 |
| Images courtesy of Cleopatra Entertainment |
In 1973, following an accidental fall from a window, English
musician and Soft Machine and Matching Mole founder Robert Wyatt
was left a paraplegic bound to a wheelchair alongside his wife, Australian painter
and songwriter Alfreda Benge who has cared for him and remained loyal by his
side for decades. During that time, Wyatt
began exploring other options for musical instrumentation, breaking away from
the band format and initiating a forty-year solo career in music. With the help of Pink Floyd drummer
Nick Mason who served as a producer as well as musicians Mike Oldfield, Ivor
Cutler and Fred Firth, Wyatt unveiled what became known as the 1974 album Rock
Bottom. Originally written in Venice
prior to his accident with revisions on the instrumentation while Alfreda Benge
was working as an assistant editor on Don’t Look Now, the album cemented
the Canterbury scene subgenre of progressive and psychedelic rock with
frequently intense orchestrations and experimental vocals.
Now circa 2024, Spanish animator María Trénor who was
initially a graphic designer for a post-production film company and creator of
short films embarks on her first feature length project with the Danish-Polish-Spanish/English
language film Rock Bottom. At
once a hallucinatory biopic of the relationship shared by Robert Wyatt and
Alfreda Benge as well as a visual interpretation of the album itself with many
of the tracks remastered into six-track surround audio, Rock Bottom is
an experimental rethinking of the rock drama.
Often hyperkinetic, filled with striking visuals both real and imaginary,
it functions as a snapshot of a bygone era of free love, hard drugs, music,
artistic expression and finally crashing.
Interspersing snapshots of the real figures in between the animation, it
unfolds as something of kaleidoscopic portrait intended for adult viewership
while also paying a hefty tribute to not only Robert Wyatt but particularly to
Alfreda Benge as well.
Running roughly ninety minutes and playing almost like a
video installation with its frequently experimental asides and montages cut to
Wyatt’s album track by track, Rock Bottom featured in the Annecy
Festival 2024 is quite the audiovisual trip.
With the music and sound effects flowing across all six channels while
the ethereal, multicolored and eventually rapid fire visuals explode across the
screen, you don’t watch Rock Bottom so much as you are whisked into
it. Think of it as a quasi-companion
piece to the album or what you might imagine while listening to it. And of course it is offhandedly a chronicle
of the fateful events leading up to the inception and production of the album,
jumping between past, present and future with the hospitalized Robert Wyatt
reviewing his life story and his connection to Alfreda Benge who like Wyatt
runs the full gamut of breakdown, poverty and addiction to cleaning up and
rising to the occasion of caring for her now incapacitated husband.
Coming to DVD from Cleopatra Entertainment and MVD Visual, Rock
Bottom while not a documentary film was as formal of an introduction to the
music and art of Robert Wyatt and Alfreda Benge as any concert film or nonfiction
piece. While the end credits make note
of the use of artistic license and embellishment in some areas, more or less it
tells their story honestly and without sensationalism. Despite having frequent animated full-frontal
male and female nudity often throughout, this is very clearly made from the
perspective of an artistically inclined woman trying to find her own place in
the world as well as both characters finding the courage and strength to
declare their love for one another. In
one feature, María Trénor has already demonstrated a deep-seated talent and
love for animation as well as telling the story of another female animator
caught up in the world of Robert Wyatt.
It is as much his story as it is hers and having seen real pictures of
the devoted couple adds a layer of poignance to the whole endeavor. You come away from it converted as a fan of
the music and the struggles it took to get there.
--Andrew Kotwicki
