REM • this is not a show (a live movie)
When Vincent Moon makes films about rock's quiet boy, it's the music that does the talking.
It takes not one, but two films to portray one of the most important rock bands around. Stipe & co abandon their rehearsal space and instead invite a selected audience consisting of family members, friends and fans to five evenings with live versions of 11 new songs. 'Accelerate' is the name of the album, R.E.M. is the band, and in Vincent Moon's 'Six Days' we follow the lead singer Michael Stipe on stage, and off stage in interviews, where he expresses his political consciousness and opinions. In the follow-up 'This Is Not A Show', we are there for the band's five exclusive live shows from the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where they played their new material before it had even been released. Stipe calls the experience 'an experiment in terror', and with his digitally distorted, black-and-white and dry-as-dust images, Moon provides the contents with its right experimental form. The encounter with Vincent Moon's films is never an encounter with traditional music films, a fact that his Take-Away Shows also bear witness to. His un-canonised portrait contains no superfluous introduction: the music is allowed to speak for itself.
(text from CPH DOX 2009 presentation)
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