Oh, David Bowie

One more ear/eye/brain candy from Beat Film Festival was a movie dedicated to David Bowie.
"David Bowie: Five Years" by Francis Whately shows Bowie's transformation from Ziggy Stardust to the serious soul singer, from Thin White Duke to the Major Tom and finally to the one of the most expansive singers EMI ever sign up a contract with. First of all the movie is indeed interesting for rare documentary videos and interviews with people who followed Bowie during all these years (priceless realisation how modest is one of my heros Brain Eno). It's so full of everything that only in the end I realized that I haven't seen real, contemporary Bowie in it, only his voice and old documentaries. It has so much drive in it - from music, from Bowie personality, from incredible beat of energy that makes you feel from complitely useless creature to the happiest person living on earth. I love the feeling when you actually want to applaud in the cinema.
Yet, apart from all above, there was one amazing thing that I never knew about Bowie. His work on Broadway in "The Elephant Man".
Oh, dear! "goosebumps" (from 5'14'')

"Turning"

I wish the trailer could show more so I won't have to struggle with words and just say - look at it, it's beautiful. But it's quite wordless and imageless compare to the movie itself. I assume even the authors couldn't put it together to present the movie short but fully. So I excuse myself for a struggle I gone through just to start writing about it.
There is nothing left to it when the light goes off and you hear the music for the first time. Don't know how will it be watching this movie at home, in the middle of the day, surrounded by real life. Probably then I would get less emotional and more reasonable and will take a closer look at the very important issues of gender and personal identity that are actually the main for all performance.
This documentary, music, women telling their stories bring up so many questions and ideas that no brain can handle immidiately. That's why on my part I just decide to focus on the beauty of visual representation. And it's a beauty indeed. The pictures of women were made by two cameras and immidiately projected on the screen. Anotony was performing the song that in his idea reflects the personality of a woman present on a stage. These images, changed and transformed by two angles camera work, together with music present heartstoping mosaic of pictures. Even though almost all of the heros telling the stories of their lives between music performances, you see them in a make up room, laughing and sleeping on the bus, when they are on the stage - there is nothing left of real life. There are only stories created of bodies, looks, music and lyric. This performance is such a strong visualisation of how the big issues of gender, rase, skin color, religion becomes equal against the fragile beauty of life and music.
"I wanted to matter. Because I was so judged one of the things I wanted the most was never to be judged. And I wanted to be beautiful."(c)