According to Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,’’ 2007) in an interview with Indiewire.com’s Anne Thompson, Nick Cave is “like Jesus in Melbourne, where I’m from.’’ That might give one an idea of the tone of Dominik’s documentary about the multi-hyphenate punk rocker/film score composer/author/filmmaker/outlaw/leader of the band Bad Seeds, whose own collaboration with Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, “20,000 Days on Earth’’ (2014), is one of the best and most inventive of recent rock documentaries.
Now he’s made another, “One More Time With Feeling.’’
While the previous film was playful and reflexive, this one is somber. Last summer while Cave and the Bad Seeds were recording their 16th album, “Skeleton Tree,’’ his 15-year-old son took a high dose of LSD and fell to his death off a cliff near Brighton, England. Grief-stricken, Cave asked his friend Dominick to make the documentary as a kind of tribute and as a way of dealing with post-release publicity for the album.
Shot in black and white and in 2-D and 3-D, it is starkly simple — inspired in part, Dominik says, by D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary, “Don’t Look Back’’ (1967). Largely improvised, it consists of scenes of Cave and the Bad Seeds performing songs from their new album, conversations among Cave, his wife, and Dominick, shot in cabs, on the beach, and in the Caves’ home, as well as Cave’s own iPhone-recorded voice-over.
The film screens only once, on Sept. 8, the eve of the album’s release at 1,000 theaters around the world, including CinemaSalem, 1 East India Square, Salem, at 8:30 p.m. A prescreening discussion between Paul Van Ness and (full disclosure) myself will introduce the film.
www.cinemasalem.com/wordpress/wpmt_film/one-more-time-with-feeling
Terror at the Pentagon
The term “reality TV’’ took on a terrible new meaning 15 years ago on Sept. 11 when Al Qaeda terrorists slammed passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while millions watched on live television broadcasts. The latter attack followed the destruction of the towers, but in some ways it was more frightening. It meant that the bastion of our military was vulnerable and also suggested that more attacks might be coming against targets such as the White House and the Capitol.
The PBS documentary “9/11 Inside the Pentagon’’ takes another look at the horrific event, using actual footage and interviewing first responders, aviation experts, journalists, and survivors. They describe the terror, chaos, and acts of heroism that happened when American Flight 77 slammed into the western wall of the building, killing 125 people inside and the 64 passengers and crew on board the plane.
“9/11 Inside the Pentagon’’ will be available on DVD on Sept. 6. The program is also available for digital download.
www.pbs.org/program/911-inside-pentagon
Conspiracy weary
Today, when the most outlandish conspiracy theories are staples of political campaigns, Oliver Stone’s “JFK’’ (1991) a multi-layered immersion into New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of a possible conspiracy behind the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, would hardly register on anyone’s credibility radar.
But when it came out 25 years ago it aroused outrage because of its crafty blurring of fact and speculation — if not outright fabrication. In it Stone effortlessly mimics the conventions of the documentary genre, as when he repeatedly screens the gruesome Zapruder film of the fatal shot and recalls the reenactments in Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line.’’ Except in this case it is no reenactment. Then he mixes such evocations of the documentary genre with sequences that range from flat police procedural to the flamboyant campiness of a cast of villains who would be at home in a Kenneth Anger movie.
No wonder the film annoyed so many sceptics and enthralled so many cinephiles. Not only did it earn six Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director, but it spurred Congress to pass the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which established an independent investigatory board and released millions of pages of previously classified material about the assassination.
Some credit is due Kevin Costner for the film’s effectiveness; as Garrison, he brings a stolid respectability to a figure whose actual reputation might not bear close scrutiny. But in the end it’s Stone’s dynamic filmmaking that carries even some sceptics along with it. A tribute to its success is perhaps the current popularity with the credulous of paranoid fantasies and the expanding gray area between fact and fiction in documentaries.
“JFK’’ screens on Sept. 9, at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive, in the Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge.
hcl.harvard.edu
Spiritual journey
Among the many documentaries that has probed the frontier between fact and fiction since “JFK’’ is Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe’s “Those Who Feel the Fire Burning.’’ It employs the device of a spectral, omniscient point of view to relate the plight of displaced people. The ghost of a refugee drowned in the Mediterranean en route to Europe is allowed to continue on his way and, disembodied, he observes the lives of those who reached their destination. This premise provides the framework for Knibbe’s vérité footage of people torn from their homes by disaster and tossed into a maelstrom of loss, injustice, and grief which leaves them as adrift and dehumanized as the dead man witnessing them. It is an apt metaphor for the fate of countless thousands, but their circumstances, revealed by Knibbe’s handheld camera, transcend any artifice that tries to comprehend them.
“Those Who Feel the Fire Burning’’ is a DocYard presentation screening on Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge. The filmmaker will be present for a Q&A.
www.brattlefilm.org/2016/09/12/feel-fire-burning
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
