Investigating David Bowie’s imagery is like wanting to enter the mind of an alien struggling with the most fluid of arts, music. Director Brett Morgen tried it with the documentary Moonage Daydream, the same title as one of the songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, which in 1973 took glam-rock far beyond its own borders with a masterpiece disc. Presented in Venice in May, it will be released on September 26 and represents an original attempt to follow the suggestions of the White Duke through an artistic visual language, like a psychedelic immersion in the vast sea of the protagonist’s creativity.
Despite Bowie’s impact on the pop culture of the 70s for fashion and costume, as well as music of course, and despite his ability to anticipate the sounds and atmospheres of the following decade thanks also to the decisive contribution of another master like Brian Eno, documentaries on him they are not numerous. Moonage Daydream will therefore be able to discuss for the director’s subjective, but it has the advantage of probing the creative processes of one of the most original artists in the history of rock.
Starting immediately from Bovie’s first masterpiece, Ziggy Stardust, Morgen evokes the shock force of a rock’n’roll soiled by the anxieties of its time. The red hair shot in the air already smacks of punk, the provocations on stage such as the fellatio practiced on the guitar by Mick Ronson go straight to the center of the ambiguities of an artist who made sexual ambivalence his own stylistic code. Magazines today on singers who have come out of talent sounds fake and copied, as well as breaking the barrier of ridicule, but back then it was not at all obvious.
In the course of the mutations he was able to make, Bowie became the White Duke in Berlin still broken by the Wall, pursuing a purity of style that the Heroes cover returns in the elegance of black and white. The excesses were not counted, whether it was the use of cocaine or the unbridled sex that accompanied it, all promptly documented in the biographies of the now former glam hero. Ziggy Stardust was promptly buried after the album’s triumphal tour by his own creator, who wanted everything but to sit on a character and genre that had made him famous.