THE FUTURE OF THE ROCKUMENTARY IS UNWRITTEN, BUT WILL IT BE DOWNLOADED OR DOWNGRADED? 

IAIN SHEDDEN LOOKS BACK. ARTWORK BY ANDREW WELDON

There’s a priceless moment in The Future is Unwritten, last year’s largely rewarding documentary by Julien Temple on the life and death of former Clash front man Joe Strummer. After many glowing, even gushing, tributes from assorted Strummer collaborators, family members, friends and devotees, including Bono and Clash guitarist Mick Jones, suddenly, there on screen, is A-lister Johnny Depp telling us in no uncertain terms how Strummer changed his life.

Fair enough too, since Depp has been known to pick up a guitar, except that the American actor is clearly taking time out from his role in Pirates of the Caribbean, dressed in buccaneer couture, complete with make-up.

I only discovered exactly what Depp was saying later, on DVD, because at the cinema screening the audience was laughing too loudly for him to be heard. This incident illustrates succinctly why the rockumentary, as it has come to be known, is a two-headed monster – popular almost solely on the basis of its subject matter; ripe for ridicule when it dares to take itself too seriously. Were it any different, This Is Spinal Tap and The Mighty Wind, two of the landmark spoofs on the rockumentary genre, could not have been made.

The release in April of Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s illuminating, if hardly groundbreaking, documentary on The Rolling Stones, came 30 years after his last stab at capturing the spirit of a rock’n’roll band, The Last Waltz. There are similarities in these two films, not least that Scorsese’s prime concern in each is to capture the respective concerts of The Band in 1976 and The Stones in 2007 in an original and engaging way. It’s the 30 years or so between them that sets them apart, and not just technologically.In the ‘70s, rock documentary was still a relatively new form, even for Scorsese, who had already tasted success with feature films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

Like The Last Waltz, which captures The Band’s final performance, Shine a Light is a warts-and-all – with real warts – exposé of a rock group in action. Its only problem is that it is far harder to impress, or express anything new, with a format that has been around since the ‘60s. Scorsese didn’t make a film about Green Day or My Chemical Romance or Panic At The Disco or The Wombats or The Presets.

He made a film about the most lauded rock’n’roll band in history, one that continues to fill stadiums and shows no sign of stopping. He could hardly go wrong in terms of turning his passion for the task into a commercial success. Scorsese is a fan and an expert at his craft and leaves no stone, forgive the pun, or camera unturned to achieve his goal. Cutting edge, however, Shine a Light is not.

There are thousands of good rockumentaries, but there are few great ones. Don’t Look Back, for example, DA Pennebaker’s 1967 fly-on-the-wall exposé of the folkie troubadour Bob Dylan remains a classic. Like much of Pennebaker’s work outside the musical sphere, it is journalism as well as entertainment. Dylan is the voice of American discontent stuck in a London hotel or on a British train or in a north of England dressing room at the start of his career.

He’s ripe, exotic, alien even, and Pennebaker’s camera milks every nuance without being intrusive. Other classics, such as I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Sam Jones’ 2002 exquisitely stark doco on the trials, malfunctions and ultimate triumph of American band Wilco, and Some Kind of Monster, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s painfully enjoyable dissection of Metallica (you couldn’t make it up) are successful because they don’t try too hard. They just let the drama of a band’s interaction unfold before the camera. It makes compulsive viewing, in a car crash kind of way.

Dig!, the 2004 film on The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre is similarly rewarding in the way the camera exposes some of its participants for what they are, rather than how they see themselves. Take several egos, add guitar and drums and one or two drug habits, and enjoy! Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing is a heart-warmingly honest view of a group overcoming the bitterness and bigotry in their own country due to their political convictions – and they’re funny with it. British film-maker Jonathan Demme, to his credit, takes a different approach. Both Stop Making Sense, his highly original concert film of Talking Heads in 1984 and his 2006 Neil Young film Heart of Gold, reveal the artist using a highly stylised approach.

One might assume from the popularity of such recent critical successes as Shine a Light and Heart of Gold that the rockumentary genre is secure. Probably, but it is likely its cultural significance will be undermined by technological forces and by a generational dissipation of the craft as a feature-length art form. The internet, podcasting, downloading... all are revolutionising how people consume music AND films.

Music in particular has never been so diverse, so accessible or so visually adaptable. That is a good thing. The chances of another film like Don’t Look Back having such a lasting impression, however, are as plausible as an amp that goes up to 11.

Iain Shedden is The Australian’s music writer. He can be seen with his band, The Jolt, in the seminal 1977 rockumentary, A Punk in London.

Andrew Weldon is a freelance cartoonist; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it