Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 1: Vincent Moon, The Traitor
This is the first chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
La forma de la espada
Threatening or comforting as it may be, the future that unfolds on those pages no longer belongs to you, it does not resolve your uncertainty. What you want revealed is something quite different, the fear and the hope that keep you awake, holding your breath, in the night: what your ears try to learn, about yourself, about your fate.[1]
Vincent Moon is the artistic name for Mathieu Saura, a French filmmaker and visual artist born in 1979. The name choice is quite interesting as it’s a character from Jorge Luis Borges’ La forma de la espada. In the short story, an Irishman, living in a small Argentinian border town, recounts to Borges the story behind the scar on his face. During the civil war in Ireland, his band of rebels was introduced to a new comrade named John Vincent Moon. Moon was a coward, intellectually arrogant, and terrified of being hurt. At their first encounter with some soldiers, the Irishman saves the newcomer from being killed with only a superficial bullet scrape and takes him to an empty general’s house where they would stay for ten days. On the ninth day, the Irishman overhears Moon talking on the phone. He is selling the Irishman to the police in exchange for money and his freedom. Enraged, he chases Moon around the house, grabs a scimitar and with the “half-moon shaped steel, I inscribe in his face a half-moon of blood.”[2] The Irishman is killed in the town-square while Moon grabs his “Judas silver” and flees to Brazil. The story ends with the Irishman revealing “It is I who am Vincent Moon, now despise me.”
Why choose Vincent Moon, the name of a traitor? Who or what did he betray? Mathieu Saura started studying photography under Michael Ackerman and Antoine d’Agata in the year 2000, both significantly influencing his photography. During 2000–2005 his photo work was released under his real name. There is even a book from Les Éditions de l’Œil, published in 2006, entitled Mathieu Saura: Photographe. Also, in 2003 he creates Les Nuits de Fiume, a photo blog following the underground Parisian nightlife scene. From this project, he meets a couple of bands and starts doing small and experimental music videos.
Vincent Moon only appears at the credits of his first music video, Lantern by CLOGS (2004), a short experimental film shot in super8. After that, all his films would be credited to Vincent Moon while his ongoing photo work was still tied to his given name. As he moves on to start the Take Away Shows in 2006, Vincent Moon betrays Mathieu Saura, killing him together with his photo work. In retrospect, it appears that the decision to assume an artistic name is not only a practicality to separate his work as a photographer and filmmaker, but also a betrayal to the image. As the initial quotation in this chapter from A King Listens, Moon grows unsatisfied with the purely optical, and starts a pursuit to find what the “ears can learn.” The line that threads throughout his whole work, the half-moon scar inscribing the death of Mathieu Saura, is to search in the aural the opening for encounters and interaction:
…the music is the pretext. What I’m interested in is the human interaction. From the beginning, the big idea was a simple thing. The films are not very important, it’s the process that might change things. The contact with someone is extremely important — the simplicity of it, and the human exchanges I had with the people.[3]
This quest starts taking shape already in his first works as a filmmaker. There is a sequence of five films that are quite prophetic in addressing Moon’s driving force for the years to come. These films are composed each of one song recorded live in the shows of the bands The National, Sonic Youth and Liars. Although they are an exercise of a photographer experimenting with a new language, the question that propelled the name change is already present — How can the sonic interaction present in sound be translated to image?[4]
To develop the aspects of his work related to this question I first will present a summary of his carreer. There aren’t clear distinctions between the distinct phases that he went through as they cross-fade into one another, but I separated some primary points that exemplify his growth in addressing the transposition of the sonic interaction to vision. Also, in the following page, I present a summarized table containing the number of his works per year, the series to which these works belong and in which countries they were recorded.
Early Experiments (2000–2005) — The First Steps
The early films of Moon already capture the seditious seeds of a longing to subvert the image through sound. In his first films, where a live performance was captured, music takes center stage while the show itself and even the artists becomes secondary together with providing any context about what is happening. This is patent when contrasting Moon’s About Today (live) by THE NATIONAL (2006) and LIARS LIARS LIARS! (or how to play nirvana in 2006) with Jem Cohen’s Instrument (1999). Both films carry a similar DIY rock aesthetic, both are recorded with a bare minimum of equipment, and likewise, focus on live performances of the bands playing on the stage. However, the outcome and how each director envision the role of the image in relation to sound couldn't be further apart.
The technological shift between the six years that Cohen released Instrument and Moon started his experiments is partly responsible for some of these differences, but only to a limited extent. In Cohen’s case, there was no way an independent filmmaker collaborating with an independent band could release a steady stream of short concert films on his own; he needed enough material to cut a feature-length documentary and participate in film festivals to find distribution.
With Moon video technology had significantly improved, digital video cameras were getting cheaper by the day, editing software was finally within reach of the regular consumer, and most importantly YouTube and similar video sharing platforms were just created. Moon started just when video and internet platforms became a feasible option for artists and creators; he could find an output without needing the help of the bands he was recording, thus having the freedom to experiment.
Nevertheless, while it provides a more fertile ground for Moon, the difference between both is further ingrained. Instrument is the outcome of Cohen spending ten years recording the American punk-rock band Fugazi. The film narrates their transformation throughout 1987 to 1998 using captured footage of their shows, recording sessions for the albums, interviews, and shots of how it is to live on the road while touring. It also testifies to the development of film and video technology at that decade as it started on Super 8, moved to 16mm and later to video. The aesthetic is very DIY, a single camera with direct sound usually handheld mostly immobile during the shows with only some zooms and pans.
For someone that doesn't know anything about Fugazi, the documentary Instrument goes to lengths to explain the philosophy and ideals of the band (the constant effort in keeping its distance from the music industry and operating in a truly independent manner). This strive to explain is even poked at by the insertion of a fantastic interview between the lead singer and an 8th grader for a public-access television TV show.
