“I feel it’s greatest if we erase it,” says the interviewer to a person offscreen.
In 1969, on the finish of a European tour, Thelonious Monk made a ultimate cease in France and filmed a particular with French State Tv. Although the station shot extensively, the footage by no means aired. Actually, it was by no means edited. As a substitute it remained archived; solely small segments of Monk taking part in tunes had been later launched on DVD by Mosaic Information.
For Rewind & Play, French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis accesses these exceptional reels (greater than two hours), remodeling the taping with Monk into an introspective essay on utterance, articulation, and readability of speech, particularly because it pertains to assimilation and finessing one’s outward verbal expression for others, each sonic and verbal. On this case, an insidious racism is at play in interviewer Henri Renaud’s try to groom Monk for public consumption on French tv.
Because the movie opens, TV station personnel welcome Monk and his spouse, Nellie, to Paris in a prolonged preamble to the precise studio recording. The crew strikes with the musician from the airport to a automobile after which to a bar. A sort, heat Monk speaks little or no; Nellie, when on digicam, does a lot of the speaking. Monk smiles, smokes, eats an egg, pets a canine. The disconnect between what seems to be the studio’s try to siphon a few of his aura or genius by observing his each motion and Monk’s tangible disinterest in small speak, dialog fillers, and something however making music retains a lot of the work suspended: at all times circling, however by no means fairly arriving on the occasion till far later.
For the remainder of this lean 66-minute work, Rewind & Play walks us by means of a bafflingly clumsy set of takes and retakes during which White interviewer Renaud unsuccessfully tries to coax prolonged responses from a taciturn Monk. Regularly, Renaud asks questions twice, making an attempt to extract a extra suave reply than the matter-of-fact ones Monk gives, solely to then add his personal feedback, which come throughout as try to assemble a extra refined picture of Monk. This happens, as an illustration, when Renaud asks, “Are you able to say one thing in regards to the title ‘Crepuscule with Nellie’?” and Monk responds “She’s my spouse and the mom of my children”; or when Renaud presses Monk for extra info as to why he “put your grand piano within the kitchen?” “As a result of it was the biggest room. It was the one room the Baldwin grand would match.” When Monk does ship an extended reply, addressing a difficulty of fairness in pay, Renaud interprets Monk’s response into French, then says, “Bernard, I feel it’s greatest if we erase it.”
Watching and rewatching Rewind & Play, I saved serious about Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe and his meditations on archives and violence his e book Necropolitics: “to penetrate archival materials means to revisit traces.” Archives, as Mbembe goes on to say, are sometimes customary from “historic occasions submerged within the drive of shadow.” Archives accumulate and memorialize, however how a lot of that’s misremembering or is at the price of cultural erasure, or is reminiscence created by modifying or modifying out one other’s voice?
One of the compelling qualities of Rewind & Play is its presentation of the “traces.” Viewers see what we weren’t meant to — the embarrassing and, at instances, cringeworthy footage of a state tv equipment fumbling by means of its efforts to acculturate one of many century’s nice musical geniuses. With Gomis’s association of footage, viewers bear witness to Monk as he subtly challenges his interlocuter, in addition to the picture that white Parisian tv tries to assemble, the method of its falling aside, and in the end Monk’s effortlessly revolutionary compositions.
