#148 - When the Hunter Gets Captured By the Game
The weird thing about Rogier Kappers' documentary film, Alan Lomax - The Song Hunter, is its footage of Lomax in his Florida home, sequences shot after the folklorist and song collector suffered a stroke that left him somewhat incapacitated.
Here the camera lingers on Lomax as if he were captured game, a prize won on some kind of surreal folk music safari. Kappers catches Lomax's famous drive, his obsessive pursuit of musical information, but he does so, oddly, by showing how Lomax is unable to function fully anymore. The frustration reveals the man.
Lomax is caught in the film's interplay of voyeuristic cool and intensely-focused admiration. We are in a half-light between documentation and celebration, between telling it like it is and dreaming it like we wish it would be.
Something is always dying here in being born: the songs are vanishing, the roads are planks of memory, the pool reflects the sky. This is a certain relationship to sound in which its absence is precisely what we want to hear. Lost is found in being lost.
But we cannot quite tell if this is good or bad. Who and what exactly is the game here when we hunt down the hunter of songs?*
23 April 2007
*Full disclosure: As a college intern, I worked in Lomax's office.