Editor’s Note: Normally this week, Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston would be down in Austin for South-By-Southwest’s film festival, catching as many premieres as he can in between tacos and fun walks down a crowded 6th Street. But like last year, SXSW 2022 is a virtual edition, so he’s at home like the rest of us. Luckily, he’s still watching all the films worth seeing, and reviewing them in our film section; keep it locked to our continuing coverage as the fest unfolds.
Given the heights that Andrew Dominik achieves with This Much I Know to Be True, his second documentary created in collaboration with Australian warrior poet/singer-songwriter Nick Cave, the comparison I’m about to make will inevitably seem trite as fuck, but here goes nothing. Once upon a time, back when “The Scientist” was still a recent Coldplay single, I remember seeing some advertisement pitching the idea of a “private” concert experience — I think it was a dot com where one could go to watch nascent 280p videos of Bush concerts — but the idea has always stuck with me, especially when it came to cinematically capturing private yet public performance without making it feel empty or too much like a music video. Plenty have tried, and most have failed, given that the most disliked sections of The Last Waltz are the ones in which Scorsese just put The Band in a black box and got Emmylou and the Staples Sisters to feature. It’s hard to quantify the impact that an audience has on concert films, supplanting the inherent lack of enthusiasm that one might have gathered among churchmice in a quiet theatrical crowd or when you’re watching a film alone, at home, hearing the pressure in your head like you’re a John Cage test subject in-between numbers.
This is a very roundabout way to say that Dominik has cracked the code or at least has it figured out better than any of his predecessors in the genre. In practice, the film operates like his original plan for One More Time with Feeling, his prior documentary with Cave, which was thrown out the window once Cave’s son tragically passed away during filming, which was to try and capture the Bad Seeds’ recording session for their record Skeleton Tree as a form of studio concert performance. Life threw a different set of curveballs at both filmmaker and subject, thanks to the pandemic — Cave’s are more obvious, in that his tour for Ghosteen was totally canceled and allowed for the space for him and collaborator Warren Ellis to compose a new record entitled Carnage; but Dominiak had his own problems, given the long and troubled production of Blonde, the third installment of what I’m coming to call the American Icons trilogy, which centers around Marilyn Monroe and is apparently too hot for Netflix to touch. Needless to say, both had time on their hands, and it made a certain amount of sense for them to collaborate on another project as a sort of stopgap for things lost. Hence, a concert film.
The dimensions of the space that Dominik is working with here, a warehouse or former factory with weathered walls, allows him to use his camera freely. Dolly tracks litter the frame, fitting in as a natural accompaniment to the aesthetic of the pseudo-stage, and the layout allows for unconventional and interesting framing. Sometimes it’ll just be Cave and Ellis alone, the former humming into a mic or sitting behind a piano, and the latter playing violin or messing with synthesizers (a wonder, given how long his fingernails are), other times they’ll be joined by a drummer and a compliment of strings and backup vocalists. He experiments with lenses and aspect ratios, oftentimes delving from one to another in the middle of a song, depending on where the emphasis at any given moment lies, but it’s the lighting that might be the most important factor. It’s a strobe-heavy production but it’s also rarely static, using the benefit of large-scale concert gaffing to its maximum on-screen advantage. The drifting qualities of the light and the tonal accompaniment that it provides — say, a rousing crescendo as Cave reaches the mountaintop in one of his numbers climaxing in a near white-out — are essential to the film’s success. The setting could hardly be improved, given that it’s a perfect complement to the somber synth-heavy tunes on Ghosteen and Carnage, and Dominik relishes the chance to capture the intimacy of the songs cinematically.
Most of the film is composed of these private performances, but what we do see of Cave in moments between numbers is fascinating. This Much I Know to Be True opens with him discussing a hobby — ceramic figurine-making — that he’d picked up in the interim, his joking way of heeding the U.K. government’s advice to “retrain” and learn new skills for a post-pandemic world. He walks us through a series of 20 figures, each an episode in the life of the devil, overflowing with a sad sympathy for the figure’s plight, lacking, aside from horns, the stereotypical power of the figure in populist Christian iconography. This is an appropriate introduction, given most recent era of Cave’s career has been one of radical empathy, beyond merely relating to the listener via song. He describes working on his comforting advice columns at the Red Hand Diaries blog, reaching out and given his fans a shoulder to cry on and words of comfort to offer them — an action that doesn’t wholly come naturally to him, which he has to actually work and wait to figure out what to say to them, to let the “better angels” rise up within him. As regular readers of his output know, his efforts are incredible and worthy of the energy, and they’re lovingly depicted here. But This Much I Know to Be True operates along the same ethos: an attempt to connect and join together after years apart, and it’s a soaring, sonorous achievement in concert filmmaking.