic devices are very performative, like the animation part and the montage style. The film is a collage, just as Cobain’s musical project Montage of Heck, that he recorded on tapes in the 1980s, was one. Brett Morgen assembles the animation, the private amateurish home videos, media archive footage, concert recordings and the exclusive interviews to an aesthetic and sensual impression. Put together, all different aesthetic elements lead to the final argument of the documentary. Even though Cobain is pictured as a complex personality, and the film includes many details about his difficult emotional state and intimate longings, the documentary does not really break with the pop cultural myth about Kurt Cobain. A quick online research about Cobain does suffice to confirm that people and newspaper of our contemporary Western music culture are still keen on speculating about the reasons and circumstances about Cobain’s suicide. For more than twenty years, the rumors about him will not stop, and the documentary moves within the boundaries of this interest. The

56 close focus on the personality of Kurt Cobain results out of his significance as one of the most popular figureheads of grunge music and his status as an icon of pop culture. As the private and public parts of Cobain’s personality are represented as intertwined, and his drug abuse and suicide strongly connected to both his inner life and his public role, the documentary supports the myth about his romantic Rock’n’Roll decease and portraits him as the ever-young face of grunge, speaking for a generation that is longing for love, dissatisfied and unfitted to fulfill the expectations of the public, their families and society.

4. Conclusion

New music documentaries use performative aesthetics and creative strategies to treat the subject of pop music. Looking once more at Grierson’s popular definition of documentary as the „creative treatment of actuality“, contemporary music documentary films emphasize the aspect of creativity. As the two case analysis could show, the performative documentary mode is a suitable way to audio-visualize creative processes, artists identities, performance and the identification with pop culture. Concluding, this chapter will summarize the results of the two case studies of the music documentaries 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck. Furthermore, the results of this thesis will be be looked at in relation to the broader music documentary discourse of chapter 2, and the subject of performativity and performative documentary. Both of the exemplary analyzed music documentaries show forms of hybridity and are in the same time highly performative. 20,000 Days on Earth employs strongly performative, as well as less performative aesthetic strategies. One part of the film uses fictionalized enactment to create insight to the mind of the musician Nick Cave. In a first- person narrative, he represents himself to the viewer as the embodiment of a performing artist. By means of a highly poetic and creative self performance, he expresses his being as a public musician and celebrity, and creative personality. As this part of the documentary is highly fictionalized and tells an imaginative narrative, one can discover the specifics of music documentary as they were stated by Heinze (2016). There is no strict distinction between imagination and reality, or fiction and non-fiction in 20,000 Days on Earth. Nick Cave performs himself, and represents himself to the viewer as a full-time performing artist. He is one with his pop cultural, public identity as the musician Nick Cave. The fictionalized elements serve as a platform of artistic performance. The set up

57 scenes, the poetic voice-over monologue and mise-en-scène of 20,000 Days on Earth is not, as critics of the genre would propose, to understand as an element of brand promotion for Nick Cave. Rather, they are to see as aesthetic devices to audio-visualize and document the subjectives processes of songwriting, and the creative imagination and a popular, public identity. Thought with Bruzzi (2006), the documentary is visibly performative, as it is highly stylized and treats a performative subject. The meaning of the documentary is performed through the negotiation between the two filmmakers, functioning as the creative instance, who set the aesthetics of the documentary, and the performative reality of Nick Cave’s pop cultural identity, that is interpreted and given a certain meaning throughout the documentary process. Another part of 20,000 Days on Earth employs techniques that relate rather to the rockumentary genre. The recording process and live performances of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds music is represented in a perspective that is rather observing and captures reality unfold in actual situations. Here, the camera takes the perspective of a contemplating audience. By using these hybrid techniques, 20,000 Days on Earth can serve both the artists perspective on pop music performance, as well as that it can capture and transport the pop cultural perspective, which includes the live performance of pop music, and the pop cultural significance of the subject. In pop music, it is the performative moment, of either music or a pop cultural habitus, that constantly creates significance, identification, and relation between the performer and the audience (Kleiner 2013). Cobain: Montage of Heck likewise combines hybrid aesthetic strategies, of which some are performative and some rather traditional documentary techniques. Altogether, the documentary strongly features the authorial voice of filmmaker Brett Morgen. The predominating aesthetic is the multi-layered montage style that merges and overlaps interviews, concert recordings, home videos, journals, television footage, documents, photos, music, sound recordings and animation to an aesthetically arty, but nevertheless non-fictional collage. The style of the film refers to Kurt Cobain’s sound project Montage of Heck, which indicates the high relevance of creation and imagination in the context of pop music. The music documentary represents an aesthetic subject in an aestheticized manner. In Cobain: Montage of Heck, the private and the public image of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain coalesce. Clearly, the film seeks to reveal the reasons for Kurt Cobain’s suicide at age 27. Home videos create the impression of private insight, while animation enables to process Cobain’s subjective states of mind. Classical interviews provide the part of the narrative that reveals facts about the unmasked, private Kurt Cobain and his

