Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2012)

Ron Fricke's latest tone poem, Samsara, takes its name from a concept shared among Indian religions pertaining to life, death and rebirth. Its root in the constant change of the world fits the film's structure, which trades the focus of Fricke's own Baraka or Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy for a more free-associative collage of world imagery. Opening on jarring close-ups of a ritualistic dance performed by three little people, Samsara only gets more bewildering when it moves from this show to the eruption of a volcano and the cooling of lava.

Yet the titular idea also connotes a cyclical movement of life and rebirth, giving order to its vastness, and Samsara soon reveals its unifying theme to be that of various ordering properties. That opening dance, so bewildering as an introduction, soon becomes part of a larger tapestry of ritual, organization and routine of humanity in nature and urban development alike, and even those of the Earth. This explain the footage of the exploding magma and solidifying lava flows, a miniature cycle of destruction and reformation the planet has seen across hundreds of millions of years. Fricke even includes a near-bookend of Tibetan monks playing horns to wake their village, a sort of invocation and benediction that reflects the cycle of the film's loose subject matter and the organizing properties at work on all cultures.

Films like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka tended to frame their key juxtapositions in the imbalance between "primitive life," with its proximity to (and, therefore, its respect for) nature and urban soullessness, in which people severed their bonds to the Earth but constructed giant, false jungles in a subconscious attempt to remake that which they had lost. Why, as seen in this film, man now makes its own mountains and islands, creating nature for our convenience. Samsara still compares the tribal to the globalized, but rather that show them as diametrically opposed, it positions them as like creatures differentiated only by scale. Rituals for the former may have more individualistic, artful expression than the time-lapsed gridlock and ultra-processed artificiality of the latter, but they serve the same purpose. Besides, the world now has modernized to such an extent that even those in the remote regions of the world have not escaped aspects of change. Near the end of the film, several Africans are seen holding AK-47s incongruous to their tribal tattoos and lip disks until one considers how long such a sight has been (sadly) all too common on the continent and how new weaponry merely marks a new era in centuries-old conflict, not the breaking of long-standing peace.

True, Samsara does have its montages filled with disturbing images of post-industrial life, in which seemingly everything can be manufactured on an assembly line. One shot of what appears to be the entrance to an amusement park gradually fills with hundreds of people all wearing the same color shirt. Just as I began to wonder why people waiting to get into a theme park would have the same outfit, I realized with horror that this was the infamous EUPA factory city in China, and the long line of like-clothed people were the workers. One shot inside a vast factory in this compound (with assembly lines making everything from George Foreman Grills to clothes irons) stretches into the vanishing point. More shocking is the similarity of the developed world's food preparation to this mechanized assembly. Some kind of combine harvester sucks up chickens and propels them into boxes, while pugs are strung up and gutted on a conveyer. Meat gets processed back in an enormous plant in China, and the journey ends at a Sam's Club in America. To drive the point home, Fricke throws in a time-lapse shot of fat Americans wolfing down Burger King in a food court, the sped-up factory work reflected in the unthinking rote of our consumption of cheap, fast crap.

Yet if Samsara suggests, as usual, that modernized humans have gone too far in claiming the Earth, it also implies that the Earth has always claimed us right back. Winds blow desert sands into an abandoned house; eventually it will be completely swallowed into a dune. A library hit by Katrina has its wares soaked and scattered, with a book spine reading "The Village That Allah Forgot" highlighted among the refuse. An Aborigine's hair is formed into dreadlocks by what appears to be red clay, making the human being seem like the dirt and dust all humans eventually become. The recurring image of a Buddhist sand mandala being carefully crafted and, ultimately, destroyed serves as an obvious visualization of this idea.

In such moments, Samsara may be more didactic than its forbears. Fricke's attempts at levity—Muslim women in niqabs standing beside a men's underwear ad with stripped-down models; a montage linking the manufacture of sex dolls, eerily emotionless androids and bikini-clad women with plastered-on smiles in a dance competition—leave as sour a taste in the mouth as that which he documents. At its best, Samsara signals a bold new direction for this film format, one that breaks from the already loose, evocative style to explore an interlinking network of ideas, to make these films about the breadth of life more resemble the chaotic but connected structure of it. At its worst, this is a ham-fisted number that trades a visually sumptuous lesson on one theme for a visually sumptuous lecture on many. Samsara's greatest strength is its occasional ambiguity, seen best in the level of beauty afforded to its silent appraisals of the developed world that always seemed so ugly in the film's predecessors. Having failed to beat this encroaching modernity back, Fricke finally gives it its due. Those aforementioned factory shots have a beauty to them as much as the hand-crafted temples and monuments that make for such breathtaking views elsewhere. Besides, those who made those astonishing wonders of the ancient world were even more hopelessly shackled to their task than the criminally underpaid workers in EUPA today.

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2011)

For the first five minutes of The Arbor, I assumed that one of the two actresses appearing on-screen was the subject of the movie, Andrea Dunbar, the late UK playwright. But after they detailed the abuses and neglect they suffered in their dingy household, I was horrified to learn that the two characters (I'm not sure if that's the right word, as I'll explain shortly) were Dunbar's daughters, that the tyrannical specter of a drunken, uncaring mother, a stereotypical artistic motivator for the downtrodden yet ambitious, was the artist herself. That realization, even more so than the film's adventurous presentation, kept me riveted for the remaining 90 minutes.

Told through reenactments with actors lip-synching to taped interviews of relatives, neighbors and friends, The Arbor initially seems an arty take on the documentary, a cute gimmick to make the movie stand out among the pack. But Clio Barnard's film proves original not merely in its staging but in the structure of its drama. This is a biography, but one that explores the far-reaching consequences of Andrea's all too brief life and the social significance of her family story. Barnard reaches her death less than halfway into the film, leaving the remaining time to sift through the lives of those she left behind, in the process delving into the perpetuating cycle of the same social ills that Dunbar documented in her realist writing.

In fact, the film's central subject could easily be not Dunbar herself but her daughter, Lorraine (Manjinder Virk). Our first concept of Andrea comes not from the archival footage collected for the movie but in Lorraine's bitter recollections, memories of her mother's alcoholism and blindness to the sexual abuse the girl endured from relatives. We also hear the second daughter, Lisa (Christine Bottomley), chime in, her perspective more optimistic; where she defends Andrea, Lorraine flatly admits that there are some things her mother did she would never forgive. By starting with these conflicting takes, Barnard humanizes his kitchen-sink documentary even as he also sidesteps objective details for gruesome remembrances.

To get at Andrea's life, Barnard mixes the old footage of the real Andrea with acted-out selections of her plays, which drew heavily upon her life in run-down estates. These readings are brilliant, not merely for the staging, which draws upon Dunbar's style (constantly onlooking residents, stagey recreations like some car seats standing in for the full vehicle), but the sheer power of Dunbar's words. She wrote her first play, for which the film is named, at 15, but her gift for capturing the world around her was instantly evident. No line appears to exist between Dunbar's plays and her life, playing out the personal dramas of an alcoholic father, teen pregnancy and the aimlessness of ignored youth through the words that never managed to get Dunbar out of that life.

