#DavidBowieis was…

13th August 2013

… a bit, well, ordinary. At least that’s how David Bowie is happening now came across in my £14.20 seat at the Cineworld Wandsworth. Tonight’s 7pm screening was billed as ‘a live nationwide cinema event’ and the ‘finale’ to the V&A exhibition that closed on Sunday. As a ‘live’ cinema event (I’m going to keep using the inverted commas), this followed in the footsteps of Pompeii Live from the British Museum (about which I posted here) in aspiring to present an exhibition on a cinema screen in real time.

As I commented then, Pompeii Live didn’t feel very, you know, live, and neither, if truth be told, did DBihn. This was despite the slightly desperate measure of cutting from the numerous prepared packages back to our uncertain presenters – exhibition curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh – leaping up onto a little stage to floor-manager-cued applause. Otherwise, I saw some compelling archive footage, admired some nice video graphics and got told again and again and again what an amazing, transformational, astoundingly original, epoch-defining genius DB is. Yet I didn’t even really feel that I actually saw the exhibition.

I had better admit at this stage that I am not one of those whose life was changed by David Bowie singing ‘Star Man’ on Top of the Pops back in 1972. I have been interested in Bowie for four decades but I wouldn’t describe myself as a hardcore fan. I meant to get a ticket to the exhibition but when it sold out quickly I wasn’t too worried. And I went tonight mainly because I’m really really interested in the problems of making cultural content work for cinema audiences. Judging from Twitter there were certainly those for whom DBihn worked wonderfully well, but I’m not among them.

I felt that for the most part I was watching a slickly produced video run-through of Bowie’s life and work with some good contributors (Paul Morley, Terry O’Neill) and some not-so-good (Kansai Yamamoto, cast adrift in one of the brief ‘live’ sections). (Incidentally, I know Victoria Broackes had a key role in the show, and assistant curator Kathryn Johnston talked us through some of the exhibits, and some of the fans were female, but are there absolutely no women who know enough about Bowie to warrant an interview? Number of on-screen guests: 11; number of women: zero.)

So it was sort of a well-produced TV show on a big screen (although next time, Cineworld Wandsworth, please try to get the projection properly aligned with the edges of the big white rectangle) and with decent sound (although it was shame about the small number of drop-outs). And then to make it ‘live’ there were frequent returns to a make-shift studio space and an audience of around seventy invitees. Each of these parts of the programme began with frantic applause as either Victoria Broackes or Geoffrey Marsh or both together hopped up onto a pile of blown-up books and did a bit of of uneasy presenting.

Except that they did not know where to look. This is perhaps my biggest beef with the programme, because no-one had quite worked out – and certainly not the curators themselves – whether they were addressing the seated seventy or the camera. So their gaze wandered all over the place and only rarely aligned with the lens. And this was the case even though we were being spoken to as if they were conventional presenters. Then in the video packages, they mostly but not totally spoke looking off-camera as if they were interviewees. Maybe no-one else minded but it drove me a tiny bit nuts.

Equally irritating were these ‘live’ interludes which when they didn’t end up with a cue for the next package involved the invitation onto the stage of one of the guests: Jarvis Cocker, Kansai Yamamoto, fashion professor Iain R Webb, Christopher Frayling and Jeremy Deller, if memory serves. Each was handed a mic to testify about how David Bowie had changed their life. Except that they too weren’t sure in which direction they were meant to look.

Maybe I do protest too much, but this mix didn’t fit what I understand ‘live’ to be. There needs to be something at stake with ‘live’ media, and a touch more jeopardy than worrying about whether one of the curators was going to stumble yet once more with their script. At the end, the final credit to the production company said ‘A Done + Dusted Film‘ and this seemed spot-on.

As for the thing about actually seeing the exhibition… I had read so much about the amazing design of the show that part of why I went tonight was to get a strong sense of how it was all laid out and how the spaces worked with each other. But all the restless camerawork didn’t even quite give me that. Call me old-fashioned – and I know this can be difficult in confined spaces – but I would have liked some straightforward establishing shots of the different galleries. At least Pompeii Live offered me this, but not, to my further frustration, DBihn.