58 personal issues. Elements of public media, like television and journal interviews, music videos and concert recordings represent the public relevance of Kurt Cobain and Nir- vana. Altogether, the final argument and meaning of the documentary is performed through the overall impression of Cobain: Montage of Heck as a collaged documentary. The striking rhythm and the multi-layered structure of the film reveal its constructedness and emphasize the role of Brett Morgen as the interpreting author. Referring back to Bruzzi again, this documentary is visibly performative as well. Other than in 20,000 Days on Earth, the moment of performance is not with the subject Kurt Cobain but with the „elaborate and ostentatiously inauthentic visual style“ (186), with which the documentary emphasizes its constructed nature as an interpretation and negotiation of reality. The pop cultural reality of Kurt Cobain, as the figurehead and icon of grunge and a hero for a whole pop generation, who got even more popular through his dramatic suicide, is represented as an artwork about Cobain in itself. The moment of music, creativity, media, performance and identification is not only inherent part of pop, but also becomes the aesthetic strategy of expression to the pop cultural documentary. Both results of the exemplary case analysis could show, that contemporary music documentaries use a multitude of aesthetic devices, stylizations and follow an approach of high artistic license. In many respects the aesthetic approach of the new music documentaries are comparable to the performative and aesthetic reality of the subject, the figures of pop music and their social context, itself. Briefly: performative filmic aesthetics are used to represent the performative aesthetics of pop in a documentary context. The approach of reality, knowledge and truth that new music documentary takes over, is con- sequently not factual and objective, but highly embodied, sensual and visceral. In this regard, music documentary appears to develop into a very performative documentary genre. Looking at the specifications by which Heinze (2016) defines music documentary, most of his points can be found in both examples. 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck show as loose handling of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Forsyth and Pollard make use of enactment, while Brett Morgen exploits a stylized montage technique that leads far away from a realistic documentary impression, although the content itself holds a revealing quality. Both films obviously are about the performative reality of pop and rock music and its social context and feature musicians, that act out their pop cultural habitus. In the case of Nick Cave, he is presenting himself and performing himself, while in the case of Kurt Cobain third people, media representation and archive footage complete this task. Therefore, only 20,000 Days on Earth could

59 show the double layer of performance, since he consciously acts as a performer in the documentary context, while the documentary about Kurt Cobain was made posthumously and the double performance is limited to the media excerpts, like television interviews or performances that are implemented into the narrative. Heinze’s last point refers to the special importance of the narrative of music documentary. The stories that are told deal with a cultural narrative, the pop cultural significance of a certain figure of pop music, in this cases Cobain and Cave, and their respective bands. Music documentaries do so in often subjective and performative ways, states Heinze, which could be clearly proven by both examples. Considered in reference to the performative documentary approach of Bruzzi, both music documentaries create meaning and significance by being creatively performed, just as pop music culture creates a cultural significance of the musicians and artists, as figureheads and communicators of the pop music scene. In both cases, performative acts evoke a reality on its own. At this point, this thesis wants to plead again for the relevance of music documentary in the whole documentary discourse. In no respect, these films only pursue promotional intentions or are justifiably to disregard as a genre of less documentary qualities or cinematic value. 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck are credible documentary works, that show how the performative documentary mode and a creative handling of aesthetics can create new and unconventional forms of documentary storytelling. Closing with Nichols, the representational quality of a documentary is to judge by „the nature of the pleasure it offers, the value of the insight it provides, and the quality of the perspective it instills“ (13). Without a forfeit of authenticity and truthfulness both films become, quite on the contrary, authentic historic documents of the similarly aesthetic and performative reality of contemporary pop music.

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• Winston „Introduction: The Documentary Film“ in The Documentary Film Book. edited by Brian Winston, Palsgrave Macmillan, London: 2013, pp. 1-32.

Filmography & Videography

• 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

• Cobain: Montage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

• Film4video. "20,000 Days On Earth Interview Special | Interview | Film4." YouTube.

YouTube, 15 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 May 2017.

Table of Figures

Fig. 1, „Intro sequence of 20,000 Days on Earth“ 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth &

Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 2, „Nick Cave in a conversation with Ray Winstone“ 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain

Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 3, „Nick Cave and sons Arthur and Earl watching a movie“ 20,000 Days on Earth.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

63 Fig. 4, „Nick Cave in a session with psychoanalyst Darian Leader“ 20,000 Days on

Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 5, „Nick Cave and Warren Ellis recording the album Push The Sky Away“ 20,000

Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 6, „Nick Cave performing live in London at the club KOKO“ 20,000 Days on Earth.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 7, „Match cut of and old (left) and new (right) Nick Cave performance“ 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard. Drafthouse Films, 2014. Film.

Fig. 8, „Kurt Cobain’s performance on Reading and Leeds Festival 1992" Cobain: Mon- tage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 9, „Bizarre home video of Cobain, Love and daughter Frances singing together“

Cobain: Montage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 10, „Close-up of a home video scene that shows Cobain and Love intimately kissing“ Cobain: Montage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 11, „Substitutive animation of Kurt Cobain recording his musical project Montage of

Heck“ Cobain: Montage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 12, „Animation of the the Nirvana album cover of Incesticide" Cobain: Montage of

Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 13, „Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl at a television interview for MTV“ Cobain: Montage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.

Fig. 14, „Kurt Cobain at the photo-shooting of Nirvana album Nevermind“ Cobain: Mon- tage of Heck. Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2015. Film.