No one can take away the label of rock star from Britain’s David Bowie, but reducing him to just that doesn’t do him justice. The documentary Moonage Daydreampremiered at Cannes, portrays with unpublished images a multifaceted artist, who constantly challenged himself.
Behind this ambitious purpose is the American filmmaker Brett Morgen, who first received authorization from Bowie’s estate and family and had access to some five million documents, including recordings, illustrations and diaries, which took him four years to filter, review a chronicle of Eph.
“I went into this with enormous respect for David as an artist and ended it with enormous respect for him as a man. He knew that he was an amazing musician and songwriter, but he had no idea that he was someone so extraordinary,” he told the journalist from Eph Marta Garde this Tuesday the also author of The Kid Stays in the Picture Y Kurt Cobain: Montage of Hell.
It is Bowie himself (1947-2016) who explains himself in this documentary. His interviews and his reflections serve to understand him as an artist and as a person and to see an evolution that he constantly embraced. “I am a collector of personalities”, he points out, and remembers that he liked to push himself to the limit and in uncomfortable situations to see how he would overcome them and not settle. His decision to move to Los Angeles, a city that he said he detested, is the result of that perennial search for challenges.
Few played with as many musical styles and with sexual ambiguity as he did, who nevertheless tended to downplay the readings made of his attire: when an interviewer asked him if the flashy shoes he was wearing were for men or women, he told him he replied that they were simply shoes.
Art was for him a kind of “therapy” that allowed him to give body to his visions and thoughts, and when one artistic expression ceased to interest him, he moved on to the next, delving into an exploration not only of music, but also of cinema, theater, painting or sculpture.
The documentary takes its name from her single “Moonage Daydream”, the third song from her album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972), in which he introduced “Ziggy Stardust”, his first major incarnation as a galactic character. “I didn’t want to expose myself to the public and I created a series of roles. Sometimes it got out of hand, ”acknowledges the artist in one of the collected interviews, television interventions where, instead of the strength that he exhibited on stage, he appears as someone humble and at times shy.
“He was always ahead of his time. He says in the movie that he was making up the 21st century in the year 71. We live in a world of chaos and he was creating that soundtrack. I think we’re entering the Bowie era now,” he notes. Eph the director of this film premiered out of competition at the 75th edition of Cannes, which closes on Saturday. It shows some stellar performances, the psychedelic imagery that permeated his video clips, his eclectic clothing, and the mantra that guided his career, willing not to deliver what people expected of him, but what he liked.
“I have had an incredible, fabulous life”, says the artist, a hit machine like “Let’s Dance”, “Heroes”, “Under Pressure”, “Rebel, Rebel” or “Life on Mars”, which according to Morgen have had a “huge” impact on your industry. Bowie, who died in New York at the age of 64 from a liver cancer that he kept secret and suffered from for 18 months before, was always attracted to those who moved outside the system and he himself said he had always done what he wanted.
“He did not lack anything, his life was very complete, but until he was aware that he was working too much, he did not open a part of himself to make room for love,” adds the director about his story with the Somali Iman, a model with whom he married in 1992 and with whom he had his daughter Alexandria.
Efe/Marta Garde/OnCuba.
