/ One More Time With Feeling / Nick Cave documentary

The facts say Nick Cave's work on the album "Skeleton Tree" began at the end of 2014. In July next year, his fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, was killed. The recording of the record was completed in early 2016. The film "One More With A Feeling" includes the last days of recording the album.
I knew it all before I hit the play button. I also knew that "Skeleton Tree" is an album that doesn't directly talk about Cave's tragedy, but that the post-mortem atmosphere is overwhelming for 40 minutes. I knew it was an album about the imposed change, about the life that is running even when it seems to have stop.

Nick didn't give any interviews after his son's death, not even on the occasion of last year's record. Instead, he decided to release a seven-member filmmaker crew into his world, for ten days, and answer them whatever they asked him. The director of the film is Andrew Dominik, the great Nick's fan. For first Dominik's film "Chopper", music was written by an ex Bad Seed, Mick Harvey, and for the other "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" film, music was composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, so the option of rude questions didn't exist.

And indeed, Nick answered all questions brutally honestly. He said that after the death of his son he was not the same person. He sees a familiar face in the mirror, but he knows someone else is inside. He started smoking again. When he goes to the store, everyone knows who he is and what happened to him. People look at him with full empathy. It's hard to get used to being an object of pity.

Aside from being heard asking the occasional tentative question, Dominik doesn't push them. But there are wrenching moments such as Susie showing a painting she found in storage, done by Arthur when he was five, of a windmill near the scene of his death.

Cave's story is about the delusion that a great tragedy is an inspiration for the artwork. Perhaps something good can happen when a boyfriend or girlfriend leaves you, but when your child dies, all ideas disappear. After that, only silence and a new life remained in him as if he were learning to walk again.

Like the late Leonard Cohen's music—an acknowledged influence on Cave's style—Cave seeks answers to spiritual questions for which he suspects he already knows the answers. He is his own God because he is, as he tells Dominik when he reads lyrics to as-yet-unreleased songs, different than the universe since he has "consciousness." Cave's art is a struggle to paradoxically honor and resist his consciousness' need to make sense of the world. When Dominik asks why Cave's recent music isn't driven by narratives, the musician responds, "Real life isn't like that." But art can be, Dominik argues, by creating a beautifully unhinged snapshot of Cave just after he experiences a major personal loss and a minor creative epiphany. (1)

The song "Skeleton Tree" closes the album and we are the last to hear it in the movie. It was created after the tragedy and is the only one who deals in a more direct way with Nick's emotions after Arthur's death. Even after such an accident, life continues to flow. I still enjoy the week full of silence, and the voice continues to travel to the ocean, and everything has its price. And Nick knows he will have to accept it all. And he lowers his head and accepts it. We hear this in verses ending "And it's alright now". Peace.

Dominik's film owes a great deal to experimental filmmaking techniques that Jean-Luc Godard used in the Rolling Stones not-quite-doc "Sympathy for the Devil" and avant garde musical "A Woman is a Woman." In those films, Godard constantly deconstructs the narratives he employs as a means of provocatively suggesting that language can only fitfully express truly profound meaning/revolutionary thoughts/sublime joy. Dominik's film is similarly about Cave's need to express himself without sounding trite or platitudinous. He does not want to escape from Arthur's death, but he also hesitantly tells Dominik, during incisive interview footage, that he doesn't want to commemorate his son through sentimental truisms, like "he lives in our hearts," a saying he spits out because "[Arthur] doesn't live at all."

Cave adds that he chooses his words very carefully because he doesn't want to be trapped by the brittle images that his words directly conjure. Dominik responds in kind by filming himself struggling—and often succeeding—at giving dimension and shape to Cave's grief. Nothing can give shape or closure to Cave—and that's OK. Watching him continue his ongoing search for existential answers is comfort enough. (1)

This was a part of the translation from Serbian to English from Before After article ''Nik Kejv- Film o tišini mraku i svetlu'' by V.Skocajic
(1)Roger Ebert, One more time with feeling by Simon Abrams