When the film shifts to focus chiefly on Lorraine after handling Dunbar's death from a brain hemorrhage at 29, one almost gets the sense that the film has restarted. Lorraine, who so deeply despises her mother for her alcoholism, torment and neglect (one can even view her death as the ultimate show of the latter), falls into a life that mirrors her mother's to a disturbing degree. Substance abuse, early motherhood, extreme neglect, all of these become traits for Lorraine just as they did her mother. Both mother and daughter met men who seemed so nice in company but turned into psychotics behind closed doors. But if Andrea carried around the scars from her father, Lorraine's issues are exacerbated by the isolation she felt has a mixed-race child in a racist community, prejudice endured even from her own mother. The real Lorraine speaks like a shellshocked veteran, and Virk conveys her hollow, haunted readings with facial language just animated enough to be heartbreaking in its resignation. Her story dips into unspeakable horrors, but Lorraine pushes on, so ravaged by them that she can no longer even express fear of them. But that tone also suggests an obliviousness to how much she shares with her hated mother, something Lisa subtly establishes in her own interviews.

Indeed, the role of perspective in this film is key. Youssef, the Pakistani who dates and impregnates Andrea, is so nice that even the racist community comes to somewhat accept him. Then, we hear of him trying to force her to get an abortion and considering ways to make her miscarry, and news of his physical abuse changes the view of this nice young man. But when he visits Lorraine one time and one time only, she is left with the memory of a pleasant day dancing in Middle Eastern clothes before returning to the prison of her mother's home. Lorraine speaks of her mother's scarring effects, but Lisa suggests that her sister misses their mom in some strange way, a naïve statement that nevertheless might hold some truth.

Barnard ties all this together with impeccable casting and direction. His camera glides with eerie precision over images of estate life, and at times The Arbor almost feels like a Resnais film. He links past and present with repeat shots that show the positive passage of time: littered fields of the past become cleaner, more communal areas in the present, while the scratched, hardwood stairs of the old Dunbar residence now has soft green carpet. The actors are so invested in their physical performances that I had to remind myself they weren't actually speaking the lines. The actors even insert tics, such as "Lorraine" averting her eyes slightly when she reaches her darkest confessions and "Ann," a kind neighbor who eventually becomes Lorraine's foster parent with her husband Steve, fiddling with a necklace.

A bleak movie, to be sure, The Arbor nevertheless finds hard-won determination in its accounts of personal and social abandonment. One can hear people light up in interviews when they remember acts of kindness that made everything better, even if just for a moment, and the graceful final shot shows community emerging from these areas of loner poverty. With the recent riots in England, uprisings of confused, angry teens at once directly responsible for their own actions and the products of social conditions, The Arbor is even more poignant: blame is exchanged, whether thrown at the system or amoral youths, but the film takes care to show that nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and even in its darkest moments, it always allows for hope.

The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights

I don't know that a weak documentary could be made about the White Stripes. It Might Get Loud, which boasted the presence of a certifiable guitar god and an alt.icon, was never more alive than when Jack White was front and center; heck, even Jimmy Page and The Edge seemed enthralled by his artistic approach, philosophy and passion. Under Great White Northern Lights, filmed during the band's first-ever Canadian tour in 2007, is as scattershot as any film focusing on such oddball characters as Jack and Meg White must be, but it is also a poignant document of what one critic called "the most fake band in the world and the most real band in the world," a pullquote Jack references with a mixture of bitterness and acquiescence.

The performances it captures are incendiary, energetic, and often hilarious. The film opens on the goofy debut of the Stripes in Canada with a self-explanatory "one-note show" that leaves fans hilariously chanting "One more note!" after the pair bangs out a chord and disappears with all the frenzy with which they arrived. For the rest of the film, they behave like a band struggling to get noticed, not multiple-Grammy winners and platinum sellers. By night, they are stars, filling theaters with fans who have been waiting years to see them. By day, however, they play town squares, classrooms, rec center, bowling alleys, a boat that makes the Orca look like a yacht, and anywhere where they can squeeze in a guitar, some drums and a microphone or two. These free side shows make the conquering schedule of every province and every territory more intimate and friendly than domineering, a means of making up for lost time and changing up the usual touring mode.

Emmett Malloy directs the film to the band's quirky white-black-red aesthetic, slipping between black-and-white film and color stock saturated in the red of the duo's gear and garb. A few stylistic flourishes fit his montage assembly of gigs, the visuals slurring through a jump cut as the songs skip around by both editing and the band's lightning-quick transitions, and he wryly captures the drives around Canada with good-natured banality and idyll. But the chilly calm of even the most remote province seems to shatter when the White Stripes arrive and set up in the nearest odd spot.

As they ride around with pleasant chauffeurs who don't always understand who these cats are, a portrait emerges of the band that both confirms and subverts their image. The love of traditional music bridges their focus on Delta blues with the music of an Inuit community center they visit. Jack likes to push the idea that he and Meg are siblings rather than a divorced couple, but damned if they don't behave like brother and sister. They tease each other, jovially bicker but always admire the other. In the film's finest moment (and its last), Jack plays "White Moon" on the piano for Meg, who sits on the stool with him fighting back tears as that high, broken voice of his growls out the lyrics.

That chemistry carries enough sweetness that the film is even more touching now that the White Stripes are, for the time being at least, no more. A few archival clips show the band at their inception, but Malloy wisely sticks to the present, showing the two celebrating their 10th anniversary by trying one last injection of spontaneity into a line of work that all too often feels like just that. Though it neither breaks any rules nor expands any horizons, Under Great White Northern Lights is a funny, touching, revelatory work that probes into one of this fashionably unfashionable outfit and the impact it had on those looking for something different.

The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)

Forough Farrokhzad, generally regarded as the greatest Persian poet of the 20th century, made her first film in 1963. It proved her last; she died four years later. Yet the movie in question, a 22-minute documentary made to increase awareness of leprosy in Iran, prefigures not only the essay film but seemingly the whole of the Iranian New Wave. "There is no shortage of ugliness in the world," says the male narrator who opens the film before Farrokhzad takes over the reading. "If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more."

The House is Black certainly contains "ugliness," featuring shots of diseased colony residents in various states of physical decay, but Farrokhzad never turns away from these people. Just as important, she does not look upon them pityingly, either. The film, in black-and-white with bright frames from the desert sun, uses subtitles without outlines, making reading them practically impossible. Throughout the film, she reads from the Old Testament, the Koran and her own poetry, the words so haunting, grim yet hopeful that I downloaded a copy of the subtitles to read along with the YouTube video. However, I could have gotten by without them: this is a film told with such simple visual grace it's no wonder one of the world's great modern art movements practically sprang out of it.

Farrokhzad breaks the documentary feel of the film almost immediately, using a montage technique of repeated shots and close-ups of objects in addition to the people of the colony. The stark realism of it all reflects the style of Iranian cinema, but so do the blatantly "cinematized" edits. In basic but pure form, poetry and realism mingle.

Furthermore, by repeating shots of people, the director removes the initially repellent nature of the lepers' afflictions. At first glance, we might recoil at the man whose skin has wrinkled and loosened to the point that he looks as if wearing a papier-mâché mask, but through seeing him again and again amid new and other recycled shots, he becomes more natural, more expected.

