Review: Thelonious Monk doc "Rewind & Play" is both agony and ecstasy

A horror film filled with unspeakably beautiful music

Alain Gomis’ documentary on Thelonious Monk, Rewind & Play, is one I’ve wanted to see since it started touring the festival circuit last year, and I learned today from a random retweet that it’s been streaming on YouTube, legally and for free, for three weeks courtesy of the WORLD Channel public media’s AfroPop series. Which means this is the exceptionally rare case where I can just embed the movie in the review and encourage you all to watch it, with literally no barriers to entry:

What a remarkable film. A movie about the agony and ecstasy of music and media, of documentary and truth, of 'performance' as a multifaceted and fraught idea. Crafted from the raw footage of a documentary on Thelonious Monk made for French television in 1969, Jazz Portrait, Alain Gomis’ film lays bare the uncomfortable reality of the role Monk is asked to play for the cameras, as stupid and shallow questions are answered with what French interviewer Henri Renaud deems unacceptable simplicity, and the one deep, incisive response he gets out of Monk is rejected as derogatory. “It's not nice," Renaud explains to an exasperated Monk, who realizes he isn't here to speak his truth. 

He can, at least, play it – and that's the other half of the film, Monk alone at the piano playing transcendently. Watching and listening to the man work his magic is astonishing and transfixing; time slips away, and I found myself sliding to the edge of my seat. Monk's playing is so physical; you can always hear it in his music, but it's another thing to see it with your eyes. 

And yet. The juxtaposition director Gomis creates here – or uncovers, as it may be more accurate to say, as this is more a case of excavation, of presenting footage in a fuller context, than re-editing it to a specific purpose – imbues that performance with more than just the appreciation of musical genius at work. There's a frustration and a fury to it too, a sense of Monk articulating himself through the contact between his fingers and the keys in ways he couldn't, or simply wasn't allowed to, with his words. Renaud, the French broadcaster, doesn't much care for anything Monk has to say, unless it comports to some comfortable script he's already written in his head, and watching those scenes of documentary micro-managing unfold are deeply uncomfortable and unsettling. They play almost like a horror film, with Monk caught in some kind of purgatory; the camera-man keeps pushing in close, the square frame and blinding hot studio lights seeming to trap Monk within a space that's clearly causing him deep discomfort, but from which he cannot escape. Watching the footage play out at length, Gomis refusing to cut away and spare us the disquiet, puts us right there with him. 

So when Monk plays, it's more than just performance. It's defiance. It's freedom, but within the stifling box of the TV studio. You feel the thrill of the music, but the discomfort of the 'interview' lingers. You can tell it lingers for Monk, too. He's commanding the space when he plays, but the space is also commanding and constraining him – the context of the performance can't be ignored. As he wraps up a beautiful, slower number, the interviewer steps back in to ask for something 'medium tempo', something a little more exciting. Maybe I'm reading too much into Monk's quiet acquiescence here, but there's a sense of exasperation. Once again, the interviewer isn't listening, and is asking for something else from an artist who's just given him magic. 

At the end, Renaud performs a prepared monologue about Monk's life for the camera, additional footage for the documentary; it's simple glossy trivia, nothing of substance, the 1969 equivalent of phoning in a class presentation by reading off the Wikipedia entry. Next to the music Monk has just performed, his words seem even smaller. I don't know what I would ask Thelonious Monk were I in a room with him, watching him play - but I'd want to know a hell of a lot more than why he used to have his grand piano in the kitchen. 

Rewind & Play would make a great double-feature with the classic D.A. Pennebaker documentary about Bob Dylan, Dont Look Back. That film, too, is about the space between an artist's craft and all the other expectations the public and the media pile on around the periphery – though Dylan, of course, isn't a black man under the spotlight of a white European tone-policing his statements. I teach Dont Look Back once a year in a guest lecture at the University of Colorado, and there's a quote from the original Newsweek review I have in my slides that's such a good summary of what is on the film's mind: "Dont Look Back is really about fame and how it menaces art, about the press and how it categorizes, bowdlerizes, sterilizes, universalizes or conventionalizes an original like Dylan into something it can dimly understand.” Rewind & Play presents that dynamic dialed up a few notches and concentrated into one afternoon in one overlit TV studio – a pressure cooker of a true original being 'bowdlerized' by a broadcaster who needs him to fit into a certain box, and an artist fighting back with the only weapon he has: his music.