The Soul of a Man: "The Blues according to Wim".

The Soul of a Man Wim Wenders, Director 2003, 110 m.

Part of the series, The Blues Martin Scorsese, Exec. Prod.

Wenders's statement (I) that his film is "more like a poem than a documentary" is a fair description of the form and style of his recent film, The Soul of a Man, produced as part of the American PBS television series, The Blues (2). Indeed, as an anthropologist and filmmaker, what I found most refreshing about this film is how this renowned auteur of the cinema poetically blends fact and fiction, breathing new life into the all-too-often-flattened pitch of historical documentary. And, unlike many ethnographic and documentary filmmakers, Wenders is not afraid to explore his medium: his is informative and cinematic.

With some recent forays into more experimental forms of visual ethnography, a daring bundle of filmmakers have transgressed the orthodoxy and sobriety of documentary film, finding performativity, re-enactment, and scripted scenarios to be an inventive means by which to impart ethnographic knowledge, thus favoring evocation over analytic description. All the same, it would be pretentious to regard Wenders as a 'formal' ethnographer. However, considering his notable career as a director of feature length fiction and documentary films, he remains a producer of cultural artifacts, and therefore--if one wishes to subscribe to Bill Nichols's (3) idea that all films are, to a greater or lesser degree, documentaries, or Karl Heider's (4) keen notion of the "naive ethnography", i.e. films that unintentionally inform us about culture--his recent work articulately comments upon issues of race, gender, and the political economy of the music business. We should also be aware that Wenders's recent film is not his first venture into the amorphous zone of 'documentary'. Nick's Film--Lightning Over Water (1981), inventively and sensitively documented the cancer-stricken struggle of famous aging Hollywood filmmaker Nicholas Ray as he collaborated with Wenders to produce a record of his final days. The wide critical acclaim attributed Wenders's Buena Vista Social Club (1999), once again proved his mastery of nonfiction filmmaking. Both films demonstrate Wenders's keen sensibility and sensitivity to the polemics of representation, and his artful ability to circumvent some of the redolent pitfalls of many a documentary (and ethnographic) film, such as the essentializing of cultural phenomena, and assumed positions of neutrality and transparency on the part of the filmmaker. His most recent film. The Soul of a Man, is similarly self-aware: a vantage point and admonition that is fairly rare amongst documentary films that deal with the past.

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Laurence Fishburne, serving as the reflective ferryman for the audience, exhumes the voice of Blind Willie Johnson (a 1930s-era southern, black, blind bluesman) who takes us on an animated journey into the early days of American blues. Shot mostly in black and white with stylized, slyly self-referential "re-enactments", these speculative filmic vignettes (shot with a hand-cranked 35mm camera) are paired by the director with recordings from the original music sessions in order to evoke and illustrate a sense of the personae, emotions, and circumstances that influenced and surrounded some of the earliest audio recordings of what were later to be called "The Blues". These choreographed images and scenes stand in for the "actual" motion picture footage from this time and place. This manner of performative re-enactment works as an evocative means of lending a sense of "being there", hinting at the subtle and unspoken inspirations--in this instance, of making music--in a fashion similar to some of the enticing film works by Tracey Moffatt, Marlon Riggs, and Marlon Fuentes.

On that note, as the film suggests, the undeniably organic birth of these songs serves to demonstrate how such mainstays of a genre are, originally, pre-conscious (i.e. "that Blues sound"). And further, how taxonomy and style are really just self-restrictive, imposed boundaries that selectively draw from the essential elements of an art form; sadly, turning personal expression into a commodity. The same can be said for films of a documentative and ethnographic nature that ascetically subscribe to the dogma of realism, instead of being reflective of and responsive to the constituent elements of their genesis (i.e. the pain, the desire) and further--like the poet/bluesman/artist--use such emotions not only as their point of departure, but as the binding elements of the work itself.

The layering of Wenders's film is a seamless weave of original musical recordings married with re-enactments, nuanced with historical and biographical tidbits. Presentday interpretations of blues classics from Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J. B. Lenoir--performed by T. Bone Burnett, Lou Reed, Shemekia Copeland, Nick Cave, Bonnie Raitt and others--demonstrate just how foundational these early bluesmen were to a wide variety of contemporary musical forms. Raitt's modern-day reinterpretation of Skip James's lyric "I'd rather be the Devil, than be that woman's man" to "I'd rather be the Devil, than be a woman to that man" is a subtle flip-of-the-lyric, that reflects changes in gender dynamics over the past seventy years, not only in regards to American society in general, but--as Raitt's success has demonstrated--within the music industry as well. Noticing the shift in gender should be as obvious as the shift in race, but this latter transposition is, unfortunately, never formally dealt with within the film.

Micro-criticisms aside, Wenders's recent foray into "experimental documentary" is a success: an inspired composition mixing fiction and nonfiction, intoned with allusional social commentary on the prejudices and injustices encountered by early African American musicians, which together equally inform and entertain the viewer. The film breaks from the mold of historical documentary and the MTV-styled 'rockumentary' (genres that are so often played with a rather prescriptive and formulaic hand--just strumming the chords, as it were). Instead, Wenders's film--like the contemporary musical renditions he has gathered herein--is not so much a cover (of blues tunes, or historical documentary) but more akin, in spirit and form, to the original: the initial structure is acknowledged but new territory is forged, resulting in a resonant opus of artistic cinematic and musical expression with social relevance.