By opening with poetic and Biblical thoughts first before going over a medical, documentarian explanation of the disease and how it afflicts people, Farrokhzad messes with convetion and encourages participation and study of these people instead of simply accepting this as a clinical study for classrooms. Philosophical thoughts might make for a heady movie instead of a blunt one, but the director knows emotion and peers into the pan-religious spiritual element that binds these people, unearthing human bonds in their noblest forms.

At first, the prayer she films children reciting, seems ironic: they thank God for all their body parts that allow them to interact with the world, body parts literally crumbling and imploding on their faces, hands and feet. Farrokhzad even asks "Who is this in hell praising you, O Lord?" wondering how they can be grateful for things that will fall off them before long. Later in the film, a teacher asks a student, "Why should we thank God for having a father and mother? You answer." The boy hesitates slightly and bashfully replies, "I don't know. I have neither."

However, Farrokhzad soon demonstrates the power of gratitude and some belief in shaping positive lives for those stuck in this colony. We see a genuine community, with children rough-housing, adults laughing and chatting and people largely working in harmony to make a pleasant life out of a bad situation. There's even a wedding between lepers, an event that brings out everyone in town—or Farrokhzad makes to look like everyone in town through montage, anyway—in congratulations and celebration.

In the medical segment of the film, the official, male voice notes that leprosy is not incurable, and that proper care can not only prevent the spread of the disease but even heal those suffering from it. With her poetic eye and voice, Farrokhzad frames the colony as a microcosm for human interaction as a web of emotional and physical support, capturing the ugliness and beauty of the human condition through a neglected group suffering from an arcane disease eradicated in so many other areas of the world. By turning her lens to these people, Farrokhzad finds not only proof of how far we still have to come to make this a better, healthier world but a model for a more ethical one too.

Some Kind of Monster

Some Kind of Monster is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. That so many Metallica fans hate it, hate it, only cements its impact. It is one of the most viciously anti-romantic films ever made about a person or group considered heroes and legends by millions. Metallica has a reputation for being one of the hardest (and hardest partying) bands around, yet the movie shows essentially one long group therapy session, with a liberal dose of midlife crisis sprinkled in for spice. Anyone hoping to see "Alcoholica" destroying hotel rooms and using blocks of heroin as pillows found what may be the event horizon of metal, an inescapable force of gravity sucking in the last bit of fury from the '80s into the void.

Hammering home how much the band has changed, the film opens with the crushing news of Jason Newsted's departure from the band and, perhaps more devastatingly, the band convenes in a Ritz-Carlton to discuss the new album with a management-hired therapist leading the chat of the personal quibbles and hangups tearing at the band. The band wants their next album to sound like a return to raw, aggressive playing, a subtle outgrowth of their desire to prove to outraged fans that the Napster episode did not demonstrate the band fully abandoning their fiery side. If they can just make something to tap back into Kill 'Em All, all will be forgiven.

Yet the transparency of the act is astonishing. The band insists on not going to the same old studio and cranking out one of their increasingly standard, hard rock album, yet they end up going to the Presidio in San Francisco, the idyllic setting wholly at odds with the basement tapes feel they want to create. Then again, the setting is the least of worries, as the band soon collapses into inaction, bickering and tedious hand-wringing over which direction they should head toward to regain their spot at the top. The band is situated between two extremes: run back to the well and hope the fans disregard every slip-up (which is a safe bet in the world of metal), or try to stay "current" and cater to the then-explosive nü-metal fad. Anyone who has listened to St. Anger knows which decision won out.

Some Kind of Monster does not quite fit into the Spinal Tap mode that has become expected of any profile of a hard rocking outfit, but it contains its own set of cringe-inducing dark humor. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich argue like an old married couple, and poor Kirk Hammet sits between them always trying to diffuse the situation, the young child who just wants to get through one dinner, just one, without mommy and daddy going at it. James has become so used to getting his way as the frontman of Metallica that his life spirals out of control: he up and goes to Russia on a hunting trip and misses his son's first birthday. The producer, Bob Rock, looks as if he wants to quit at every second to go make the same money without all the hassle elsewhere. Family commitments become horrid reminders of how much these men have mellowed, and even their hobbies (Kirk's surfing, James' vehicle collecting, Lars' land-buying) come off as the sort of things middle-aged men do to feel cool.

And then there's the therapy itself. The "therapist" (actually a "performance-enhancing coach," a terminology that recalls steroid use, which might explain the scrotum-tightening rage he produces whenever on-screen) is a complete charlatan. Armed with a collection of shirts he rescued from a burning souvenir shop in Disney's Polynesian Resort, Towle is a huckster, not seeking to help the band so much as manipulating their stress to ingratiate himself among them and reap the benefits. One look at this asshole and you just know that, had someone documented the band during their '80s heyday, he'd have been one of the faux-psychologists on Oprah or Donahue talking about how this music was polluting young minds and that the answers for how to protect the children could be found in this book he's conveniently written. At one point, he actually suggests lyrics to the band members. Never mind that the final lyrics of St. Anger sounds as if the band cribbed them from freshman-year diaries littered with doodles of the English teacher being decapitated by a dragon summoned by Ronnie James Dio; this is such a massive breach of ethics, morality and, frankly, sanity that someone should have pushed him out immediately.

Yet, in a strange way, Towle largely succeeds in reuniting them, precisely because they all rally around hating him. As the band becomes aware of Towle's BS, they grow resentful of his presence, and one of the funniest moments of the film comes when James says, without a trace of irony, “I think Phil is under the impression that he's actually in the band.” Maybe that's Phil's ingenious plan: be so cloying and ridiculous that people at each other's throats dispel their anger at the third party, but considering how incompetent and useless he is as he dispenses trite advice, I'm disinclined to believe that theory.

More than fictive films, documentaries tend to be memorable through individual moments over the overall story (though that's important too, of course), and Some Kind of Monster has moments to spare. After the Napster fallout, the band is wary of anything that might make them look like sellouts, but the label strikes a deal with radio companies to have the band record promos for some asinine contest. However, this cynical marketing helps the band, as they push the image of their lavish homes and huge tracts of land out of mind to sarcastically ruin each take, tapping into their goofy younger mood and making them a group of kids again instead of 40-somethings mired in arguments. Then there's Lars' dad, an amazing old man with a beard down to his navel and the direct tone of English spoken through a Dutch accent. Torben is so deadpan it hurts, and when Lars lets him listen to what the band has put together so far, his pacing suggests he's more terrified of what Torben will say than anyone. As the rambling warble comes to a close, Torben strokes his beard and solemnly intones, "DELETE THAT." Torben! The best. Just the way he says it, like the proclamation of a Norse god through the calm, detached avatar of Werner Herzog, is so devastating and funny. If a storm ever manages to breach the Dutch levee system, it must be retroactively named Hurricane Torben.

As James and Lars tear at each other, the others begin to show the strain of dealing with this for years. Long-suffering Kirk patiently deals with the bickering, but when Hetfield and Ulrich decide to leave solos off the album in a transparent attempt to fight back into the mainstream trends of the day, Kirk can stay silent no more. He accurately claims that leaving off solos does not prevent dating the record to the past: it only cements the band in an ephemeral present. When the filmmakers interview Jason, his measured, relieved tone cannot disguise the lingering resentment for not being accepted as a true member of the band.

