The Music On Film Festival
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The Music On Film Festival

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The first thing we wanted to do is make sure the films we selected worked well in the Palais Theatre, because it’s a big theatre and such a great rock and roll venue,” shares festival director Dennis Watkins explains. “So the starting point was concert films, ones that could utilise the great Palais sound system. So we were looking for films that weren’t small-scale and intimate, but something that would look better on a big screen with bigger sound rather than something you could just enjoy on DVD or Blu-ray at home. So that was the first thing we were looking for – something with a sense of scale and that would benefit from a live audience. We wanted to focus on rock ‘n’ roll and something a little more contemporary as well as providing a little bit of history. Looking back on the history of rock concerts, rock videos, and films about rock, my first thought was one of the greatest films of all time: Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. And also Woodstock, which was so influential – it won an Academy Award and raked in an incredible amount of international success for a rock ‘n’ roll concert movie.”


As well as featuring the biggest names in music, the festival exhibits work from legendary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, resulting in a celebration of the great icons of film as well as their rock ‘n’ roll counterparts. “Around that, we started to want to show off filmmaking skills as well as this rock ‘n’ roll musicianship. So we have some of the great filmmakers, some of the great artists. Just looking at the history of people putting music onto film, I was reminded of Fantasia, the 1940 film from Walt Disney which put classical music to animation. When I watched it again, I was astonished by just how beautiful it is. The skill is incredible, so it’s no wonder it had such an incredible impact,” he reveals.


Though the festival program may be as diverse as they come, great effort has been made into forming a cohesive whole – forming a rich narrative on the history of contemporary music. “If you saw every film at the festival, you would learn something new each time – with each film adding to the one before it. Although it’s really diverse, with pop like P!nk, rock like the ‘Stones, and some opera, country music, and Sigur Rós. When you actually watch the films in sequence they tell this amazing story of these artists and why they play music, where they come from and how it affects the sort of music they play,” muses Dennis.


When I was first asked to program the festival, I started looking back on my collection of music films as well as collecting new ones, and found that a lot of movies that I thought would work great as a film experience were in fact just a great record of an event, rather than a terrific film. Surprisingly enough, many of the ‘Stones films don’t leap out beyond the confines of being a ‘Stones fan. Unlike Shine A Light, which really is something else. I think it is the touch of Scorsese. It’s like Werner Herzog’s documentary on putting on Wagner operas, which you would think is a pretty dry subject if you weren’t a fan of classical music. But the way he captures the faces, and the creative phenomenon that is going on with the conductors and musicians, it makes you realise that there is something magical happening when people are completely devoted to making music.”