In 1977, Pink Floyd was one of the biggest bands in the world. Fresh off the massive success of their albums, "Dark Side of the Moon," "Wish You Here" and "Animals," the band went from playing small clubs to huge stadiums. This new found popularity, however, created a number of artistic limitations for a band used to creating an intimate, psychedelic experience. The band's main songwriter and creative force, Roger Waters, often complained that audiences in these stadiums paid no attention to the music, electing to set off fireworks, indulging in drunken behavior, or even mindlessly screaming during performances. Water's frustration came to head one night as an audience member scaled the barricade in front of the stage at one of the shows. In a fit of rage, Waters spat in the man's face and called him a "swine."
Feeling unable to meaningfully connect to his audience, Waters sunk into a period of depressed introspection, contemplating why he had grown to hate performing, opting instead to build a figurative wall between himself and the audience. The result was Pink Floyd's "The Wall," an album exploring Water's own isolated youth, lonely experiences as a rock star, and emotional meltdown. The album came with a live show that physically manifested the story behind the concept by building a wall on stage. The plot of "The Wall" follows the life a rock star named Pink (half of Pink Floyd) who turns into a disaffected, fascist demagogue, spewing the hate of his inner demons upon the audience. As in Water's own life, Pink loses his father to World War II, is coddled by a controlling mother, abused into conformity by teachers, and lost in meaningless sex and failed relationships. Pink creates a figurative wall around himself (made physical in the show) and wallows in drug induced isolation and self pity.
In 2010, Waters resurrected the production with stunning updated technology and a new perspective that tied his themes of building walls and personal feelings of isolation as a way of describing modern world politics. His story became a larger narrative of a world separated by war, political ideology, religion, wealth inequality. For Waters, the concept of walls goes far beyond individuals and into global institutions and nation states as well as social media, all of which govern the life of people in the twenty-first century.
Having attended three of Waters' remarkable performances, I knew that he and co-director, Sean Evans, had a formidable task with their new documentary film, "Roger Waters The Wall Live." They had to capture the biggest concert spectacle in rock and roll history, a show that was physically gargantuan in size and teeming with complex and meaningful visuals giving life to a master performance by Roger Waters and his band. I was worried that a film could not do justice to a concert that itself was an experience. Could the film be cut in such a way to include all the perspectives of the stage, each with their own special vantage? Given that the enormous scope of the show was a defining factor, could a film demonstrate the largeness of a show that donned a 40 foot high wall spanning an entire stadium yet preserving the intimacy of Water's performance? Finally, could a film capture the meaning behind the album and Water's reinvention of it?
The concert footage is INCREDIBLE, easily the best filmed and recorded concert in the history of rock music. I actually felt chills watching the film, as if I were there seeing the amazing performance all over again. It brilliantly captures the most impressive part of the concert, which is that it manages to be both large in scale yet very intimate. One of the great ironies of Water's new production is that "The Wall" grew out of his frustrations with connecting to a massive stadium audience. Yet, his show is strikingly intimate because of the large scale of the wall projections and use of special effects that satisfy both the front row and the last seat up in the grandstands. The movie seamlessly connects beautiful, long tracking shots, presenting a wall that dwarfs an audience in the tens of thousands with closeup shots of the superb band. The cameras show every interesting angle one could fathom, including shots from behind Waters and ones that move back and forth on both sides of the wall, showing all the interworkings of the concert. All of this footage is a fitting and celebratory document to rock's grandest spectacle.
Feeling unable to meaningfully connect to his audience, Waters sunk into a period of depressed introspection, contemplating why he had grown to hate performing, opting instead to build a figurative wall between himself and the audience. The result was Pink Floyd's "The Wall," an album exploring Water's own isolated youth, lonely experiences as a rock star, and emotional meltdown. The album came with a live show that physically manifested the story behind the concept by building a wall on stage. The plot of "The Wall" follows the life a rock star named Pink (half of Pink Floyd) who turns into a disaffected, fascist demagogue, spewing the hate of his inner demons upon the audience. As in Water's own life, Pink loses his father to World War II, is coddled by a controlling mother, abused into conformity by teachers, and lost in meaningless sex and failed relationships. Pink creates a figurative wall around himself (made physical in the show) and wallows in drug induced isolation and self pity.
