Documentary films about famous people are inevitably faced with the difficulty of having to fit their story between private and public life - nothing half and nothing whole?

The level of difficulty increases when it comes to telling about rock legend David Bowie, because this artist has constantly reinvented his public masks, each one different, each with its own history and style.

And he has almost never disclosed anything about his private life.

So how do you tell about Bowie in a documentary?

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

  • Follow I follow

The American director Brett Morgen has found an elegant solution for "Moonage Daydream": He lets Bowie speak for himself - and that exclusively.

There is no other voice that would classify or comment on anything, only the star himself tells about his life, his philosophy, his art.

The different facets of the artist

Morgen likes to approach his subjects with extensive in-depth research.

For Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015), he gained access to the archives of the late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain and worked closely with his family on the film.

In "Moonage Daydream" he took a similar approach.

Shortly after David Bowie died of cancer in 2016, which surprised many fans, Morgen began collecting material for his film.

For several years he worked his way through the official estate.

What he found he condensed into an attempt at representation that, like a kaleidoscope, intentionally splits up into the various facets of the artist.

Concert footage alternates with videos accompanying Bowie on his travels through Asia and the United States.

Early interviews on TV shows give a picture of the stumbling blocks the British press found in, say, Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's early 1970s alter ego.

A recording shows him facing a presenter who, visibly irritated, eyes the androgynous, glittery clothing and platform shoes and then asks, "Are those men's shoes or women's shoes?" "Those are shoe-shoes, silly," replies Bowie with a smile.

Just as little as he allowed himself to be provoked by the press and forced into explanations, he left just as little clue as to where David Robert Jones, as he was originally called, ended and where David Bowie began.

Creative solutions

"I'm a collector of personalities," he will say in "Moonage Daydream" as if to himself.

And calling Ziggy Stardust an archetype of the messiah rock star, inspired by Japanese kabuki theater and pantomime.

"The artist doesn't really exist, it's just a sliver of people's imaginations," is another Bowie quote director Morgen intersperses here.

135 minutes fills up tomorrow looking at each such sliver.

He finds creative solutions for all stories that do not have original image material.

When Bowie talks about his childhood, the difficult relationship with his mother and the mental problems of his beloved older half-brother, the narrowness of 1950s London emerges from photo collages.

There are no subtitles, no headings, no classification.

No speaker from the off takes the audience by the hand and explains something.

The images jump from interviews to concerts to travel shots to film clips in which Bowie was seen as an actor.

Always interrupted by quotes from the artist, which he recites as if in a soliloquy.

Nevertheless, nothing seems random, following a logic that is dictated by the content of the image and what Bowie says.

Only a vague chronology can be discerned, but even in this, director Morgen jumps forwards and backwards on the timeline.

A stream of images emerges, the intoxication of which one has to surrender to.

If you do it, then in the middle of this stream there is a dialogue between the viewer and the artist, in which you immediately want to jot down the most concise quotations and cleverest sentences about art, about creativity and about love.

Anyone wishing to say goodbye to Bowie personally can do so with this film - paradoxically, like everything to do with Bowie: a public event once again feels immediate and intimate.