Cohen offers information to situate the songs inside a bigger picture, hints the socio-political views of the band, unpacks its history and makes sure that the unaware viewer has enough to follow the narrative development. The film is imbued since the start with an ocular-centric approach. It was created to remind a period, to be a documentary in its literal sense. Cohen, when started to record the Fugazi shows just wanted to “document things that are important to me.”[6]
In contrast, Moon is not worried about documenting anything or in providing any information. Sound is at the center of attention, eschewing interviews and other footage that might give any explanation or context. About Today (live) by THE NATIONAL is the last film of a three-part series where three different shows by The National was recorded by Moon. In this film, he shoots the song being performed live in Paris. The first and most axiomatic observation is that music is the core of the film, even the band playing becomes background for it merely indicates the source of the sound. Moon, is not really interested in the band, it’s appearance, or how they are playing, his focus is on the music being performed.
In Instrument, each performance is mostly shot from the same angle. The camera only slightly moves to reframe or zoom in from a wide to a medium angle. The viewer can clearly distinguish what is happening on stage, who is who and what they are doing.
In About Today (live) by THE NATIONAL Moon starts experimenting with low frame rates coupled with fast camera movements that blur the image. The lead singer becomes a blur that transitions from one state to another like a slide show. In LIARS LIARS LIARS! (or how to play nirvana in 2006) he takes it one step further. In this film, shot a couple of months later, Moon mimics with the camera the rhythm and intensity of the music. Giving only a vague sense of where and what is happening the fast pans and whips with a low frame rate turn the concert, the band, and the people into an abstract painting as a method to convey the sense of being there, of interacting with the music, of experience a live performance.
Moon walks a thin-line between video art and rock documentary in these seminal years. From these experiments, though, three key traits emerge that are essential to how he will continue to develop his process of filmmaking. First is how music functions, not in reference to who is performing, but to open a space for encounter. Secondly, meaning and narrative are not essential as his films rather focus in delivering an experience akin to being present in a live show. Lastly, there’s a heavy reliance in the new technologies that were developed at the turn of the century that persuades all steps of his artistic practice.
The Take Away Shows (2006–2009) — The Rebellion of Sound
While Moon was taking his baby steps in filmmaking, the freshly graduated journalist Christophe ‘Chryde’ Abric created, in 2003, an online blog to talk about the rock scene in Paris named La Blogothèque.[7] A couple of years later, in 2006, Moon and Chryde partnered up to record live and improvised song performances mostly by foreign bands that came to Paris on tour. Chryde would get in contact with them and produce the films while Moon would be the filmmaker.
The project was named Take Away Shows (or Concert à emporter in French) referencing the fleeting moment that was captured but also the fact that now you could carry these shows in your pocket as the iPod Video had just been launched. By subscribing to their RSS feed, it would automatically download the latest shows to be watched on-the-go.[8]
The format was deceptively simple: record a live performance with one camera and the minimum takes possible — most of them in a single take — in an improvised and ordinary down-to-earth place. The locations vary from small apartments, bus stops, coffee shops, taxis, bridges, parks and what became the staple of the Take Away Shows, the streets of Paris.[9]
The first came out in April 2006, and each week two new films were published. This accelerated schedule fitted well with Moon’s ideals of keeping each show raw. There was barely any editing, and the structure of the films was composed of a quick intro where the instructions of the director or some preparations by the artists sound, a dry cut to the title sequence followed by the song being performed and finishing with an outro title. This structure had some slight variations, but it permitted Moon to focus on what he considered most important: finding novel ways to force the musicians to sonically interact with the environment and with him.
To find a simple definition for this series would be hard, Mathias B. Korsgaard in his book Music Video After MTV categorizes it as “Improvised Music Video,” but even then he problematizes it as “the Take Away Shows are uncategorizably situated between music video and concert documentary. They retain the music video’s insistence on a single song, but the songs are played live in front of the camera as in concert documentaries.”[10]
I will take another step and say that, as Moon prioritizes sound and music over the musicians, he goes beyond merely situating the Take Away Shows in between the music video and concert documentary. A simple example is seen in Neil Halstead — Trying to Reach You (2006). This film came out only two months after the Take Away Shows started and it was the first time that Moon gave priority to the environment and the sound over the performer. With a total duration of almost 4 minutes, more than half of the time is a single shot of the camera traveling down a street in Paris while the performance is heard. The listener doesn't know where the sound comes from until the camera reaches a building at the end of the street and with a big zoom into one of the dark windows he finally reveals the source — the artist casually playing his guitar sitting on a balcony — just to pan out some moments later.
It is not merely a question of delaying the source of the sound, as in Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic, but that the musician loses its hierarchy in the film. The fascination springs from the miracle of the “fleshy throat that vibrates” instead of being towards the artist.
Anchoring his films on the song and the interaction as opposed to the musician isn't without controversy. A recurring criticism about these films is how Moon vampirizes the bands and musicians’ identities. According to one of these critics, “each time a band makes a Take Away Show the same ritual is repeated thanks to the mise-en-scéne. The result is always a progressive loss of the band’s identity and posteriorly an assimilation thanks to the person behind the camera [Moon]”[11]
Morera’s idea of losing the identity of the band is a curious one. Wouldn't the band’s identity be in their music? Or is it in the constructed image of what they and their music represent? Lawrence Grossberg, in his chapter in the book Sound & Vision: The Music Video Reader (1993) analyzes the impact that the image had on the artists whose careers grew together with the boom of the music video:
Now the singer plays himself, promising a continuity of self with the space beyond the stage. But it takes a rare musician to not look like a video quotation of the image of musician; the image shimmers at the border of leaving the music behind, while celebrating itself as musically inspired.[12]
To situate the rock (and indie) bands that appear on the Take Away Shows within the context that Grossberg explains, gives another layer of meaning to Mathieu Saura’s choice in assuming the artistic name of Vincent Moon. He betrays the carefully constructed identity of the artist, opting instead to focus on the voice and the sound that is created.