Neither can compare, however, to Dave Mustaine, that tragic figure. Twenty years on from being ejected from Metallica just prior to the band recording their first album for substance abuse, Mustaine still cannot see the impressive career he carved outside the group. Sitting down with Lars while James is away in rehab, Mustaine makes painfully clear why he cannot let it go. It is not simply a matter of being angry for being fired. Dave then spent the next 20 years watching Metallica conquer the world while Megadeth, celebrated as they were (and are, far more consistently these days than 'Tallica), always played second fiddle. Sheila O'Malley calls him Shakespearean, and that's an apt description. He actually refers to himself as a failure, though thousands would call him a legend, all because he missed his shot to make it with his friends, who became his bitterest foes (the feud continued for years after this movie and was, in fact, prolonged in part because of it, though all now seems to be well at last). I am never emotionally prepared for the moment where Mustaine quietly says he misses "my Danish friend."

The greatest aspect of documentaries and reality television is the manner in which directors and editors must make drama out of spontaneity. Even if reality TV is scripted or a documentary subject is playing to the camera, there is still a degree of the unknown far greater than that of a regular film. For example, I believe the editing on Jersey Shore is something of a masterpiece, a series of consistently hilarious juxtapositions that know exactly the right facial expression to use in a reaction shot and how to make the inherent, sleazy absurdity of the program all the wilder. The filmmakers here achieve a similar degree of inventive comedy, finding just the right shot or quote to puncture the ballooning self-loathing and let the bilious self-awareness spill out.

Without question, the funniest of these examples comes when Robert Trujillo attends his first meeting as a member of Metallica. Trujillo, the clear front-runner among some massively talented competition (I was particularly surprised/pleased to see Scott Reeder, one of the most underrated bassists working, trying out), is ecstatic. The band briefly discussed looking for someone their age, and though Trujillo technically fits that criterion, his youthful vivacity is a blast of fresh air in the jaded airing of grievances seen throughout. If someone had pulled him aside during the audition and asked how badly he wanted the gig, he'd almost certainly have said he was just glad to be in the same room as these guys, and he'd be totally sincere.

Which is why it is so achingly funny when he gets the gig and shows up to a meeting. I was talking on Twitter about the movie with Sheila, who is also a fan of the film, and we both laughed over this scene. Trujillo is overwhelmed: not only is he joining one of the bands that set the standard in his youth, that band also goes by the nickname Alcoholica. God knows what he's fantasizing about when he walks in that room. (My personal belief, as I related to Sheila, is that somewhere in his head he was strapping on skis to slalom around hookers down a mountain of blow.) He has it MADE. And then, James Hetfield starts pouring out his soul. He comes to the point of tears as he talks about how much he doesn't want to face the idea of working without his friends. And the cameraman, that blessed, ingenious cameraman, just moves onto a shot of Trujillo not making a sound. He thought he was going to be in one of the baddest bands of all time, and he showed up for some form of platonic marriage counseling. I have laughed harder and more consistently at that one shot than the totality of nearly every comedy I've seen in the last decade. It is perfect.

Complete with well-assembled archived footage -- just compare those dorky, teenage versions of James and Lars headbanging at Lars' house with the multimillionaires of the present -- and excellently shot concert footage, Some Kind of Monster does not seek to undermine the image of a legendary band but honestly deals with issues most headbangers would prefer not to confront. The first few times I watched the film, I cringed whenever James or Lars' children would come to the studio, because they just deflated the men, who stopped screaming and thrashing to listen patiently to toddler speak and make their own noises for the kids' amusement. Only recently did it even occur to me what a horrible reaction this was: why was I so angry at children for, basically, existing? They represent the band getting older and having to shift their lives. We all have to do it, and so do artists. While Ulrich may have a huge collection of art he can sell on a whim for millions of dollars with which to buy other works of art or Kirk can get himself a nice ranch, their mellower attitude does not mean they've sold out. We all like adults who are big kids, but everyone has to act like an adult at some point.

Near the end of the film, Metallica plays a gig at San Quentin, and Hetfield gives a brief speech to the inmates. "There's a lot of misspent anger that has come out sideways for a lot of people. Including yourselves. And if I hadn't had music in my life, it's quite possible I could be in here, or not even in here, be dead. And I'd much rather be alive." He doesn't chastise them, doesn't preach. Most importantly, he recognizes that any of them are harder than he or Metallica could ever be, so he just gets something off his chest and gets back to entertaining, and the crowd eats it up.

By the time Some Kind of Monster comes to a close, you'll be hard-pressed to look upon the quartet as bad-ass partiers ever again. Yet the band does not completely tarnish themselves with the level of access they allowed the filmmakers. Whatever happens behind the scenes, hell, whatever happens on each new record (at the time, new Metallica generally brought only more grumbling, an issue not rectified until Death Magnetic), none of it matters on the stage. Even now, when Metallica takes the stage, they give a goddamn show, and by ending on a concert, Some Kind of Monster reminds the audience why they fell in love with Metallica in the first place, and why no personal action by one or some of the band members can ever stop a tour from selling out. These guys have to play, and when they get on-stage, they only have time for the performance, not for the baggage. That they can still mop the floor with lesser bands shows that nothing can ultimately keep these guys down.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

The question of whether Exit Through the Gift Shop is nothing more than street artist Banksy's double-bluff, as with all such matters, strikes me as one not worth answering, or at least not if it means wracking one's brain in an attempt to look beyond the movie instead of just taking in the actual product. Besides, the answer is obviously "yes", or "yes, but..." Kind-of, sort-of the outgrowth of one man's attempt to document Banksy, among many other street artists, Exit Through the Gift Shop gets flipped on its head, so that the subject becomes the uncredited director and the erstwhile filmmaker becomes the subject.

Frankly, that's as it should be. The man at the center of Banksy's film, Thierry Guetta, is such a card that his open-faced innocence and charm beat out Banksy's carefully maintained mystery and iconography. We meet Guetta as a man making it in Los Angeles by buying up vintage clothes for $50 an item and adding a few measly touches to pass them off as "designer" wear for 10, even 1,000, times the cost. It's not that he's evil or greedy, just someone who casually tinkered with a piece of clothing until the trendy came along and threw money at the man (would you say no?). His continuation of this con amounts to a subtle form of pranksterism, something that makes the transition into the next stage of his life more understandable.

On holiday back in France, Guetta reunites with his cousin, who now goes by the name Space Invader and, sure enough, spends his time designing stickers based on the characters from his nom de plume and throwing them on walls, signs and bridges all around Paris. Suddenly, Guetta is exposed to the underground world of street art, and he's hooked.

Always armed with a camera, Guetta documented his boutique in L.A. constantly -- much to the chagrin of nearby celebrities who understandably mistake his innately curious nature for paparazzi-esque -- but he faces even more backlash for trying to film people who could be charged for vandalism. In some of his earliest recorded footage of following around street artists, we can see Guetta's amateur mistakes, especially his penchant for turning on the camera's light to get a better shot, in the process illuminating the heretofore inconspicuous artist.

