Film Review: Nick Cave: 20,000 Days on Earth

Film Review: Nick Cave: 20,000 Days on Earth

I’m not sure how Nick Cave got together with Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, but I’m glad they did. Between the three of them a collaboration was born to create 20,000 Days on Earth, a deliberate tip-toe into the fact and fiction surrounding Nick Cave’s existence and creative process.

The first scene, Cave half naked waking up in a grand bed of white sheets and striking light, he narrates the opening line “At the end of the 20th century I ceased to become a human being”.  This line, as arbitrary as it may have seemed early in the piece, was setting the tone for Cave and Co to unveil his “world of violence and mayhem, where there is a god like existence… not in a holy sense, just someone keeping score”. This film is an extension of his world and Nick Cave is keeping score.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s imagery proves to be of stunning quality, managing to control the film’s cinematography with class and style complete with contrasting flashbacks of Cave’s early gothic days. We have lunch with Warren Ellis and surprisingly he is completely human, a shock for most who would have only seen him on stage in some kind of ‘dirty seeds’ virtuosic violin induced trance.

This whole film pieced together is bursting with stories and lines of narration that at first seem to be cluttered en masse, soon prove to be beautifully crafted together in a familiar and deliberate manner.

Nick Cave can control the weather with his moods, but he cannot control his moods.

The film is screening at all good cinemas, and session times are available here.
 

-Jackson Purser

 

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