It is also a reconfiguration of the function that the music video has taken since MTV’s launch in 1981. According to Grossberg, “Music video presents a particular mode of cultural cannibalization, in which the soundtrack has been digested lifetimes ago, in fact, consumed by the image, which appears to be singing.”[13]As in A King Listens, the sound in Moon is the responsible for undermining the image sovereignty in music video, as ontologically contradicting as it may sound. The image no longer matters, the musician’s identity is to be found not in how he presents himself but, in his resonance, sound becomes the site to find the unmediated uniqueness.
In Borge’s story, the Irishman not only saved John Vincent Moon but trusted him enough to take Moon to his hideout, which was paid back with betrayal. The band’s (or their managers and agents) similarly trusted their image to Moon who would then throw it away and look instead into the aural for something singular. A kind of betrayal where music and sound are more important than anything else, even if it means at the expense of the performer’s interest.
With time though, Moon and Chryde, that started the Take Away Shows by tracking down the bands that were in Paris and trying to convince them to participate in the recordings, were amassing millions of views. The films they did with Grizzly Bear, The Kooks, Beirut, or Arcade Fire, became even more popular than their official music videos and the music industry took note. Moon’s rebellion against the supremacy of the ocular, the civil war between sound and image, quickly became assimilated as another instrument in reinforcing the identity of a band. For some time, Moon played along.
The films shot for R.E.M. are a tipping point in this aspect. According to the blog post in La Blogothèque, the lead singer from R.E.M. (Michael Stipe) reached out to them looking to do a couple of Take Away Shows. Stipe had shown some of the films to his band members and thought that it would be an exciting challenge. Moon displays a clear idea of why R.E.M. is interested in doing a Take Away Show, he writes — “Doing a Take Away Show with R.E.M. could be seen as a way to rejuvenate their image. Obviously, it’s part of the whole thing. Putting aside the huge venues and ultra-sophisticated recording studios to play in the street — that’s a pretty cool thing to do, certainly seen as chic.” [14]
Stipe had doubts if R.E.M. would fit into this format. A decade before when Jem Cohen showed his film Lucky Three (1997) to Michael Stipe, a performance film with Elliott Smith similar to the Take Away Shows, Stipe’s answer was “who would want to watch a musician play an instrument?”[15] These doubts — even with the proven success of the series from La Blogothèque — were still there since Stipe saw this as a “challenge” and Moon was worried what if it didn’t work? “What if the band looked ridiculous, old-fashioned, too used to playing their songs perfectly in front of bigger, more impressive cameras? (…) what would it be like with such an ‘old’ band, so experienced in the classical media stuff?”
It took three songs to break those doubts. In R.E.M. — Living Well (2008) Moon crammed the whole band into a car and made them sing while driving around. While “playing this little game” Stipe broke out in laughter and from there on they became friends just playing songs for the sake of it.
So why do these films for R.E.M. have such a weight? It indicates the reversion from Moon ideals of subverting the identity and the image to how the music industry started incorporating this raw, stripped-down music performances style and spinning it into promotion and marketing. Moreover, although Moon is aware of this, it didn’t seem to bother him back then, since R.E.M. gave him “crazy freedom for experimenting ideas and developing new formats.”[16]
Also, even though it was part of trying to rejuvenate the image of R.E.M., it was still the sort of personal interaction that appealed to Moon. Using the film for promotion and marketing could be accepted if there was still freedom for an interaction that tried forcing the spontaneity of the sound above the image. This would soon change.
As La Blogothèque grew more successful, because of the Take Away Shows, new directors started coming onboard and mimicking the original format. Additionally, around the world many projects started replicating the formula.[17] Moon’s initial aural uprising was stalled. The Take Away Shows was mummified, withering any revolutionary potential into a set of aesthetic traits that pictured an imagined authenticity. His initial motives of “breaking certain rules of music representation and basically those rules were rules that we saw in a world of rock and pop music,”[18] became part of the rules itself.
Moon, the new directors of La Blogothèque, and the many other projects that spawned focused on the external elements instead of stressing the deconstruction of the identity. Theses aspects were: Take the performance out to unusual places; the music always must be recorded live; when possible shoot in a single-take; and lastly, use a hand-held camera that moves around. These traits initially devised to deconstruct the identity, when removed from the conditions of forcing unexpected encounters, became a blatant attempt in trying to sustain a shallow image of authenticity that could be adapted for the music industry.
Already in 2007, Moon occasionally focus so much on these aspects that the interaction comes in second place. In his film CHEAP MAGIC INSIDE (a project with BEIRUT) (2007), movements are rehearsed to the point that lead singer Zach Condon appears awkwardly acting out what was expected of him. The band is positioned throughout the building so that they come in to play in pre-determined moments, and there are very few sequences where Moon risks losing control of what is happening.
Chryde, the producer of the Take Away Shows, gradually turned La Blogothèque, into a production house, capitalizing on the interest of the music industry in exploring the format. A decade later, with Moon already far gone, the films that Chryde produced show to what extremes the format was carefully embalmed, embellished and immobilized to only maintain the outer appearance of what made it so unique. Both the music videos Phoenix ‘Ti Amo’, Live in Teatro Bibiena, Mantova (directed in 2017 by Colin Solal Cardo) and Justin Timberlake — Say Something ft. Chris Stapleton (2018, directed by Arturo Perez Jr.) follow, to the rule, all the aspects that Moon developed back in 2006.