And yet, Guetta presses on in his filming, and even when the weeks turn into months and years and more of the artists he trails question why he keeps filming, they allow him to keep doing so. Thierry has a strange charisma, a man who is both stupider and far more intelligent than he looks. He is a pathological liar, never doing so out of malice but simply to avoid trouble, and his ability to diffuse tension works equally well with authorities as it does his reluctant subjects.

This first half of the film, focused primarily on Guetta and the thousands of hours of footage he collected over the years, makes for the most revealing work ever made on street art. Guetta is like an art critic in the classic sense, not simply discussing the scene but living it. If the artists -- caught between flattery and trepidation of the increased attention Thierry brings -- could afford to gain full notoriety, he'd probably go the next step and promote them as much as he could. Watching clips of Guetta's gathered tapes, it's impossible to view what these people do as mere graffiti: this is daring, often political and utterly beautiful. The sheer range of expression captured is enormous, from a man who paints the outlines of objects shadows to giant posters with satirical intent being erected on buildings. Had it continued in this vein, Exit Through the Gift Shop might have been one of my favorite films of the year.

Then, Banksy comes into the picture. The most infamous and elusive of London's street artists, Banksy comes to Los Angeles, only to get stuck without his usual guide, who fails to gain entry into the country. Artists recommend Guetta, who had tried and failed to meet Banksy, since he knows where all the taggable walls are. After spending some time with the odd Frenchman, even Banksy is rendered powerless to resist him, and he allows Thierry to come back to London and film him. Banksy's entourage is stunned.

Banksy's emergence slows the film to a crawl, replacing the bouncing nature of Guetta's purposeless but devoted charting of the underground to Banksy's manipulation of him as a complex piece of commentary. Banksy is genuinely impressed by Guetta's knack for avoiding trouble -- Banksy makes a detour to Disneyland where he sets up a dummy of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride, and Guetta gets detained by security but somehow manages to hide film in his socks, alert Banksy that the jig is up, and get released without issue -- but he also realizes that the film the Frenchman claims to be making will be a load of crap.

When Banksy's L.A. exhibition causes a sensation and capitalizes the movement, he starts molding Guetta into a street artist in his own right. It is Guetta who comes up with his new persona, Mr. Brainwash, and Guetta who shrewdly sets the hype machine spinning until all of Los Angeles cannot stop talking about this new artist, but it is Banksy who knows the ultimate goal. Clearly, Mr. Brainwash's rise to succès signifies the changing nature of street art and how quickly the mainstream is adopting it, but so what?

The film, like Banksy's art, is provocative and smart but also carries the feeling of being incomplete, as if the final punchline will always be in the next painting. In his talking head, Banksy silhouettes himself and masks his voice, and you get the idea that he does this not to hide from cops but his fans who undermine his committed but naïve views on the purity of his art. As he spends the entire second half ensuring he extends that mystery, he winds up stretching himself too thin. By standing back and letting Guetta have his moment, he proves how easy it is to create a stir in the increasingly gossipy art world, but at the end of the day, he's still a commodity.

I'm torn on the film. It's second half is nothing but the lead up to a joke, but that joke kills: watching yuppies line up in excitement to buy something a magazine told them was cool sight unseen is hysterical, and their pretentious opinions on the art being exhibited had me in tears. But the loss of momentum and the sudden feeling of pointlessness that set in distracted me from what had been fascination with the movie's look into street art culture. I came away from Exit Through the Gift Shop with a renewed interest in the practice of urban art, but I was also frustrated by Banksy constantly undercutting his own gag. Having just watched the documentary on Joan Rivers, I was struck by how seriously she took comedy as she meticulously categorized her jokes into file cabinets. But at least she allowed herself a chuckle at the situation. Banksy, performance artist as much as painter, is bound to be the straight man in a solo act. Maybe he saw Guetta as his double, his Costello, but when Thierry's prank swells even beyond the realms of the satire Banksy intended, I got the nagging suspicion that maybe this time, the joke was on him.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

It's a shame that my generation's knowledge of Joan Rivers generally extends no further than her involvement with red carpet shows -- "Can we talk?" and "Who are you wearing" ensconced in the public vernacular -- and the endless plastic surgery jokes made at her expense. For anyone willing to even lightly peruse archives of her stand-up will find one of the sharpest minds in the field, a comic so ahead of the curve that she still comes off confrontational long after other Tonight Show favorites like Don Rickles have become parodies of themselves. The distinction between Rickles and Rivers is that everyone else is trying to make a joke out of Joan, but she always hits back the haters with something far wittier.

Joan Rivers, A Piece of Work was made by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, who previously directed the Darfur documentary The Devil Came on Horseback and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (about a man falsely imprisoned for 20 years for a rape/murder), and it surprisingly stands in the company of those hard-hitting and bleak looks at the world. Charting a year in the life of the then-75-year-old comedienne, the film spotlights Rivers' state of flux between being a respected icon and being a cast-off in the perpetual motion youth machine that is show business. In the first few minutes, she goes over her schedule and holds up a blank planner, calling it her worst nightmare. For someone who might still seem ubiquitous through all her awards coverage, Rivers struggles to hang on as she works the same nightclubs she performed in before Johnny Carson launched her career.

Unlike some of her contemporaries, Rivers isn't cashing in on nostalgia. She doesn't enjoy showbiz tenure in Vegas, doesn't have a trove of DVDs and CDs to re-release all the time. She agrees to anything that comes her way to keep her in the spotlight. She knows she's selling her soul for Celebrity Apprentice and those awful perversions of old Friar's Club roasts that have turned personal and honorific jokes into a parade of half-talented hacks finding ways to tell the same three jokes. But how else to pay for her opulent lifestyle, or her generosity toward her staff and especially their children? (Reference is made to her putting the kids of her staff through private school, at least a $100,000 investment per child just to get them to the collegiate level.) She and her manager joke about the gaps in her schedule when she isn't jumping at something, anything, but they seem to laugh that they may not cry.

Rivers' comic style has always been candid, and she's nothing if not frank here. On her plastic surgery, she speaks of the industry's hatred of age and the hypocrisy of those same people turning around and mocking her for taking measures to maintain that youth. The tutting and clucking of tongues is the most rank, sexist bullshit you can imagine, and one can plainly see that insulting someone's modified looks hardly helps someone who got the surgery in the first place over insecurity over looks. In old clips of her talk show performances, Joan pokes fun at her appearance, but when the filmmakers return to the present and Rivers casually says in the middle of makeup that no man ever told her she was beautiful, we get a piercing, off-the-cuff insight into the pain that motivates her humor.

For 84 minutes, Rivers takes us into similarly revealing territory. She speaks of the poisoning of her relationship with Carson, destroyed when she parlayed her frequent guest hosting gigs on the Tonight Show into a competing talk program on Fox. That show cost her Johnny, and her husband, driven so mad by executives' manipulation that he committed suicide and left Joan and Melissa with massive debts. We learn she cares more for acting than comedy, having gotten into stand-up to pay the bills while she tried to launch her acting career -- making her perhaps the only person to try stand-up to make money. But once Carson told her she'd be a star, she threw herself into the business, and she shows the directors a wall of file cabinets in her home containing cards with jokes written on them arranged by alphabetized subjects -- "My Sex Life" sits nearby "No Self-Worth." Fearful of the younger comics with their hidden writers, Rivers fills these shelves with cards, a one-woman writing staff cataloging bits as if preparing for the talk show she no longer has.

