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Nick Cave – 20.000 Days on Earth

A portrait of the singer and author Nick Cave on the fictitious 20.000th day of his life develops into an essay of the driving forces behind the artist´s creativity.

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When Nick Cave still lived in Berlin, he perhaps liked to go to the Turbine on Rosenheimer Straße. In any case someone who looked a lot like him showed up every weekend at a club where Dr. Motte (before he became the king of techno) used to play all sorts of non-techno records. The rumor at the time was that it wasn’t Nick Cave but his daft brother who didn’t like music at all and was a pretty boring dude. He was said to live in a run-down apartment and was supposedly a painter, but a bad one at that. Maybe Nick Cave invented this so-called brother of his. He never existed. Though there was never a need to disguise himself. In 1980s West Berlin it was not considered cool to bother anyone famous since you might damage your own image. But to come up with the idea of inventing a boring doppelgänger might work for someone who moves his family to Brightom, the rainiest seaside resort city in Europe, and starts writing a diary.

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH is a partly fictionalized documentary film about Nick Cave. The rock documentary genre is so idiotic that the best films out there – THE RUTLES – ALL YOU NEED IS CASH and THIS IS SPINAL TAP – are parodies. 20,000 DAYS is a film for Nick Cave fans. What this film has going for it is that Cave has always been in some way an insidious parody of himself.
The filmmakers stage a depiction of Cave's 20,000th day on earth. An old-fashioned, but stylish chrome travel alarm goes off at 7:00 a.m. in Cave's bedroom. But the writer and musician is already awake and contemplative. Cave's voiceover narrates: At the end of the 20th century he stopped being a person. He sits at his desk, perfectly dressed, working on an old-fashioned typewriter when he gets a call from his assistant who tells him what is on the agenda for the day. The management of the great artistic enterprise that is Nick Cave: therapist, lunch with Warren Ellis, archive. Now and then familiar faces appear in cave's car, like Blixa Bargeld and Kiley Minogue. Presumably fake.
In conversations with British author Darian Leader who plays Cave's shrink, he talks about his childhood, his parents, and about his determination to become a rock star. But he quickly comes to his point that serves as the film's leitmotiv. The power of transformation on stage, of forgetting who you are. Cave tells the story of a Nina Simone concert where she stared the audience into submission, then launched into a set of songs that were, as Cave recalls, “transformative.” This is what Cave aspires to – the art of transformation, a form of magic on the stage.
Transformation is Cave's driving motif. First he devised the rockstar persona for himself, he told the actor Ray Winstone, who can be seen in Cave's video “Jubilee Street.” Now it's about the transformation through the music, on the stage, and with the words he sings. Even the smallest idea is important. Cave no longer writes on the computer since the temptation to delete is too great. At the end of the film he sings an unfettered version of “Jubilee Street,”: “I'm transforming. I'm vibrating. I'm glowing. I'm flying. Look at me now.”

Tom Dorow

Credits

Original title: Nick Cave – 20.000 Days on Earth
Großbritannien 2014, 95 min
Language: English
Genre: Essay Film, Music Films
Director: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
Author: Nick Cave, Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
DOP: Erik Wilson
Montage: Jonathan Amos
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
Distributor: Rapid Eye Movies
Cast: Nick Cave
FSK: 6
Release: 16.10.2014

Website
IMDB

Screenings

  • OV Original version
  • OmU Original with German subtitles
  • OmeU Original with English subtitles

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