David Bowie: Rai 3 airs Brett Morgen's film “Moonage Daydream”, retracing his story

On Thursday, January 8th at 9:20 PM, Rai 3 will air “Moonage Daydream“, Brett Morgen's spectacular film retracing the life of David Bowie, to mark ten years since the London-born artist's death (January 10, 2016).

Trying to capture on film a personality as multifaceted, enigmatic and elusive by definition as David Bowie's was an almost impossible undertaking. Brett Morgen, already a veteran of the docu-music genre with the earlier "Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck" and "Crossfire Hurricane" (on the Rolling Stones), decided to take a radically different path: not a documentary, but an immersive experience, a journey (an interstellar one, of course) into the mind of "the Man Who Fell to Earth", of the man who was Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the neo-romantic pierrot of "Ashes To Ashes", the platinum-haired rocker of "Let's Dance", the cyber-industrial detective of "Outside" and a thousand other faces besides.

"Moonage Daydream" begins exactly like this: with an infiltration into the mind of the London-born artist. As if viewers had been implanted with the fateful chip from The Matrix in order to access the labyrinthine mental pathways of the Thin White Duke.

Starting with the opening double reflection: Bowie's voiceover cites Nietzsche's thoughts on the meaning of life ("All people, no matter who they are, hope to enjoy life more, but it's what you do in life that's important, not how long you have or what you wanted to do. Life is fantastic"), then, as the liquid, cosmic notes of "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir" (from "The Buddha Of Suburbia", 1993) drift by, he lingers on time, "one of the most complex expressions memory has ever made manifest, something poised between past and future, never quite fully present... You find yourself struggling to grasp that profound and formidable mystery. Everything is transient. Does it matter? Am I interested?". But before we can even begin to imagine an answer, we're catapulted onto a spaceship travelling at the speed of light, riding the hammering rhythms of "Hallo Spaceboy" (1995), eyes wide open at that kaleidoscope of sounds, images, colours and suggestions that will accompany us through the film's 140 minutes, studded with film frames, songs, live footage and fragments of interviews.

To untangle the web of five million rare and never-before-seen items, drawings, recordings, films and magazines he was able to access through the David Bowie Estate's collection, the Norwegian director made another clear-cut choice: to rely solely on the voice of his subject, dispensing with the usual roll call of testimonies from friends, family and colleagues that typically populates this kind of documentary. So while this sidesteps the hagiographic reconstruction-by-committee that often weighs down the genre, it also means staying faithfully anchored to a single point of view: Bowie's own. But what might seem an all-too-"orthodox" choice, one that toes the line - "Moonage Daydream" is also the only film officially endorsed by his estate - ends up instead becoming a source of countless doubts and contradictions. As many as those sown by the life of the author of "Changes" himself, a man who never hesitated to question his own convictions: from his musical approach, always free yet capable of sudden shifts in perspective, to his relationship with love, initially rejected and then wholeheartedly embraced in his happy union with supermodel Iman, whom he married in 1992.

It is Bowie, then, who guides Morgen's hand through the exploration of the many art forms he voraciously experimented with over the course of his life: music, film, dance, painting, sculpture, video and audio collage, screenwriting, acting and live theatre. The narrative is never linear (very few dates, no captions or credits), instead unfolding as an imaginative, experimental flow of free association, in keeping with that "fascination with an artistic language concerned with fragments and chaos" that the London dandy repeatedly claimed as his own.

We witness the relentless charge of a career played constantly on the attack, starting with the glam epic, which is given ample space here (after all, "Moonage Daydream" is also the title of one of the finest songs of that period), with the unfathomable Ziggy Stardust ready to dodge questions from more or less starchy British TV hosts (Dick Cavett, Russell Harty, Valerie Singleton, Mavis Nicholson, among others) with his arsenal of dazzling, enigmatic answers, especially those about his sexuality and his relationship with image. An androgynous alien with improbable make-up, used as a passe-partout to dismantle conventions and boundaries - including those of rock itself - through grandiloquent glam orchestrations and flaunted bisexuality (even in concert, with the memorable live scene of the "fellatio" performed on Mick Ronson's guitar). Then, after the boom in England - attested to also by the fans' idolatry (in fact the only voices heard here besides his own) - comes the period of a hated Los Angeles, incubator of urban ghosts and toxic residue, yet one that managed to "make him grow musically"; then the therapeutic landing in the Berlin of the trilogy with Brian Eno, where he could be reborn undisturbed because "nobody cared what you did", and the return to England (including a moving reappearance in Brixton after so many years), but also the great world tours of the 80s (Serious Moonlight, Glass Spider), when his embrace of the mainstream risked compromising his integrity to the point of a "Rock'n'Roll Suicide" (a track used, not by chance, at that very moment), followed by the arduous path of artistic reconstruction that would pass through the bold new gambles of the 90s ("Outside", "Earthling") and the plot twists that followed, right up to the artistic and spiritual testament of "Blackstar".

A two-hour-and-20-minute full immersion, whipped up by frenzied editing and relentlessly punctuated by music, with a full 48 songs: from "Space Oddity" to "Life On Mars?", from "Quicksand" to "Aladdin Sane", from "Word On A Wing" to "Modern Love", from "D.J." to "Ashes To Ashes", from "Heroes" to a stirring live "Warszawa" from the Isolar II tour with Carlos Alomar as bandleader (among the unreleased live footage is also the "The Jean Genie/Love Me Do" medley, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, during the final stop of the Ziggy Stardust tour). Tracks manipulated, deconstructed and blended into new mixes through a process that recalls the very cut-up technique of William Burroughs that Bowie used in the 70s to write his lyrics. With a star-studded team at work, including Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer and right-hand man, Oscar-winning sound mixer Paul Massey ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and David Giammarco ("Ford v. Ferrari"); the sound design team of John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone ("Bohemian Rhapsody"); and VFX producer Stefan Nadelman ("Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck").

"Moonage Daydream" plays very much like the film Bowie himself might have conceived and shot about his own life. The film of a man hungry for life, who claimed to have used himself as a canvas and to have ended every day of his time on earth thinking about what he had managed to receive and learn in those 24 hours. A waking dream through which to relive the "incredible life" of one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century culture and art.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google