Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Star Scholar Contribution

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2014): Music in Documentary

Notes on the Rockumentary Renaissance

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14288/cinephile.v10i1.198034
Submitted
March 25, 2023
Published
2014-06-01

Abstract

2009 saw the release of All Tomorrow’s Parties (Jonathan Caouette), a feature-length film documenting the history of the acclaimed artist-curated annual music festival of the same name on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. The film was compiled and curated by a young filmmaker, Caouette, who burst onto the scene several years earlier with an autobiographical documentary (Tarnation, 2003) made with iMovie, Apple’s entry-level video editing software. All Tomorrow’s Parties is comprised of footage shot over the course of a decade on a range of media formats— including Super 8mm, 16mm, DV, and 35mm still-photography — by a mix of professional filmmakers, amateur videographers, and attendees of the yearly festival and its satellite events. Funded in part and “released” by internationally recognized music label Warp Records, the film premiered in the 24 Beats Per Second program of the annual South by Southwest music festival, secured theatrical distribution, appeared at special screening engagements featuring live musical performances from bands featured in the film, streamed online for free at a leading new music website (Pitchfork Media), and appeared on DVD and Blu-Ray home video formats at the end of 2010. Five years after its release, there is still no better example of the life-cycle and vibrancy of the contemporary rockumentary genre than All Tomorrow’s Parties with its flow across multitudinous creative, cultural, and industrial networks emblematic of our contemporary moment of (trans)media convergence. Moreover, there is no better evidence in support of a proposition I have offered elsewhere: rockumentary is an aesthetically rich and commercially viable documentary genre notable for its visual style, innovation in the area of film sound and image technology, and the ways in which it organizes a complex system of socio-cultural and industrial interactions (Baker 7). The genre occupies a resonant place within larger histories of film and popular music culture and directly impacts contemporary audiovisual works organized around popular music. The ever-growing number of media objects in theatres, online, and at home invested in the documentary representation of popular music suggest we are in the midst of the genre’s expansion and resurgence.