In 2010, Waters resurrected the production with stunning updated technology and a new perspective that tied his themes of building walls and personal feelings of isolation as a way of describing modern world politics. His story became a larger narrative of a world separated by war, political ideology, religion, wealth inequality. For Waters, the concept of walls goes far beyond individuals and into global institutions and nation states as well as social media, all of which govern the life of people in the twenty-first century.
Having attended three of Waters' remarkable performances, I knew that he and co-director, Sean Evans, had a formidable task with their new documentary film, "Roger Waters The Wall Live." They had to capture the biggest concert spectacle in rock and roll history, a show that was physically gargantuan in size and teeming with complex and meaningful visuals giving life to a master performance by Roger Waters and his band. I was worried that a film could not do justice to a concert that itself was an experience. Could the film be cut in such a way to include all the perspectives of the stage, each with their own special vantage? Given that the enormous scope of the show was a defining factor, could a film demonstrate the largeness of a show that donned a 40 foot high wall spanning an entire stadium yet preserving the intimacy of Water's performance? Finally, could a film capture the meaning behind the album and Water's reinvention of it?
The concert footage is INCREDIBLE, easily the best filmed and recorded concert in the history of rock music. I actually felt chills watching the film, as if I were there seeing the amazing performance all over again. It brilliantly captures the most impressive part of the concert, which is that it manages to be both large in scale yet very intimate. One of the great ironies of Water's new production is that "The Wall" grew out of his frustrations with connecting to a massive stadium audience. Yet, his show is strikingly intimate because of the large scale of the wall projections and use of special effects that satisfy both the front row and the last seat up in the grandstands. The movie seamlessly connects beautiful, long tracking shots, presenting a wall that dwarfs an audience in the tens of thousands with closeup shots of the superb band. The cameras show every interesting angle one could fathom, including shots from behind Waters and ones that move back and forth on both sides of the wall, showing all the interworkings of the concert. All of this footage is a fitting and celebratory document to rock's grandest spectacle.
The movie intertwines the massive concert with scenes of a road trip that Waters and company takes through some European battlefields to pay reverence to his father and grandfather, both killed in the world wars. Some of this footage works brilliantly. The movie is bookended by moving scenes of Waters going to the graves of his family and softly playing the trumpet, creating a perfect tie-in with the trumpet used in the concert. Waters even cries at one point reading the letter sent to his mother documenting his father's death. Other scenes, however, seemed unnecessary, inarticulate and even staged. One particularly excruciating scene involves Waters at a bar yammering about his story to a French bartender who doesn't speak English. Another has Waters and a friend driving in a car and talking about meaningless non-sequiturs. Despite the fact that Waters has been very articulate about his motivations behind "The Wall" and its new production, he has few interesting tidbits to say in the film. I think that the movie would have been much better in cutting many of the documentary scenes or intermixing silent versions of them with the concert. To be honest, I found myself longing for the concert footage when it wasn't on the screen.
"Roger Waters The Wall Live" certainly sets a new standard for filming a concert both in sound and film production. While I left the theater again inspired and bewitched by Water's work, a part of me couldn't help but be disappointed in the direction of modern music. Who today has the talent or ambition to stage a show of this physical and intellectual magnitude? With the exception of Green Day who produced "American Idiot," a story of disaffected youth in George W's America, most rock stars today think small and play small. While the pop star du jour may have the pyrotechnics and staging, they don't have the ambition to make a complete, conceptual work and contribute to a larger cultural discourse. It is crucial that a film document "Roger Waters The Wall Live" because it is a bar by which serious artists seeking cultural importance should measure themselves.
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