Week 12 Screening 1

Upside Down: The Creation Records Story. 2010. Danny O’Connor.

Upside Down opens with the seemingly obligatory montage that presents a snapshot what is to come. Although in this case it is accompanied by some ear splitting feedback that takes you out of the film instead of drawing you in. It then segues into individual interviews with the participants of the documentary in order to fill in the backstory of the film. This portion of the film slumps into a protracted recounting of how they all met each other. The section loses its pace and seems overly long perhaps because there are no interesting stories about how or when they met. The section should have given way sooner to the content that follows when something actually happens. Due to the subject of the film there is a wealth of interviewees but in this case the polyphony has the effect of making all the developments in the film indistinct and monotonous, there was no effort to make them distinct. The film is sound-tracked by the music that is being discussed, this might give the film fidelity but the use of early music from the bands is not conducive to easy viewing. But when this film takes off and gets interesting is when the story takes off and coincidentally the music improves. The interviews are used to give the footage that follows a specific context (the footage itself would be useless without the context from the interviews) the interviews in this case are entertaining and insightful as they are firsthand. This film illustrates the complexities of a talking heads interview.