All Tomorrow's Parties
- Posted: 26th Mar 2010
- Category: Reviews
Watching All Tomorrow's Parties is sort of like arriving at the end of a wildly debauched party - you're not quite sure what's going on, but it sure as hell looked like fun. The film really does drop you right into the midst of the chaos as you try to piece together fragments of evidence. The film catches you with the beat of the music addictively repeating over old Super 8 film and we cut between people and bands and the camera is right in there with the artists on stage and in with the crowd, jostling to the front with all the other cameras: so many cameras everywhere, seeing everything but no-one.
Describing the inclusive ethos of the All Tomorrow's Parties, this film takes you on a whirlwind tour of history in the making of a music festival. Shot predominately by fans, the film is a kaleidoscope of passion and memories.
The older footage used in this film does prompt you to think back to summers long gone, warm days and dreams of rose-tinted freedom. But this nostalgia brings with it a sadness, knowing that those days were not bliss, but knowing even so that what is normal now will be idolised in the future. We see these holiday camps in a haze of distance, but imagine that reality - it's never been as blissful as you might have hoped.
Like Belle and Sebastian songs, ATP invokes a wistfulness in the viewer that it's hard to recover from. It seems that Stuart Murdoch can bring this particular kind of beautiful melancholy to all his projects. Like the guilty pleasure of sitting up all night watching festival coverage when you're safe at home drinking milky tea in your bland suburban life, sometimes I found myself just a wee bit glad that I wouldn't be the one waking up tomorrow with a raging hangover. I couldn't quite convince myself to believe in the idyl of the holiday parks which ATP is famed for using as venues. But forget about cynicism, because this film showed that it really is all about the music, and getting the audience as close to the music as possible. We see passion oozing out of everyone on screen and it's certainly infectious.
Of course, Jonathon Caouette is an obvious choice for ATP as co-director, picking and choosing contrasting textures and sounds. The fragile narcissist that was evident in Tarnation is seen here, as the camera lingers unexpectedly and sometimes intrudes unexpectedly.
There's some fantastic imagery too - from John Cooper Clark reciting poetry over abstract images of a man's curled toes on a water slide, to some old footage of amazing 70s dancehall break-dancing, played under a dirty dance track. This is the stuff that makes this film - not when camera wanders aimlessly, hunting the party, but when the directors really work their footage and mash it up in ways that should be so wrong they create something new and surprising and exciting and delicious from it.
Directed by All Tomorrow's People and Jonathan Caouette, UK 2009, 82 mins
All Tomorrow's People is now available on DVD.
