Edit Room
Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
Directed by Adam Yauch
Awesome seems the most unusual due to its format: The Beastie Boys selected 50 concertgoers (each exchanging their driver's licenses for video cameras) to compile the footage into "an authorized bootleg." A home-movie experiment, it is the ultimate in digital democracy, fulfilling the indie-era notion that video provides art opportunity to everyone. Intro credits boast: "Although none of these camera operators were trained, they captured the show with love and passion." But then a Scarface joke-reference announces the Beasties' new sense of hip-hop-oriented cinema, which mixes punk mischief with high-tech professionalism. From there, Awesome lives up to its title.
Beastie Adam Yauch took a year to assemble the different ways of seeing-an editing feat consistent with the Boys' "rhymin'-and-stealin'" aesthetic. Awesome proves that hip-hop's sampling and scratching prototype is still a technological revolution. Creating a grid of 48 on-screen images, Yauch surfs his menu-bank and then treats each choice to avant-garde f/x. (One shot reflects action in the pupil of an eye; "Body Movin'" is performed in solarized b&w.) The mix of perspectives is head-spinningly splendid.
Surely Eisenstein, the master of montage, would approve the heady blizzard of images during Mixmaster Mike's DJ solo. Five or six visual textures, each containing nine or 10 colors, are presented at once-all timed to the stage performance and keeping the concert sequence coherent.
In this era of over-zealous digital editing, when shots are rarely sustained for longer than six seconds, comprehension is often sacrificed to busy-ness as techie filmmakers cater to the public's attention deficit. No worse examples exist than the recent movie musicals Chicago and Moulin Rouge, which both dishonored the legacy of Bob Fosse's choreographic-editing. It is good that Liza with a Z reappears to remind film culture that coherence was integral to Fosse's art.
Fosse's editing was rhythmic but, above all, devoted to capturing performance. Not razzle-dazzle sleight-of-hand, Fosse's aesthetic was closer to Peckinpah's appreciation of space and action. (Although Fosse's sensuous dance movement rarely utilized slow-mo film speed.) Liza with a Z lets you see the eroticism of Fosse's steps with precise, not fussy, cutting. "Ring Them Bells" has genuine showbiz pizzazz which, unlike Chicago, importantly preserves Fosse's debt to theatrical tradition: the b&w motif of Liza's "Bye Bye Blackbird" number is actually Fosse's modernist, disco-era distillation of minstrelsy.
Liza is no more her mother than Rob Marshall is Bob Fosse, but at least she's the real thing, a star from the era before Madonna, when performers had to have talent. Liza's akimbo strut and rag-doll jauntiness were perfect for Fosse, who adapted to cinema with an innate gift what the Beasties articulate in "Body Movin'." In '72, Fosse and Minnelli generously shared their talent, anticipating the star/fan camaraderie that distinguishes Awesome.
Hip-hop concerts notoriously lack showmanship like Fosse's, but Awesome hides that fact, asserting audience revelry as part of a communal ritual. This egalitarian excitement justifies the gonzo-video aesthetic-then upgrades it. After all, the Beastie Boys' artistic significance did not only come from expanding hip-hop's bonhomie beyond the ghetto. Rick Rubin's brilliant hi-fi record production on Licensed to Ill and Spike Jonze's Beastie videos proved equally innovative-if not revolutionary.
Awesome continues that inventiveness. Its great sound design gives depth to the lo-fi imagery and puts rhythm upfront. With beat-box momentum, scratched-vinyl exhilaration and goofy-furious rapping, this documentary of happy audience faces presents a White/Negro utopia that only goes wrong when it literally turns red, dedicating "Sabotage" to George W. Bush. Otherwise, Awesome revives hip-hop's neorealist ethic of common-man humanism. Through deft editing, joy is made visual, made percussive.