Both Colin Solal Cardo and Arturo Perez Jr., have been working as directors for La Blogothèque for many years now. In these two music videos though, the difference is that now there is not even a trace of the sonic interactions that appealed so strongly to Moon. Both follow, strictly, the format of the Take Away Shows: single-take, live music, always moving. Nevertheless, they required many weeks of pre-production, permit clearance to shoot in the historical buildings, an intricate lighting that takes at least half-a-day to set-up with a sizable crew, rehearsal with each person that will appear so that they are in the right position at the right time, wiring microphones all over the building and a sound crew, and have the musicians rehearse each step. In Phoenix ‘Ti Amo’ it’s rehearsing with the people who will figure in as casually entering the theater, in Say Something it’s a whole choir that will have to correctly time their entrance throughout the balconies of the building.
Returning to Moon, around 2008, his honeymoon with the indie music scene came to an end as a misunderstanding with the band Arcade Fire led to him losing the final cut of a feature documentary. Already disenchanted and recording less and less Take Away Shows (which now had more directors keeping a constant flow of new shows), the filmmaker hears once again that disembodied woman’s voice, attracting him towards the sonic interactions, and responds accordingly, going back to his projects without any commercial restrictions.[19]
In retrospect, his analysis from this time is that “from the beginning I’ve had the freedom to do what I want when there’s no money involved. I’ve had good and bad experiences of working with money on some projects, but mostly it turned out bad.”[20] Moon in the end made over 200 Take Away Shows, and it was during this time that he perfected his style through constant experimentation. These years constantly creating was his true film school. Most importantly, during this period, he perfected the techniques that he will soon start using to unearth an otocentric image. He trained and became virtuous handling the camera, he learned how to move within the scene and how to use his body movement in a harmonic sense with the artist being recorded.
Feature Documentaries and other projects (2006–2011) — Finding a Voice
In parallel to the Take Away Shows and his work in La Blogothèque, Moon also created ten feature documentaries and some other side projects. Free from the self-imposed structure of La Blogothèque these documentaries display his inspirations at the time and serve as a testbed for his more experimental ideas. One of the biggest influence early on, that is visible throughout his career is Nicolas Humbert & Werner Penzel’s documentary about Fred Frith Step Across the Border (1990). Moon praises the film for being the closest visual form to music, that it is “cinema and music conversing.”[21] This film becomes a urtext for Moon. He will struggle throughout the Take Away Shows and in his first documentaries to reach what Humber & Penzel describe as being the core of the film:
In Step Across the Border two forms of artistic expression, improvised music and cinema direct, are interrelated. In both forms it is the moment that counts, the intuitive sense for what is happening in a space. Music and film come into existence out of an intense perception of the moment, not from the transformation of a pre-ordained plan. In improvisation the plan is revealed only at the end. One finds it.
The other connection concerns the work method: the film team as band. Much as musicians communicate via the music, our work, too, was realized within a very small and flexible team of equals. What mattered was exchange. And movement. Sometimes we started filming in the middle of the night, responding to a new idea that had arisen only minutes before. We had a fundamental feeling for what we wanted to do, for what kind of film this should be. And we followed that feeling. It was all very instinctive.[22]
Humber & Penzel furthermore, in how they worked within their production company Cine Nomad, travelling around the world to capture these moments, also seem to have inspired Moon’s constant reference to his work as a nomadic kind of cinema.
With Step Across the Border, as a strong influence directing Moon’s filmmaking, he pursuits what a sonic image may be in the documentaries that he did in parallel to his work in the Take Away Shows. When observing these documentaries a trail emerges in how Moon progressed in achieving this. In his first documentary A Skin a Night (2008) this endeavor to take the visuals to the level of music is explicit.[23] Moon uses sequences of the horizon and landscape of the city quickly passing by and spinning into blurs of light and patterns similar to those in Step Across the Border. These shots, an attempt to visualize music, as they give rhythm more than meaning to the viewer. A first step similar to what film theorist and director, Sergei Eisenstein, wrote in his chapter The Landscape as Music, which will reappear later-on in this thesis.
Nevertheless, these sequences are few and standout from the rest of the film. These first documentaries are still very didactic compared to his later work. There are lower thirds describing the people, the band explain their songs, there are headshot interviews and Matt Berninger’s (the lead singer) voice-over talks about the band, the recording of their album Boxer and the process of creation. With very little performance footage, most of the shots are their recording experience in the studio. A Skin a Night is an example of Moon trying different forms to subvert the image while balancing the commercial necessity of doing a commissioned documentary for a band.
REM: Six Days (2008) progresses the experimentation, as it’s a mashup of footage from live concerts, the recording studio and the outtakes from Take Away Shows that was done with them. With more access and freedom to capture the live shows around the venue and the stage, he goes back to his exploration of how to shoot a live show returning to the exercise of using the concert to break free from the forms of the performance and into the visual realm as he had previously done in Liars, Liars, Liars.
In any case, what I consider to be the two most decisive films from this time are La Fautes des Fleurs (2009) and An Island (2010). The former is a film about the cult Japanese musician and poet Kazuki Tomokawa. This film consolidates the style of what Moon worked so far in his previous documentaries and in La Blogothèque. He finally achieved creating his particular version of Step Across the Border and won the Sound & Vision award at CHP:DOX 2009, one of the film festivals that continued to bring Moon onboard with his new releases.
This film indicates his distancing from the music industry. It’s his first feature documentary that wasn’t commissioned by a band or musician. By this time Moon had already shot five documentaries and a little bit over 100 Take Away Shows, he acquired the technical knowledge and confidence that enabled him to take the next step in his sonic overtake of the visual. Free from any commercial requirements the film is not a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa, but a portrait of what it is to be in the presence of this poet and musician also known as “the screaming philosopher.” The film focuses on the experience of interacting with the artist, music flows out of the performance footage and mixes with the sounds of the city occasionally coming back together to show a segment of a performance or a snippet of Tomokawa’s life.
