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‘One More Time With Feeling’ Documentary

In July 2015, the goth-noir Australian rocker Nick Cave experienced the unspeakable when he lost one of his twin sons at the age of 15. His son Arthur fell off a cliff in the sleepy seaside town of Brighton, England, and he died from head injuries. Cave had already written the batch of songs that would appear on his next album ‘Skeleton Tree’, but was midway through the recording when the incident occurred. After taking 6 months off to grieve, he asked his friend and filmmaker Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, “Killing Them Softly”) to film the remaining recording sessions and original interviews to create a documentary about the album and its circumstances. More pragmatic than an artistic instinct to explore grief and adversity within the creative process, he specifically commissioned ‘One More Time with Feeling’ to help him weather the record’s eventual press junket (where he’d inevitably be bombarded with loads of painful, intrusive, and maddeningly inane questions about deeply personal matters). Dominik’s resulting work premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and then played in a few hundred theaters around the world the night before the record’s release. ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a far better film than was necessary, with exceptional form and function. What began as a promotional film is elevated into something that manages to articulate the inexplicable with great depth, compassion and insight.

Part I: Artifice

‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a 3D film photographed in high-contrast black and white. I’ve never seen 3D technology used to simply present talking heads and bodies at rest, but it really elevates the studio recording scenes that run throughout. 3D footage is shot with a depth-of-field so shallow that we see Bad Seeds band-mate Warren Ellis’ conducting hand fall out of focus just as quickly as it comes in. The camera presents life as a scattershot of stimuli vying for attention and consideration, in a context where there can be no clarity or transcendence.  The camera is disciplined enough to hold one object in focus, leaving everything else gauzy, hazy, significantly out of reach, and here Dominik creates the illusion of intimacy… making things palpable albeit extremely fleeting. And then there’s the stark black and white photography, which most effectively amplifies the weight and gravity of the content. Rich chiaroscuro lighting gives objects great depth, a nuance that conveys even the slouching weight of the fabric he wears as inky black shadows pool within the dimpled sleeves of his sport coat. With sizable floodlights studding the studio’s perimeter, the camera illuminates Cave’s grace and emotion during flares. When depicted in silhouette, it swallows him in darkness and grief.

Dominik creates no boundaries between the studio subjects and his documentary crew, and in doing so makes no efforts to cloak the artificiality that would otherwise inhibit intimacy. The film even opens with a botched take. Audio continues to roll while the cameras set-up anew, capturing Nick Cave’s close friend and collaborator Warren Ellis’ off-camera reticence to even talk about such personal affairs. Not long after, the director asks Cave to take off his shirt just so he can put it back on again within a better take. This is not a naturalistic approach to documentary filmmaking, and the director deliberately foregoes the typical fly-on-the-wall approach. In fact somewhere past the mid-point, Cave’s wife and son visit the studio and Cave calls out the irony of a cameraman watching the 3D camera, which watches he and his family as they close the circle by watching that cameraman. By assembling the film from 2 groups of cameras, one set on the musicians and the other tracking the musicians from behind crew #1, the contrivances of filmmaking become part of the film’s fabric. The camera dolly and the circular track that encircles Cave at his grand piano become as much a part of the action as the old-timey microphones and studio equipment the musicians employ to capture aural authenticity. This creates an interesting contrast between intimacy and audience, inspiration and intent.

The filmmaker also stitches together a few impossible shots to suggest continuity and context, both internal and external states. In one case, the camera spins around the piano and pulls away, swiftly pushing through a crack in the wall, plunging down the center of a circular stairwell, exiting and emerging into the blinding daylight. In another shot, possibly the filmmaker’s most literal narrative provision, the camera moves in tight on Danish soprano Else Torp’s face as she sings the song “Distant Sky”, pushing further and further through the skin and veins of her face and out the back of her head to once again thread a tiny crack in the wall. We’re back outside, pulling away from the studio and into the night. Through the aid of savvy computer editing, the town of Brighton quickly gives way to East Sussex, to England, to the UK and the Western Hemisphere, as the Earth turns. By co-opting this piece of satellite imagery, he reconciles the internal with a macro view of our place in the cosmos. Both shots suggest life beyond the grief, a context beyond Cave’s own private trauma.

