John Zorn - a Bookshelf on Top of the Sky [2002]

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Self-conscious and not the better for it.......2007-03-09

The director/camera operator of this highly idiosyncratic film decided to make it as much about her attempt to make a film about John Zorn, as about Zorn himself. So there are a lot of shots of her sitting in an editing suite looking glum, or waiting for the always frenetically busy Zorn to answer her phone calls. Personally I could have done without that kind of thing, as I'm more interested in Zorn than in the director of the film.

You could argue that it does help to make the film a good deal more engaged and personal than an anonymous hackwork documentary might have been, but on the other hand it's hard to think of anyone making a hackwork film about such a diverse and contradictory figure as Zorn - a man who seems to be able to go from playing insane 20-second thrash metal celebrating Japanese S&M porn to writing an elegiac movement for string quartet in memory of victims of the Holocaust without ever seeming to wonder like he might be spreading himself a bit thin. And from the little I know about the economy of independent film-making, any film about Zorn was liable to be a labour of love. So I give this an extra star because she got the thing made at all.

There is actually quite a lot of footage of the great man, rehearsing musicians and talking and playing live with the brilliant Electric Masada (superior in my view to the original band). When Zorn appeared in the 80s, a lot of British jazz critics (and for all I know some US ones) had a problem with his eclecticism. It's true that Zorn is a magpie, but if so he's the magpie equivalent of the cyber-watchdog in Neal Stephenson's novel 'Snow Crash' - a 200-pound uber-magpie plated in titanium armour, with a voracious appetite for shiny stuff and an internal nuclear engine that will drive it forever until it's built the most astonishing nest the world has ever seen. Zorn's intensity as a sax player is one of the most fearsome things in music, when he's on form. He can make a piece of metal tubing sound like the screaming of the damned.

One solution to this film's drawbacks might have been the one taken by the makers of the DVD of the excellent Minutemen documentary 'We Jam Econo', namely to include all of the concert footage uncut on a bonus disc. As it is there is not enough live stuff, and not enough interviews with the people who work with Zorn. We don't get much of a sense of what he's like, only of what the director thinks he's like. And it is in fact possible to convey a sense of the former.

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