Very little explanation of what is happening is given. Additionally, all the music being in Japanese helps to distance the listener from any meaning. The subtitles are present only in the moments where the musician talks about his life, and even then, the little that is talked isn’t sufficient to create a portrait of the artist. The sequence of Tomokawa talking about Keirin bike races establishes well Moon’s progress in reconfiguring the relation between music and visual.
It begins with the sounds of a Keirin race transmission on tv. The film first introduces the sounds to briefly show a quick sequence of the bikes rushing through the track to then cut to Tomokawa sitting in his living room watching the race. The voice of the race announcer is joined by a strange gong that increasingly reverberates louder and quicker until it stops in sync when Tomokawa starts shouting “go!” as the bikes get closer to the finish line (the arrow in the figure above marking the exact moment). It does not explain from where the gong comes from, and as the sequence continues sounds flow in and out not helping identify if what is being heard comes from the race, from some other source that is not being shown, or from the artist’s music. Jumping from the living room to the race tracks, a strange kitschy Japanese music starts playing without ever revealing it’s source (the frequencies at rectangle 1). People are putting their bets in; the bikers are getting ready to race even though there is heavy rain pouring down. Tomokawa starts talking about the differences between betting and artistic creation while images of the stadium resound and the bike race dances together with the soundscape. When Tomokawa loses the bet, his music merges the sound into a dreamlike image (number 2 is where his music starts). Moon succeeds in grounding the film in the sonic experience, image and sound unfold an interaction that slowly detaches from what the film depicts.
La Fautes de Fleurs is a film about affirming one’s uniqueness at its most basic level, and to do so sound is the only place where this concept can be developed. The musician tells the tragic story of his younger brother– in his 30s he couldn’t longer manage to live in this world and decided to jump in front of a train. Tomokawa, in turn, sings and screams to affirm his place, his voice is his presence against all odds. Moon, successively, accompanies Tomokawa’s screams, using the camera as an instrument that screams together with the poet.
Tomokawa’s portrait is the mean that Moon uses to open his own voice, a successful encounter in interacting with the woman’s voice in Calvino’s story. The previous years of constant experimentation culminated in this documentary. It’s Moon’s scream of autonomy against the industry and his affirmation as an independent fleshy throat that resonates back through his films.
After expunging in Le Feutes de Fleurs his need to reconceptualize Step Across the Border, he moves on to new territories. This move will be analyzed in depth in chapter three with An Island, and how it solidifies Moon’s interests in expanding what he views as music and continuing his development of the image from a broader sound perspective.
Petites Planètes (2009–2014) — A Thousand Planets and Becoming Minor
Moon’s breakout from the music industry was due to a slow but constant curiosity to explore new interactions with sound and music that went beyond the ones he was having so far with the indie music bands. In La Blogothèque, the idea at the time was to ignore the rules and force the musicians out of their comfort zone by taking them off the stage and into the streets. However, a part of him wanted to seek something different and pursuit places where music is on the streets, far away from the recording studios and already a site for unexpected encounters.
While still dedicating himself to the Take Away Shows, in 2007 Moon released three short films about the music in Essaouira, Morocco. In 2008 he released a film shot in Tanzania, a feature documentary about a duo of Czech viola players, and an unfinished documentary shot in Palestine. This is an important aspect as it shows that even while working within the indie rock scene there was a growing attraction in Moon to other forms of music. It may also be the manifestation of a growing disenchantment with the industry.
With the new directors of La Blogothèque keeping the flow of indie-rock shows, he distances himself from the USA/Europe axis and searches for rising artists in other places of the world, starting with a film about a musician from Mali. A work that he continued well after he stopped directly working for La Blogothèque. Each time he found an artist that would fit the audience of the Take Away Shows he opted to release it in the bigger platform created by Chryde instead of on his personal network.
In 2010 the ties are further severed, and Moon decides that it’s time to try something different:
I felt the need to travel and to discover some other music, to explore the world, going to other corners, and actually, it was also this idea of nomadic cinema, sort of, that I had in mind. How could the use of new technologies and the road fit together? How could I edit my films in a bus crossing the Andes?[24]
It was this call to explore and investigate that led him to create Petites Planètes. A name inspired by the homonymous series of travel books that Chris Marker edited for Editions de Seuil in the 1950s. The idea behind the 32 volumes that he edited was for it not be “a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveler’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us.”[25]
It’s intriguing to make deeper links between Moon’s series Petites Planètes and Marker’s Petite Planète. The first, more obvious, is how Moon uses the plural form. In 1959, Marker’s words to justify the series was that “We live in a planet that seems smaller and smaller. Everything invites us to know it better.”[26]
The tone of Moon’s films also reflects how Marker questions the seriousness of travel books by breaking the idea of what is institutionally noble and sanctified — why is there a separation into what is considered to be proper culture and history? Marker gives photographs of street life and people at work equal attention to those of eminent historical figures. This doesn’t mean he refuses or denies the gravity of history — especially at a time with such recent memories from World War II — but he intersects these scarred memories with new ones that are being created. In the volume on Austria, for example, he opens the first chapter with the title of Carol Reed’s film “The Third Man,” and it takes three pages to confirm what the reader was expecting by showing the iconic Prater’s Ferris wheel.
