Alex Winter’s Zappa Documentary

courtesy of Larsen Associates

This coming Friday will see the opening of Zappa. Directed by Alex Winter, the film is being described as the “first all-access documentary about the life and times of Frank Zappa.” Presumably, “all-access” refers to the prodigious breadth of footage of not only Zappa himself but also a wide diversity of those who worked with him and several of those that interviewed him. Running 126 minutes in duration, Winter’s film is definitely more comprehensive than Thorsten Schütte’s Eat That Question—Frank Zappa in His Own Words, which I discussed in July of 2016, back during my Examiner.com tenure. 93 minutes in duration, Schütte’s film is about half an hour shorter than Winter’s; but, writing as one that is primarily concerned with listening experiences, I do not feel that Winter had much to add to the profile of Zappa that Schütte had developed.

To be fair there are far more contributors to Zappa than had been interviewed for Eat That Question. However, my own perspective is that of one that takes listening to Zappa’s music on recordings very seriously (as well as having visually experienced his 200 Motels film). In that context I feel that Winter’s exhaustive account ends up distracting from much (but definitely not all) of the experience of listening to the music. Most important is that both directors acknowledge the significant role of the music of Edgard Varèse in Zappa’s development. Winter is more specific about the record album that seized Zappa’s attention, but one of the most significant episodes that Schütte captured involved Zappa conducting a performance of Varèse’s “Ionization” not too long prior to his death. On the other hand, very early in Zappa Winter captured footage of Zappa leading the original Mothers of Invention group in an “encore” performance of Varèse’s “Octandre.” The instrumentation was not quite right, but the brash delivery made it perfectly clear how the composer’s style had appealed to Zappa. Sadly, the film accounts for only the opening phrase; and I would be very disappointed if that was all the Mothers played!

I was pleased that Winter accounted for the only time I actually saw Zappa up on a stage. This did not involve the performance of music. Rather, David Raksin served as moderator for a discussion that brought Zappa together with Pierre Boulez. The latter had conducted performances of Zappa’s music with his Ensemble InterContemporain. This connection may have been elided because Zappa himself was not satisfied with the performances, and Winter does provide footage of Kent Nagano rehearsing the London Symphony Orchestra in a series of Zappa compositions that were released on a series of two albums. It may well be that Boulez was as unhappy about Zappa as Zappa had been about Boulez; and I found it interesting that, not only is Zappa never mentioned in the lectures collected in Boulez’ Music Lessons book but also the EnsembleInterContemporain and its base of operations, IRCAM (the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, “Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music” in English) only appear in Jonathan Goldman’s Preface to the English translation of Boulez’ lectures.

The good news is that Winter provided much more footage of Zappa’s music being performed. I also felt it was valuable to listen to what many of the performers had to say about the effort that went into negotiating the many complexities in his scores. However, the listening is what matters most; and, for my money at least, I would have preferred much less talk replaced by much more music.