Though it never dips into Spinal Tap territory, A Piece of Work does offer a stark look at the entertainment industry when a star enters late age. Rivers voices her disdain for hearing she's a legend or that she's opened doors because that's what one says of the dead and retired. She is invited to perform at the Kennedy Center tribute for George Carlin, and she rightly notes that Carlin would have despised the whole thing, and that the Establishment praises him in death as the final insult and dismantling of his power. Flanked by comics who, for the most part, barely knew him, Rivers feels the pain of the event and its meaning more than anyone. But, once again, she goes on anyway, disgusted by the spectacle yet perversely honored that she was considered. If she doesn't go, they'll be doing this same, eulogistic ceremony for her next year and she'll still be alive.

And yet, she soldiers on, still grateful for every fan, still primed for every gig. The Celebrity Apprentice and Comedy Central Roast gambles pay off: Rivers gets back in the spotlight, but she's too much of a professional to wallow in it. She gets more gigs, endless appearances, off them, and suddenly people can still see how fiery she is. Like another examination of dedication in the face of adversity, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, A Piece of Work may be depressing, but it's ultimately uplifting. Through all her hardships, Joan never gives up, and she still has the drive. She's abrasive but unfailingly kind, and if she insulted you on the street, it's only because that's how you rib a friend. Her blend of vulgarity and grandmotherly care can be seen when a Hellen Keller joke inspires the rage of a heckler with a deaf son. She berates him into silence but clearly feels bad, and when other fans come to her after the show for autographs and slam him, she quietly says, "But he does have a deaf son." It's the clearest display of how Rivers has evolved these 40 years in the limelight, both as a performer attempting to stay fresh and as a person who clings to all the family she has left. Throughout the movie, Joan Rivers insists she's not through yet and still has something to say. By the end, you'll realize she doesn't need to keep making the point. She makes it every time she goes on stage.

Until the Light Takes Us

On the surface, Until the Light Takes Us seems a film tailor-made for people like me: curious about the Norwegian black metal scene that caused a media frenzy, and even open to some of the bands to emerge from the surprisingly complex evolution of a sound initially defined with a rigorous set of aesthetic and social codes. Unfortunately, the movie never gets off the ground, and not even the low budget can excuse some of the rampant amateurism of the production.

Directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, compared to someone like Sam Dunn, seem less devoted metalheads thirsting for the full story than curious hipsters who heard some such about a church burning or two and decided to look into it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but Until the Light Takes Us never focuses on anything but the scandal, and its fleeting moments of insight come off as spontaneous, unplanned moments instead of something actively sought by the filmmakers.

Most of the film revolves around the commentary of two main subjects: Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell of the band Darkthrone and the legendary Varg Vikernes, he of Mayhem and Burzum fame. The directors establish them as foils: both were among the genres progenitors, but Vikernes helped nurse the public image until it spiraled out of control (largely thanks to him), while Fenriz, somewhat wistfully, only cared about the music. These are essentially the only two points of view presented in the film, and the directors ensure that what few sources they get to fill out their 90 minutes tend to fit on Vikernes' side of things, only without his retrospective clarity.

If your only interest in black metal concerns the church burnings, well, this might be the movie for you. Until the Light Takes Us makes sure to include endless montages of blazing cathedrals and concerned, stuffy Norwegian presenters gravely speaking about the black metal scene in old newscasts. Though most of the arson was limited to a set period in the early '90s, Aites and Ewell find a way to keep coming back to these montages, littering the film with them ad nauseam.

For those who actually wanted to hear something about the music, however, the film offers few nuggets. The talking heads discuss Helvete, the record store opened by Mayhem's guitarist Euronymous that became the epicenter for Oslo's nascent extreme metal scene, but they never discuss what the place really meant for people. The only time anyone does something of the sort is in a brief mention of Emperor's original drummer Faust, who came to Oslo from the Norwegian boonies as a teenager and found somewhere he belonged; then, one of his old friends changes the subject to focus on Faust's murder of a gay man back in his hometown, not to shed light on anything but to speak approvingly of the slaying.

Where is the discussion about black metal's growth? Bathory hardly rates a mention, and non-Norwegian groups like proto-black metal band Celtic Frost and modern masters Agalloch are nowhere to be found, nor is any talk, good or bad, included about semi-mainstream BM group Cradle of Filth. Even some magnificent, forward-thinking Norwegian bands like Arcturus and In the Woods... are cast aside. No effort is made to talk about some of the striking art related to the genre -- the inventive way bands stylize their logos alone should have been a minor focus -- the difference between traditional, death and thrash-influence black metal and the more symphonic, progressive sound pioneered by groups like Emperor. Even the considerable evolution of both Fenriz and Varg's groups are downplayed, mentioned primarily in each of the old, estranged friends' passive-aggressive put-downs of the other (Fenriz mocks the electronic doodling added to some black metal bands, bands like Burzum; Varg all but outright accuses Fenriz of selling out).

Only the intriguing quality of the main participants saves this film from total failure. I was surprised, considering how scandal-hungry the directors are, that they never once touched upon the anti-Semitic and racist Vikernes espoused when in prison. They do, however, tackle the reason why they are sitting in a (quite cozy, it must be said) prison talking to Varg, and the musician is forthright, if still self-justifying, about the arson and murder that landed him in jail. With the benefit of hindsight, his bitterness over taking credit for various church burnings just to piss off the teenagers and rival bands who did them to impress him is tempered by a realization that one shouldn't state in print that one committed a crime, or even leave open a hint that could bring investigation. About the murder of his Mayhem bandmate Euronymous, Varg sticks to his self-defense line but at last admits paranoid thoughts he should have considered. Still, he lightly chuckles at the idea, as if remembering some embarrassing moment from childhood and not the grisly stabbing death of one of his friends. Yet the filmmakers do not press him on this, apparently failing to understand the difference between being hostile and simply asking tough questions.

Luckily for the audience, Varg is so interesting he shines in spite of the hollowness of much of his words. He attributes the black metal philosophy to a reaction against Americanization and the loss of cultural identity in a liberal, globalized Norway that had already lost much of its past from Christian purges, but he also voices disgust with those who insisted black metal had to be tied to Satan. He comes across as one of the nicest, most polite white supremacists you'll ever meet, and it's difficult to reconcile how charming he is in these interviews with the dark nature of his past and the abhorrent views he continues to voice everywhere but in these facile 90 minutes. Fenriz, too, is a soft soul: the first shot of the film depicts the crew setting up the lighting for his interview, and he comes off as polite and a bit shy, smiling sheepishly as the crew prepares around him. He even whistles a bit.