Moon’s series, in a similar manner, counterbalances these both extremes. A film about the Sufi chants in Ethiopia is followed by the traveling circus artists performing in the streets of Debre Berhan. Trance rituals in Java clash with Indonesian Hip Hop. Possession rites in Brazil are followed by carnaval. Both artists carry in their homonymous series the idea of mixing all levels of culture to better dialog with the places they are talking about. At last, Chris Marker’s words at the beginning of Petite Planète echoes strongly in Moon’s beliefs and in the direction that his work has taken him:
One does not escape so easily from a world now conquered, and a new tourism appears, which exorcises the picturesque. This enthusiasm of the reader for the knowledge of the world is not the sign that he suddenly discovered for the other nations a long-dormant curiosity: it is rather that he understood that their knowledge was a step, an indispensable component to self-knowledge.[27]
For five years Moon traveled to over 20 regions from all over the world and released 198 films.[28] Technology played a very important part and was essential to how Petites Planètes worked. Apart from allowing Moon to shoot single-handedly and to edit it on the go, it also made possible for Moon to create a massive database of these films where the listener can navigate throughout the hundreds of films creating his own path.
Possibly, its due to this database that Moon decides to, instead of using Chris Marker’s original Petit Planète, use the plural form Petites Planètes. A vision more appropriate to a time where the vast quantity of information available ends in isolationism; each niche, each place, each topic, a world in itself. Moon’s use of the plural form, furthermore, indicates a move towards the Deleuze of The Fold and A Thousand Plateaus. An understanding that in constructing these multiple worlds the listener is forced to find new ways to interact with the films, to unfold the database (which is the subject of the last chapter).
While still in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s, another perspective that helps understand Moon’s move away from the music industry is that of becoming minor.[29] Free from the music industry, his work inadvertently drifts towards the three main aspects of what is considered to be minor literature (and art): The deterritorialization of the major language (further changing the relation between image and sound); Everything is political (as it searches to disrupt signifying regimes); It is always collective (Moon’s dependence on the community that grew around his work to support and help him in every step of the process).
Moon, while not theoretically expressing the idea of becoming minor, was actively appropriating the tools at his disposal to avoid what previously happened [in La Blogothèque] when creating Petites Planètes:
To do all those films would have been impossible with a big company behind me. I was traveling alone with my backpack — computer, camera, microphones in it. Alone, but with [the help of the] local people. Meeting my team, which was absolutely not professional people, on the spot there, going from one place to another. I really believed that cinema could be this very simple thing — I want to make a film and you’re going to give me a place to stay for the night. I give you a moment of cinema and you offer me a caipirinha.[30]
In an essay named Becoming Minor (2017), authors Anna Secor and Jess Linz discuss that the condition and the aim of becoming minor is to be at the impasse, at the space of betweenness. The problem, though, is that it’s not a comfortable position to stay in this state of the impasse (thus the need of a diagram as discussed further on), Moon failed in his first years and now with more experience comes back to this state in Petites Planètes:
The impasse space is parallel to the space you were passing through, but different. Unadorned, it does not cater to its guests with predictability or decorum. It is more savage. It is dark in the impasse; it is a space that requires heightened senses, because it makes no promises. In the impasse, adjustment style prevails over history and genealogy. This is an unholy space of flux, reconfiguring, and recoding of meaning. In the impasse, you can’t move forward with any rapid clip. This doesn’t mean that nothing is happening, though. In an impasse, an active passivity overtakes you, reconfiguring molecules and changing operations.[31]
This description of the impasse seems to describe the king’s plunge into the dark caves below his castle, could listening be a form of active passivity? At certain moments in Petites Planètes Moon seems to go so far into the sonic experimentations that he seems to be touching his way in the darkness trying to find a way to balance himself. It’s his period where listening and the sonic is most tensioned with the image. Moon’s becoming minor is a work from within cinematic language, it stammers and stutters the vision so that sound can overtake the hegemony. In continuing the movement from La Faute des Fleurs, Moon in Petites Planètes becomes more conscious of the medium he is working with. He pushes the visual sometimes to see where the connection with the sound will snap.
Furthermore, in moving on from the idea of music video to now tackling the ethnographic documentary practices, becoming minor is used as a tactic to divest Moon from responsibilities when he takes this next step. It’s impossible to ignore the ethical issues raised by a French filmmaker who leaves a budding career in the music industry to travel the world recording traditions in lesser developed countries. The first image that comes to mind is that of French colonialism and the practices of ethnographers in the first half of the 20th century.
Deleuze relates becoming minor to how Jean Rouch attempts to overcome this colonialist mentality. In Rouch’s documentaries, the trained ethnographer uses various mechanisms to critique the colonialist other and to undermine the fiction of identity. Whether they worked or not is a controversial topic outside of my research scope. Nevertheless, the three elements of minor literature are evident in his films — “deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”[32]
In Moon’s case becoming minor is associated with his fixation on being experimental as a method of resistance from any academical approach. This routine avoids the necessity of guidebooks and extensive knowledge in ethnography practices, both with the creator and the listener. This isn’t without certain pitfalls. The editors of the experimental anthropology magazine ART/E/FACT synthesize well what Moon brings to this field — “Vincent Moon and Jacob Kirkegaard, have a clear ethnographic perspective in their line of work, but are not afraid of misrepresenting the folklore or worried about staying within academic frames of anthropology — in this way they push the boundaries into an experimental folklore.”[33]
For some years Moon even described himself in his website as “questioning the established norms of visual representations of the ‘other’,” he later moved on to a less pedantic “About Me” page that raises less controversy and has avoided naming himself an experimental ethnographer, as he did before.[34]
There is also a financial-technological aspect to Moon’s becoming minor. Compare Petites Planètes with Alan Lomax, an ethnographer that similarly to Moon shared interests in collecting music from around the world. With a life dedicated to capturing folkloric music, Lomax although focusing his work in the United States also traveled through various countries to capture local musicians. The controversy in Lomax, though, is that he used to copyright the folk music he recorded and sell them without distributing any royalties to the musicians. A fact that came to light when the blues musician Leadbelly sued him for the money that he owned.[35] Moon, on the other hand, by using Creative Commons avoids entering these legal and ethical issues.
