Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.

"Imperative to catch on the big screen, Stephen Kijak's Scott Walker: 30 Century Man opens today for one week only at the IFC Center in New York." NP Thompson at the House Next Door: "There are other fleeting, theatrical engagements in the offing for early '09 before this documentary, long denied to American audiences though it did smashingly well in the UK, settles onto DVD. But having first seen it 18 months ago in a real movie theater and then again last week on my laptop, I can state with certainty that Kijak's collage-like approach to recreating 1960s pop music history, and tracing its influence through the subsequent decades, loses something in immediacy and intimacy on the small box. And the abstract visualizations that Kijak devises - soft-focused, delicately hallucinatory mosaics in orange and gold that feel all of a piece with Walker's era and sensibility - cry out for the widest panorama."

Updated through 12/20.

"To say that Walker is to pop music what Joyce was to literature perhaps implies undue import, but the comparison is helpful in that one must allow oneself to listen to, and enjoy, The Drift in the same way one might read, and enjoy, Ulysses," writes David Lowery in Hammer to Nail. "Stephen Kijak provides a fine point of entry with his documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man... For all its biographical accounting, 30 Century Man is at its best when Kijak follows Walker into the studio to observe the process behind The Drift."

"To its credit, 30 Century Man is seriously focused on defining and promoting appreciation for the music itself," writes Leah Churner in Reverse Shot. "Much of it is organized into a 'listening party' format, in which various musicians are shot in close-up as they hear recordings of Walker's music, providing commentary and some interesting facial expressions: David Bowie, Sting, Brian Eno, certain members of Radiohead, Ute Lemper, Damon Albarn and Allison 'electroclash' Goldfrapp, who praises Walker for 'not hiding behind fashion or rhythm.' The long span of releases from the Walker Brothers' first single, Pretty Girls Everywhere (1965), to Tilt (1995) provides plenty of conversational fodder.... I thought 30 Century Man would provide some kind of an experiential inroad to his persona, something persuasive and winning - a hook, in short. I forgot hooks are for pop songs, not trips to Hell. Smell you later, Orpheus."

IndieWIRE interviews Kijak.

Update, 12/18: Diedrich Diederichsen in Artforum:

Walker's own take on his artistic persona is evident in his songs, with their homages to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Genet and their evocations of physical violence and primal distress, but his legend is one of involuntary periods of silence, of losing his first audience and never finding another, of the clash of avant-garde ambitions with the world of pop music, and of the soul of Xenakis trapped in a boy-group body. This legend was surely not willed, let alone deliberately constructed, by Walker himself—which makes it all the more powerful....

We do not find out anything about Walker's view of the world or what drives him in Kijak's film, however. What we are dealing with here is a fan dedicated to presenting his hero as a visionary genius.

Update, 12/20: "In a movie that avoids examining Mr Walker's personal history, there are hints of a man struggling with chronic depression and problems with alcohol, but they are only hints," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "No major personal relationships are mentioned or even alluded to. The music speaks for itself. And the fragments offered from Mr Walker's albums Tilt, from 1995, and The Drift, from 2007, accompanied by abstract visual designs, are, in a word, haunting."

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 1:50 PM