Joan Baez: I am a noisenow available in streaming platforms like Hulufirst premiered at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival before opening in national cinemas in 2023. Directed and produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, and directed and edited by Maeve O’Boyle, I am a noise features extensive interviews with Báez conducted during her 2019 farewell tour, as well as pieces from those live performances. But the documentary is actually a complete life story, told with plenty of personal reflection from the singer, songwriter and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, whose family home movies and a collection of diaries, letters and audio recordings, including those from sessions of therapy. – combine with archival performance footage to reveal the multi-level scope of Báez’s personal and professional life.
JOAN BAEZ: I AM A NOISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: “I don’t think anyone who becomes famous at a young age has the slightest idea that this will ever end.” In the contemporary interview parts of I am a noiseJoan Baez is 79 years old and is preparing for her farewell tour, a tour that will tour sold-out theaters across the United States before arriving in Europe with dates in Paris, Istanbul and Madrid. And it will be hard work, which she readily acknowledges in segments where her legendary three-octave soprano and her nimble guitar fingers are raw from the effort. But she’s also been performing for a third of her life, basically famous since she first took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and now her time as a performer is coming to an end. “The decision to end your career… I can’t really anticipate what it will be like.”
I am a noise controls Báez while she sings and makes appearances on tour, which also becomes an opportunity for quality time and relationship rehabilitation with her son and occasional drummer Gabriel Harris. But the film is primarily a weighty personal document formed from the physical materials that Báez preserves in his precisely cataloged storage space. His parents and two sisters appear in evocative home movies filmed throughout his childhood and adolescence, crude diary entries and whimsical, effective drawings are set in motion through animation, and the letters Báez wrote become revealing points of your thought process, or even your soul itself. .
As Báez’s folk scene star rose, he promoted a budding Bob Dylan. (“He needed a mother; he needed someone to sing his songs”). She became active in the civil rights movement and later went to prison to protest the Vietnam War. But her fame also alienated her from her sisters, and she transformed her lifelong struggles with anxiety into new and volatile ways. Along with her popular song “Virgin Mary”, Báez became known as the song of the same name or “Madonna”. And that was a mental trip for a young woman who was always working to control neuroses and panic attacks. “I went from thinking that she was not very suitable to being called Virgin Mary. I mean, that was a much better deal. So I ran around barefoot with long hair looking like the Virgin Mary, probably thinking a little bit that she was.” Her professional successes (and, later, many druggies, mainly with quaaludes) are recounted in I am a noisewhich finds its lowest point with audio tapes of inpidual and family therapy sessions that attempted to clarify where all the internal and emotional struggles in Báez’s life really began.
What movies will it remind you of? DA Pennebaker’s evocative 1967 documentary Do not look back, which tells the story of a cocky young man named Bob Dylan while touring England in 1965, is on Max and well worth a watch. (Báez accompanied and performed with Dylan on the tour, whose relationship is discussed in I am a noise.) And in 2009 the PBS series. American teachers produced Joan Baez: How sweet the soundthe singer’s first full-length documentary, which included an on-camera reunion/interview with her ex-husband David Harris.
Performance worth seeing: The edition in I am a noise, from co-director Maeve O’Boyle, acts as a powerful conduit into Joan Baez’s story. With 60 years of live performances to cover, as well as the many chapters of Báez’s life (her upbringing, sometimes difficult relationships with her sisters and parents, her emergence as a fierce advocate for social justice, and her experiences as a wife and mother), you could say there is a lot to cover. But O’Boyle’s work aligns these segments with reverence and grace, often drawing interesting parallels with the use of Báez’s personal archive of diaries, letters, and artwork.
Memorable dialogue: “I was a sensitive girl,” says Joan Báez in the present about animated images of her adolescence. “I internalized everything. “I was worried about the poor, I was worried about the animals.” Foreshadowing her public life as a singer and defender of folklore, she says that even back then she “was aware that there were pains greater than mine.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: With Nora Dunn playing her in the memorable 1986 Saturday night live Sketch “Make Joan Báez laugh” – perhaps all anyone needs is Phil Hartman as a goofy game show host and Jon Lovitz as Howie Mandel, blowing up a rubber glove with his nostrils – it’s easy to see how the singer’s bracing popular songs and her staunch defense had defined her to a certain extent. in her career. But on the other hand, Joan Báez has never felt the need to apologize. “When she was in tenth grade,” she writes in a letter that appears in the documentary, “she had an identity. I’m not a saint. I am a noise.” Through these letters and the accompanying artworks, we learn how Báez’s identity was formed and, with the addition of archival material from her performances throughout the 1960s, we can connect that directly to who she became. He became a professional. I am a noise is at its best when it becomes elliptical, with the electrons of folk music, fame, bold activism, and Báez’s realization as someone who requires inpidual space revolving around the central core of her upbringing. And well, it’s not that she never cracked a smile. One of the best vintage images shows the singer on stage in the 1960s. “I’ll Play Bobby Dylan” – Bobby! – “doing Joan Baez”, and the audience cuts away while she sings the traditional ballad “Mary Hamilton” in a reedy and apt impersonation of Dylan.
Our call: Transmit it. Joan Baez: I am a noise will serve both old and new fans of the singer with its wide range of archival materials as well as clips from live performances. But, ultimately, this is a documentary like a personal journey, a life story told with total visual immersion for the viewer.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