Distributing his films for “free” creates a relationship with the listener that Henry Jenkins denominates as the moral economy, where “free” means that even though people have not used money to purchase the films, Moon expects some sort of labor to be involved from those that watch his work.[36] In becoming minor, he expects that a percentage of people who watch his films are likely to support the project either by sharing, by helping him with specific expertise or knowledge of local musicians for his next recordings, donating money through crowdfunding or paying a small fee to watch him screen his movies. Moon is acutely aware of this and adapted his life to fit within these parameters:
I live without any money, or very little sums, from film festivals or music festivals who invite me mostly. But, I don’t make films ‘for free’ as someone was telling me the other day — I just don’t make them ‘for money’, but I get very well paid in the energy of people, in the exchanges I have on an everyday basis, in invitations for a dinner or a drink.[37]
Whether this model is an ethical one or not is debatable. Rouch, for example, shared with all his collaborators royalties from his films. Paul Henley in his article Postcards at the service of the Imaginary (2010) describes how Rouch’s subjects became future collaborators, and how many of them through the royalties they received were able to open a business and improve their life situation. Moon, conversely, even though is sharing the films under Creative Commons reaps benefits, other than a financial one, that mostly concentrates on him (like recognition, invitations to travel, exhibition spaces). Although it could be argued that the musician’s recorded benefit from the exposure that the films give them.
So far, this hasn’t been a problem as the network of collaborators he built around him seem to derive trust from his collaborative process. The term refers to a sense that the people who helped him develop the films for Petites Planètes, expect him to maintain the moral obligations (freely sharing, local musicians, and creative commons) that are implicit in the project. As he balances between the impasse of minor and major, this might eventually become problematic if Moon is unable to continue in this in-between state and decides to use his material for purposes that betray this trust. For now, the fact that he walked away from directing videos to large record labels and dedicated himself to Petites Planètes gave him the “street cred” that he has maintained so far.
Petites Planètes importance in Moon’s career will be further explored in the thesis, for now, this section focuses in defining the period where the concept of becoming minor was one of the primary key points. If with the Take Away Shows the director has to force the musicians into a situation where they can shed their identities, in Petites Planètes there is no such need. The notion of the director is of someone who collaborates, someone who is integral to what is being filmed but that has as much control as who is in front of the camera:
The notion of “director” is overstated and many things escape to our direction during the process of creation. It would have to be about letting it go as much as possible in the recording process, being open to the accident and play with it. In that configuration, the exchange with the “subjects” is obviously on a very different level. I often show my ignorance of the result as a first contact with the people I will film. The result will clearly then be a “collaboration” with all the impromptu in it. A collaboration born from the refusal of power.[38]
Híbridos (2014–2018) — Lifting the eyes
Híbridos is the latest project that Moon created in partnership with the director Priscilla Telmon. For three years Moon stayed in Brazil dedicating his time to explore the multiple manifestations of spirituality in the country, a big change in pace for someone who was always traveling around the world and working on multiple fronts. The project is composed of a feature-length documentary (released in 2017), a database where each ritual is a separate film (93 films total), an audiovisual installation and also a live-cinema experience.
The feature follows the aesthetic line Moon has developed so far. Moon and Telmon over the course of 90 minutes explore rituals from the diverse tapestry of spirituality that forms Brazil, with no explanation or descriptions. From Candomblé to Indigenous rituals, from the New Christian Evangelical movements to Ayahuasca ceremonies, all of these are concatenated together creating a fragile line that connects them. The bodies merge into a moving mass of feet and hands during the celebration of Círio de Nazaré[39] and soon are made whole again in Umbanda’s “terreiro.”
In the live-cinema version, the directors edit and mix the footage with the sounds in a live performance and sometimes with live music being played as well. In film festivals and wherever adequate, the feature documentary is followed by the live version. In the first year of release, interestingly, Híbridos Live gained more space than the feature and was able to take the project to places such as MoMA and the Barbican.[40] As the topic of the film is the manifestation of spirituality in its most diverse forms, some unexpected venues became interested in the live version like the Église St Merry (Paris), the San Damiano Church (NYC) and the Mekudeshet Sacred Art Festival (Jerusalem).[41]
Híbridos consolidates a growing interest in religion, rituals, trance and possession that was already present in Petites Planètes (in 2012 Moon made a series on Sufi rituals in Chechnya and the trance rituals of Java). At that time though, this was a tangential subtopic to local folklore. Híbridos finishes this move from local folklore to solely focus on how sound and music are integrated into religious practices and its relation to the body.
The section in this thesis The Encounter-Image, is dedicated exclusively to Híbridos, where I will go into details. However, for now, most importantly, this project, is the moment in A King Listens where Moon emerges from the darkness with the ocular reconfigured anew. Híbridos marks the opening of the eyes. A new image that was conceived in the Take Away Shows, gestated during Petites Planètes and that now is born. Its umbilical cord freshly cut. Still an infant, still not being able to walk alone, but already a separate entity born anew from sound and vision.
From Mathieu Saura to Vincent Moon — with the chronicle of the betrayal mapped out and the king having emerged from the darkness, it is time to shift from the macro narrative to study the details that make Moon’s path relevant to the progress of an otocentric cinema.
Continue reading Listening: overcoming the limitations of a visual model of thought or go the INDEX.
[1] Calvino, Italo. 1998. Under the Jaguar Sun. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 40.
[2] “…con esa media luna de acero le rubriqué en la cara, para siempre, una media luna de sangre”.
[3] Moon, V. (2010, March 11). Vincent Moon: Interview. Retrieved 08 15, 2015, from Prefix Mag: http://www.prefixmag.com/features/interview/37989/
[4] This question can also be rephrased as “how to film music?” A recurrent question in cinema that is explored in Kracauer’s Film Theory (1960, pp.146,151,152) and Michel Chion’s Film, a Sound Art (2009, pp. 413–414)
[5] The titles in bold will later appear in this research.