Both Fenriz and Varg ultimately paint themselves as bright but alienated young men who reacted against society for not fitting into it. As Norway is one of the most liberal places on Earth, the solution they found was extreme and reactionary: if liberalism bred a conformity of its own, all the better to simply be authoritarian and violent. If one must conform, at least make it interesting. The best moment of the film involves Fenriz, in his halting English, explaining his outlook by bring up his least favorite artist, Frida Kahlo. Even though he hates her, Fenriz marvels that Frida and other Latin American painters, all of whom operated under oppressive regimes and exploitative American policies, used vibrant colors in their paintings. When one looks at art from liberal Scandinavia, however, there is a starkness, be it in Norwegian black metal or in the films of the Swede Ingmar Bergman. Artists, the discontent members of society, paint that which they see but is not before their eyes.

Another highlight involves the differing reactions to black metal's entry into the public consciousness. In Stockholm, Fenriz walks around an art gallery featuring photographs from the black metal scene and art inspired by it.* Though the less political of the two primary talking heads, Fenriz nearly has a physical reaction to seeing his past commodified and confirmed to be trend. He quivers with suppressed rage and disgust, and when he tries to be polite and shake the curator's hand, for a split second I wondered if he would lunge at the poor man. A third black metaller, Kjetil "Frost" Haraldstad, projects an image of being an attention whore, but when a performance artist convinces him to come to Milan to put on some black-metal-inspired visual art, suddenly the man who cheerfully talks about the flattering thrill of getting his photo printed comes to terms with just what his life has become. He broods on the flight over, and his self-mutilating act no longer seems a cry for attention but a response to mounting feelings of self-loathing.

Sam Dunn, with his degree in anthropology, traced metal's roots for his rockumentary. A journalist, trained to get anecdotes and a more personal perspective that makes even critical biographies intimate, might have made a better oral history of the scene. Documentarians rooted in film can find the narrative, best exemplified in movies like Harlan County, U.S.A. and Hoop Dreams. A film-background director might also have focused a bit too much on the scandals, but at least a narrative might have come from it. Aites, a musician inspired not by metal but indie bands such as Sebadoh and the Mountain Goats, just appears to be doing this on a lark. I like anything that deconstructs the absurd mythology around the black metal scene, but Until the Light Takes Us doesn't even do that. Aites, hipster that he is, appears to be genuinely impressed by the musicians' actions backing up their words, even if both are abhorrent. He has no interest in the music itself, and the film ultimately doesn't even rate a decent bit of muckraking. The low budget wouldn't have been such a hurdle if the filmmakers could have figured out what they wanted to say with this.


*I must confess, I couldn't stop laughing at someone's contribution: a photo of Mickey Rourke with corpse paint slopped over his face and a painted message reading "Black Metal Mickey." Next to it was the regular photo with another painted title: "Not Black Metal Mickey."

Monterey Pop

D.A. Pennebaker, having already followed Bob Dylan through the artist's whirlwind reinvention (complete with Dylan's ironic take on the whole mad process), should have been prepared to go out and film a gathering of counterculture heroes and fans for a music festival out in Monterey, California. Yet not even he could have adequately foreseen just what the festival would symbolize. Hell, on a basic level, not he nor anyone else could even hope to capture all the great music there for a theatrical release.


The film Monterey Pop condenses three days that shook the world to a scant 79 minutes, a reflection of its original intent to be shown on ABC, a plan that naturally fell apart the second anyone in a suit saw the footage Pennebaker obtained. How could even a ratings-hungry network allow themselves to air this frightening display of youth madness on its section of the broadcast spectrum? If the station wanted to scare people, it could just do a news story on the perils of some vaguely defined social evil starting to enter the public consciousness. It needs rock as a scapegoat. What could ABC hope to accomplish by airing the ultimate explosion of mid-'60s music, a collection of tunes so listenable that even a stuffy old audience would be as excited by the rock as those in attendance?

The occasionally frustrating time limit of Monterey Pop actually works to its advantage in this respect, separating us from the audience by not only truncating the show but playing clips out of sequence, yet also capturing the overwhelming feeling that something changed across these three days. Preceding the actual concert with the defining single of the Haight-Ashbury scene, Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," playing over images of artists arriving and roadies erecting the equipment. Pennebaker devotes the entire film to performances, not milling about the crowd the way Michael Wadleigh and his arsenal of editors and camera operators did at Woodstock, yet the brief moment before the festival begins provides the snapshot into the mentality for the entire event, even the movement.

Pennebaker interviews a young, attractive woman, a vision of the innocence and naïveté of the hippie movement. With wide, saucer-like eyes, she breathlessly conveys her expectations for the festival. "I think it's gonna be like Easter and Christmas and New Year's and your birthday all in one, you know?" she says in the loopy, sincere voice of the casual drug user, but whatever she might be taking to prepare herself for a trip that covers no spatial distance, she certainly seems to know that they're all about to go somewhere. From her giggly, eager talking head comes McKenzie's song over the montage, then come the songs.

I long ago discovered I am not the holdout minority on this opinion, but I must confess: I always found the music at Monterey Pop to be vastly superior to that of Woodstock. Culturally, Woodstock was of course the apotheosis, the pinnacle of the hippie movement and its ultimate display of social relevance. Yet today one can more clearly see the cracks forming in the dike, portending the flood unleashed at Altamont. Monterey, however, is where the secret got out, where the various rivers of protest and social revolution converged into the same mouth. Those waters may have overflown later, but everything's just groovy here, baby.

That is not to say that everyone who played at Monterey was good. Outtakes reveal a number of groups so meandering and zoned-out that they border on the infuriating. Some group called The Blues Project commits two unforgivable sins: engaging in an endless drum solo and ruining the electric flute. Speaking as someone who loves the flute and has a close friends who is amazing at it, the latter was especially disheartening. But this is confined to the outtakes; Pennebaker may have given a number of acts the short end of the stick, but he knew exactly what to leave in and how to arrange it to maximize flow.

Pennebaker eases us into the concert by started at the end. Mamas and Papas, who sound a bit dated in their druggy shuffle before settling into the irresistible groove of "California Dreamin,'" a song as fresh now as it was then. Pennebaker jumps from the last performance of the festival night back Saturday morning to capture Canned Heat's frenetic take on the blues standard "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" a version that's a bit too unhinged to properly harness that song's fierce riff -- even I, a consummate anti-fan of Eric Clapton, must say that Cream perfectly captured it and shame most who try to put their own spin on it. Cut back to Friday night for Simon and Garfunkel, a sly move by the director to let the mood rise and fall instead of front-loading the film with Friday's more laid-back material.

For the most part, however, most of Monterey Pop is an extended crescendo. Hugh Masekela's acid jazz/Afrobeat is the first example of the organizers' admirable desire to spotlight more than just the San Francisco scene. Masekela's trumpet, played over the same experimental collage of colors and dissolving "skins," sounds ahead of the curve Miles Davis was establishing for jazz fusion even though Masekela and his band play traditional instruments and not electronic devices. He doesn't offer the audience any chance to slowly acquaint themselves with a style they've never heard, opening with African screams over a beat that begins at a frantic pace all will only spiral further into madness from there. Ironically, his is the first outright electric performance, pushing two traditional sounds -- jazz and African music -- to propulsive relevance. Masekela isn't the only world music artist to appear at the festival, and it's strange to think that they perhaps tap into the underlying atmosphere of musical liberation and psychedelic frenzy better than almost any of the Western pop acts there specifically catering to that sound. Just consider how well the film flows from Masekela to one of the more brilliantly far-out San Francisco bands, Jefferson Airplane. It's one of the smoothest transitions in the film, but Pennebaker must also move from the Airplane's incendiary "High Flyin' Bird" and "Today" to Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Ball 'n Chain" just to capture the full range of passion and aesthetic in the South African trumpeter's music.

