A documentary inside the head of genius: we can be David Bowie... just for one day

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The oldest aspiration of the documentary in general, and of the music documentary in particular, is to make the viewer participate not in a story but in the experience that gives it meaning.

to give a larger example, is not so much the ethnographic account of an existence condemned by ice, but also a shared experience.

Nanuk, through the eyes of Robert J. Flaherty, does not tell us about his life but rather makes us feel it.

And the same goes for, for example and for excellence,

, the DA Pennebaker film that documented Bob Dylan's British tour in 1965.

The only wish of the teacher (or teachers, adding the filmmaker and the poet) was to walk alongside the very young

and sing with him, and smoke with him, and get lost with him.

And maybe meet.

Brett Morgen

is so clear about this concept that he insists on it with almost suicidal naivety.

takes the title of one of the cult songs included in

to propose a film that is actually a journey.

But not anywhere, but at the very center of the imaginary of the chameleon musician who fulfilled that eternal aspiration of alchemy to make a universe whose center is in each of the points on its surface.

It is simply about translating the verse of '

' in the only possible way: from '

to simply '

.

At one point in the film, an unidentified character presumes to be Ziggy.

He does it in front of the camera and instead of declaring his love to his idol, he declares it to himself.

That was the sacred potion.

Brett Morgen's new work becomes strong there: in the distant possibility of making the viewer feel the certainty of being what they want to be as the only possible way to approach the musician.

Unlike his previous documentaries on the figure of

this time nothing is told.

Or very little.

The idea is none other, it has already been said, that living Bowie inside rather than just next to him.

Of being him in a radical way.

'Moonage daydream'

is an unclassifiable film due to its excess.

It is not biographical.

It cannot even be strictly considered a documentary.

and spread over two and a half hours of footage that run through the screen mainly through images of concerts.

The sound by Paul Massey and producer Tony Visconti is simply there to vibrate in its most literal sense.

An image of David Bowie in 'Moonage daydream'. EL MUND

But what you want to explore is a total Bowie who transcends music to be everything, to be anything.

Bowie, in fact, was, in addition to being a musician, an actor, a painter, a sculptor, a script writer, a heavy smoker, a provocateur, an activist... Bowie speaks through some interviews and the screen explodes in a kind of melting pot that also refers to the evident of archive images than

of the fairs.

Consequently, the film does not attempt to explain who Bowie was.

Nor does he want Bowie himself to explain himself.

Through his statements what emerges is basically a nice guy especially gifted for irony who refuses to be locked into a definition.

All of his interviewers fail.

he blurts out at the journalist's insistence.

"I'm a collector of characters," he is heard saying on another occasion.

A good part of the narrated interludes of

in long monologues of supposed philosophical inspiration that illuminate as well as disconcert, induce laughter as well as yawn.

Far from Morgen's intention to sanctify the character.

In a display of refutation or denial of himself, always so close to Bowie himself, a good part of the film is about something else, it shows other worlds, it refers to a universe that is necessarily strange.

And so, from images of films from

, passing through the most obvious ones of Méliès's moon, they are summoned in a kind of spell that is as extravagant as it is enjoyable.

and, instead of exception,

by Robert Wiene, complete the outrage that also wants to be indefiniteness and fugue.

Pure Bowie would say more of an impure.

His own movies --with

or

in the center-- appear at the same time as his theatrical performances such as

and always with the camera fascinated by a close-up with magnificent, magnetic and polychrome eyes.

The only more intimate or autobiographical brushstrokes stop at the figure of his wife

(with whom he spent the last 25 years of his life) and, in a very special way, his brother.

taught him, he says, what he had to read and what he had to listen to.

After going through the Armed Forces, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital for life due to schizophrenia.

That is the only time that the film that does not want to be so challenges the viewer from sadness.

And there also increases the desire to get closer, if you want a little more, to Bowie.

"Bowie can only be experienced,"

says the director.

And indeed, that's what it's all about, feeling Nanuk's cold, Dylan's chaos and the distant possibility of being anything, which is the way of being Bowie.

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