[6] Cohen, J. (1999, May 5). Jem Cohen. (T. Minarchick, Editor) Retrieved June 22, 2018, from Ink19: https://ink19.com/1999/05/magazine/interviews/jem-cohen
[7] According to Variety magazine: http://variety.com/2008/digital/features/christophe-abric-and-mathieu-saura-1117985049/ and to https://www.francemusique.fr/emissions/label-pop/christophe-abric-fondateur-de-la-blogotheque-25562
[8] iTunes store would have a specific section for “Videocasts”, a term that fell into disuse as Youtube consolidated and made obsolete having to download the videos to watch.
[9] The crowdsourced dictionary “Urban Dictionary” ironically defines the Takeaway Shows as “an impromptu concert performed usually while walking down a street. Usually performed in France, always performed by an indie band. If it’s a true take away show, it will involve some obscure instruments.”
[10] KOORSGARD, Mathias B. (2017) Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music. [Kindle Book]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com
[11]Morera, S. (2010, October 1). La creación de Vincent Moon (La Blogothèque). Retrieved from Transit: http://cinentransit.com/la-creacion-de-vincent-moon-la-blogotheque/ (Personal translation to English)
[12] Grossberg, L. (1993). The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Postmodernity and Authenticity. In S. Frith, A. Goodwin, & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Sound & Vision: The Music Video Reader. Abigdon: Routledge, p. 35
[13] Ibid.
[14] Moon, V. (2008, March 31). R.E.M. Retrieved 11 15, 2017, from La Blogothèque: http://en.blogotheque.net/2008/03/31/r-e-m-en/ (The translated English version of the blog post doesn’t explicitly state who wrote it but the original in French is signed by Vincent Moon)
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, Into the Woods, Música de Bolso in Brazil, Sony Ericsson’s Copenhagen X Sessions, Watch Listen Tell, They Shoot Music Don’t They from Vienna — are just some of the examples.
[18] Vincent Moon has a Vision (2012). [YouTube Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHiZRChxkc
[19] The association that Mladen Dolar makes in his article What’s a Voice? (DOI: 10.11606/issn.2237–1184.v0i18p79–90) between the woman’s voice in A King Listens and the sirens in Odysseus strengthens this anecdote of Moon being unable to resist the call of sound.
[20] Moon, V. (2014, March 11). In Conversation: Filmmaker Vincent Moon and Hung Tran of The Onion Cellar. (H. Tran, Interviewer) Retrieved May 26, 2018, from https://www.andofotherthings.com/2014/03/11/conversation-filmmaker-vincent-moon-hung-tran-onion-cellar/
[21] Vincent Moon — What’s In My Bag? (2011). [YouTube Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=7wlxzNnNcek
[22] Liner Notes for the film quoted in Gehman, C. (1997). Stateless. Millenium Film Journal, 30/31(Fall).
[23] It was his first recorded as the footage is from 2006, although it came out in 2008.
[24] Vincent Moon and Nana Vasconcelos: The world’s hidden music rituals. (2014) [Youtube Video]. TED. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nZqiPLCvM4
[25] Marker, C. quoted in Stevens, I. (2014). Isabel Stevens on Chris Marker’s “Petite Planète”. Retrieved January 23, 2016, from Aperture: https://aperture.org/blog/isabel-stevens-chris-markers-petite-planete/
[26] Marker, C. quoted in Geneix, N. (2014). LA COLLECTION «PETITE PLANÈTE» (SEUIL) — «SOUS LA DIRECTION DE» CHRIS MARKER, 1954–1964. Retrieved February 2, 2016, from Chris Marker: https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/petite-planete/ (My translation from the original in French)
[27] Ibid. (Personal translation from the original in French).
[28] Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Egypt, Poland, Iceland, Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Sardinia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Philippines, Croatia, Ethiopia, Russia, Uruguay, Peru, Caucasus, Vietnam and Ukraine
[29] Which is present in A Thousand Plateaus but that assumes the central spotlight in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986)
[30] Vincent Moon and Nana Vasconcelos: The world’s hidden music rituals. (2014) [YouTube Video]. TED. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nZqiPLCvM4
[31] Secor, A., & Linz, J. (2017). Becoming Minor. D: Society and Space, 35(4), 568–573. doi:10.1177/0263775817710075
[32] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: toward a minor literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 18.
[33]Rosenblum, E., & Grytter, C. (2013). From the Editors. ART/E/FACT, 3. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/artefactpub/docs/issue_3/1?ff=true&e=3746210/6638693
[34] The old one, from 2013, can still be accessed here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130528091503/http://www.vincentmoon.com/about.php
[35] Wolfe, C. K. (1992). The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. New York: HarperCollins. (On the other hand, in a turn of events, the electronic musician Moby sampled Lomax’s recording in his music Honey and turned them into platinum selling records).
[36] Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, p. 74.
[37] Moon, V. (2011, November 27). WATCHING TOM ZÉ WAS LIKE WATCHING ME MOVING IN SPACE: AN INTERVIEW WITH VINCENT MOON. (R. Slater, Interviewer) Retrieved July 15, 2014, from https://soundsandcolours.com/subjects/film/watching-tom-ze-was-like-watching-me-moving-in-space-an-interview-with-vincent-moon-10813/
[38] MOON quoted in Rosenblum, E., & Grytter, C. (2013). From the Editors. ART/E/FACT, 3. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/artefactpub/docs/issue_3/1?ff=true&e=3746210/6638693
[39] A catholic religious procession in Belém do Pará that reunites over 2 million people.
[40] Although at the time of this writing it’s still early to compare in the long run the feature and live version. There are two distributors already for the theatrical release in Brazil and France.
