The rockumentaries

Martin Scorsese presents The Blues - A Musical Journey

Apart from his celluloid masterpieces, Martin Scorsese remains a wonderful cinematic interpreter of music. Witness his 1978 movie The Last Waltz on The Band, or his release this year, Shine a Light on The Rolling Stones. The Blues isn’t one film, though. It is seven different movies by seven directors as gifted as Scorsese himself, Wim Wenders and Clint Eastwood, among others. Each of the seven movies focuses on various styles of the blues, the all-American musical form that gave birth to music as diverse as Jazz, Soul, Rhythm‘n’Blues and Rock‘n’Roll.

Tracing the origin of the Blues from the American south to its gradual spread around the country and then the world, the movies do so with a mix of vintage clips, re-enactments and filmed performances by various Blues pioneers. Arguably, some of the movies are better than the others, but Clint Eastwood’s Piano Blues and Wim Wender’s The Soul of a Man deserve special mention. What is fascinating is that the movies work as a musical document as well as a cultural map of the African-American experience.
Sony
Price: Rs 4,995

D A Pennebaker -Don’t Look Back

The mother of all rock films was released in 1967. The subject was rock’s very own poet, philosopher and punk Bob Dylan. The fly-on-the-wall feature follows Dylan and his entourage (including Joan Baez and Bob Neuwirth) on his 1965 tour of England. This was the last tour by Dylan as a folk singer, and by then he had turned into an oracle in the public consciousness.

The footage of the concerts themselves are kept at a minimum, but they are riveting in their own right. Performing to an adoring audience, which would be baying for his blood in 1966 for daring to go electric, his performances are spellbinding. This is a pioneering movie, one that would be used as a template for TV series like VH1’s Behind the Music 30 years later.
Docurama
Price: Rs 699

Richard Lester - Help!

When The Beatles were at the height of their fame, director Richard Lester made his second movie with the band after the previous year’s A Hard Day’s Night. While it was shot in a gritty, black and white mock-documentary style, Help! was in glorious technicolour, and followed a bizarre James Bond spoofing plot of a hilarious Indian cult trying to get a precious ring off—who else—Ringo’s finger. So we’re treated to over an hour of exotic locales—from Barbados to the Swiss Alps—madcap humour and charm from The Beatles and some of the finest pop songs ever.

The movie went all out to capture the daft surreal humour of the time. In one of the sequences Ringo falls into a cage containing a Siberian tiger, and the wild animal is subdued by The Beatles followed by the people in a pub and then a football stadium full of people singing God Save The Queen.
Capitol
Price: Rs 4,995