Part II: Substance

Throughout the interview footage, Nick Cave considers his place in the cosmos and sees it differently. Time has become abstract for him, either all happening at once or stretching like an elastic band. He articulates best while working in metaphor: “You have this trauma and so you create a fence around the area. Everything around it is ok and you move forwards but that fence is always there and the way I was saying ‘Time is elastic’, we can go away from the event… but at some point the elastic snaps back and we always come back to it.” He points out that we have what the universe does not: consciousness, and due to that gift and curse, “the present is of a magnitude greater than the trillions of stars that came before” For that reason, there is no Earth time, there is no humility within the cosmos because “the past, the present and the future are happening now.”

Small devices aside, like those that help reconcile the verbal with the visual, Andrew Dominik tries to avoid editorializing and its within Nick Cave’s narration where the documentary broadens its appeal to those unfamiliar with his music and persona and becomes something truly profound. Nick Cave repeatedly attempts to describe the trauma but warns there are no words that can neatly summarize his grief, because extreme loss is no place for sentiment. “You can try to put words to it”, he says, “or offer some trite platitude that wraps everything up neatly, to say something like ‘he lives in my heart’ — but he doesn’t. Not really, because he doesn’t live anymore.” And here he’s not just speaking on the futility of articulation – rather he’s speaking to its utter uselessness because he can no longer event predict how he’ll respond to stimuli, events or personal interactions. “It’s too big to comprehend,” Cave says towards the end of the film, “you search to get your head around it, to create a narrative for it.” But he also recognizes that such a narrative would provide no answers and no comfort. He, his wife and Arthur’s twin brother Earl grieve together, as a family, but in parallel they also grieve alone as individuals. And he no longer understands himself as an individual. The “event” instantly made him into another person, literally someone else inside his skin. “It’s affected me in ways I don’t understand,” says Cave, still raw with grief. He recounts sobbing on the street in the arms of a friend, only to then realize that he’s leaning into the arms of a complete stranger, or he recounts how a baker asks how he is, and he gets tripped up without a clue how to answer. “It’s frightening. I don’t know what I’m fucking doing now… what am I doing sitting in a camera talking about this kinda thing? I wouldn’t have done that before.”  

Creativity fits centrally within the film, as Nick Cave concedes that a writer wants things to happen in life so you have something to write about, but suggests that trauma is very damaging to the creative process. “Imagination needs room to breathe, and when a trauma happens, there’s just no room to breathe.” He recognizes the prophetic nature of his lyrics and cites his wife Susie’s (potentially revisionist) sense of superstition around that. When she later presents the camera with a painting Arthur made when he was 5 of the Rottingdean Windmill (which happens to be located mere meters from the cliff where he fell to his death), she laments how they chose to frame the painting, way back when, in black. Their tragedy seems to define not only the present and future, but permeate the past, and it’s clearly changed her, as fundamentally as it did him. There’s an indelible moment right here as Cave’s eyes respectfully and tenderly shift to and from her, with both understanding and trepidation. He leans back in his chair to give her space, but it feels like he’s leaning forward, as if her next words could come as complete surprise. Because he assumes that she’s changed just as much as he, and maybe 6 months later they no longer know how to understand one another beyond the shared grief that’s come to define them.

Dominik applies a few devices to resolve the film in ways that feel narratively “authentic” while still serving the weight and gravity of the story. From that satellite image of the world still spinning to a montage of still portraits of each now-familiar face from the film, ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is ultimately not about the recording of an album but a family separated, and that family’s comprised of his wife and son, the band, anyone affected. Earlier we heard Cave concede a critical point that this isn’t just something that’s happened to he and his wife, because it happened to Arthur (who he reminded us, doesn’t really live in his heart because he doesn’t live at all). The film ends fittingly, with a lingering image of the cliff where Arthur fell to his death. During those end credits we hear Arthur’s own voice, for the first time, right beside his twin Earl as the now-divided brothers sing Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” a few years back. It’s an impossibly fitting song that confirms as more than superstition, that there is indeed prophecy, and maybe a little bit of providence, in Nick Cave’s work and life.

‘Deep Water’ by Marianne Faithfull

I’m walking through deep water

It’s all that I can do

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Your face is hidden from me

But your love is not

I will not reach for other things

Till I know what I have got

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

I’m walking through deep water

I have no time to lose

I’m walking through deep water

There’s nothing left to choose

This little heart of mine

Got loaded up with chains

The world just swirls around me

The water makes its claim

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

I’m walking through deep water

Nearer to the sea

I’m asking the deep water

Don’t take my love from me

I’ll dance with little ladies

With a hundred just like me

They hold their breath and hesitate

And dance beneath the sea

An emotional and touching movie and a great blog post about it by @bearsontrikes