By the time The Who take the stage, oh forget it. There's no better indication of the goodies left to come than the fact neither the concert nor the film ends with their performance. Justifiably perched near or at the top of any list of the greatest live performers (generally forming a trinity with James Brown and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band), The Who certainly come to play, thundering through "My Generation" before demolishing their equipment. That's not unusual for the band, of course, but you get the feeling they tore up their stuff out of the frustration of knowing they'd been beat. For during the planning of the schedule, Pete Townshend noticed the name of another performer, one upstart ex-pat returning to his homeland after honing his craft in England, and refused to go on after the guitarist. A coin flip decided the matter, and Townshend had to settle for being the opening act of James Marshall Hendrix. The fact that The Who were scared of letting the Jimi Hendrix Experience go on after them, but in retrospect it might have been even more damaging had Hendrix gone on first. Either way, while The Who broke into American stardom at last through this performance, it was Hendrix more than anyone who made his name at the festival, and his combination of a bold new sound and an outlandish stage presence condensed everything about the counterculture into one unstoppable act.

Pennebaker would wisely go back and put Jimi's entire set on video at a later date, but even with his sole contribution of "Wild Thing," Hendrix invents the modern guitar, coalesces a scene into one unified and beautifully squall and unleashes the sexuality of rock music. Blowing The Who out of the water is just the cherry on top. Hendrix combines the best aspects of the other acts, fusing Jefferson Airplane's otherness, Joplin's searing emotion (hers delivered through her voice, his through the guitar), Otis Redding's explosive R&B and The Who's anger. He also lays down the blueprint for playing the rock guitar, that is to play it as if an extension of the penis. But Hendrix molds that style into something orgasmic and shared, not a masturbatory exercise. When he sets his guitar on fire at the end and genuflects over his god/demon at it screeches death throes through its pickups, Hendrix says more about sexual liberation than any sociopolitical tract.

Of course, the hilarity of Townshend's fears over Hendrix showing him up are moot in Pennebaker's sequencing, because he rearranges the appearances to let two other show-stoppers come after: Otis Redding, the King of Soul, steps out for the first time before a predominantly white crowd, and if the outdoor festival had a roof, he'd have blown it off the sucker. One of the great tragedies of Monterey was that no Motown artists were featured thanks to a moratorium by the label's founder, Berry Gordy, who made as many terrible decisions as brilliant ones (this was one of the former). Redding, favored son of Stax/Volt, appears to pick up the slack left by the omission of so many R&B artists, and while The Who may usually deserve the term "maximum R&B," the energy Redding brings to Monterey leaves Townshend and co. in the dust. If Hendrix knocks you on your ass with his ability, Redding makes it impossible to sit down. He didn't have nearly the dancing talent as James Brown, but that hardly matters, as it is Redding's goal to make you dance, not him.

Bounding out on the stage launching into "Shake" without hesitation, Redding couldn't look more out of place. Standing in front of a white, middle-class audience with that same trippy film running behind him that fit so well with, say, Jefferson Airplane, it's a fish out of water moment that could have derailed another artist. By the end of "Shake," no one watching can deny that he belongs there, or at least no one would wish to be denied the potency of amped-up soul. Even the cameramen can't stop moving along to the groove. Redding himself justifies being at the event with a bit of banter preceding his next number: "You're the love crowd, right?" he teases the hippies. "We all love each other don't we?" Then he launches into his simmering, pleading "I've Been Loving You Too Long," a piece as maddening and frothing in its despairing seduction as Brown's "Please Please Please." Doubling over as if in agony, Redding squeezes out each syllable in dry sobs until you just can't take it anymore.

In Redding's full set, also released by Pennebaker to complement Hendrix's show, the energy is even higher, moving into a fiery version of "Satisfaction" and ending with a magnificent rendition of "Try a Little Tenderness" that should have made all the other performers grateful no one else had to go on Saturday night. The overlapping of the montage of young women around the festival on top of the music is the clearest demonstration of how unprepared everyone was for Redding's set; shoved at the end of Saturday's roster as the act few in attendance would know, Redding took to the stage as the film crew had already shot their stock for the various hippie acts that day. One can only imagine the terror with which Pennebaker and co. tore up their supplies looking for extra stock when Otis blew up the festival. When he jubilantly yells "I got to go, y'all!" at the end of his set, I've let a pained "No!" escape my lips more than once.

The final performer in the film's sequencing, Ravi Shankar, actually played on Sunday morning, before The Who, Hendrix and The Mamas and the Papas brought the proceedings to a close that night. Shankar gets 18 minutes, an eternity compared to the one or two singles afforded to the pop bands but not so gargantuan when one considers his set ran for nearly four hours. Shankar, invited at the insistence of his disciple, George Harrison, is more out of place than either Masekela or Redding. Yet his droning sitar instantly fits the psychedelic mood of the Summer of Love, and if the entire concert as staged by Pennebaker seems one long crescendo, then Shankar is the perfect embodiment of that approach. His raga builds and builds, layering drones and fast runs until you think it cannot possibly get louder or faster, then it does. With Shankar flanked only by Kamala Chakravarty on the droning tambura and longtime collaborator Alla Rakha on the tabla, the trio fill the stadium and have everyone in attendance staring in awe -- one of the best shots in the film is Hendrix looking on with reverence as Shankar blisters his fingers. Shankar's music, though drawing upon centuries-old classical forms, somehow feels as if it were created to move the sound of the '60s forward, a building to emotional catharsis that draws out for minutes, a prolonged orgasm that feels at least as daring as anything cooked up by these bands to fight the Establishment, and in some ways more so. The crowd absolutely loses it when Shankar cuts off, and it's hard not to leap to your feet as well, transformed by this most spiritual of music.

The film of Woodstock would spend more time with the people, more interested in what they believed and how they perceived the world. By reducing crowd interaction to a bare minimum, Pennebaker puts all the emphasis on the music, not what it symbolizes. The crowd exists mainly for reaction shots in his mind, montages of heads slowly bobbing along to the more psychedelic acts or going crazy for the energetic bands. As such, Monterey Pop has held up as well as the music it spotlights, undated by the absurdity of the hippie worldview and some of the more unbearable acts that can be plainly seen in outtakes. Perhaps something can be read in the fact that the '60s plays best in this 80-minute special, nearly 1/4 of which belongs to an artist removed from American hippie-dom by half a planet, but Monterey Pop is as hopeful as Woodstock without that faint air of fate hanging over it. Pennebaker had already documented one of the major artistic shifts of '60s pop, and it's funny how Don't Look Back feels more epic than this. Maybe that's because he'd finally gotten into the music himself, and, like us, he just wants to sit back and enjoy the tunes.