Documentary – UK / European Premiere

Showing @ Filmhouse 2, Thu 23 June @ 22:20

Esther Anderson, Gian Godoy / UK / 2011 / 90 mins

The idolisation of Bob Marley throughout the 70s is a high status associated with the cultural visionary, yet Esther Anderson and Gian Godoy’s documentary is a portrait of liminality, fringed lifestyles and exclusion. As his partner and collaborator, Anderson’s footage of 1970s song writing, smoking sessions and political debates provides a peering analysis of Marley’s Rastafarian roots. His suspicion of politics, religion, even society itself casted him into the lonely world of observation where his viewpoints came from watching an affected world, cracked by the pressures and intensities of imperial rule. Yet hidden within the recurrent stoner-chat about free-thinking, nature and ‘life’, there was a fundamental centricity to Marley’s rejection of the status quo in Jamaican society: that revolution through music, art, nature or uprising would smash the shackles of Conservative domination and give hope to the poor and underprivileged members of Jamaican society.

Though the documentary is choppy and slow due to its mosaic composition, there’s a freedom rooted in the nature of its editing, allowing Marley’s friends, associates and fellow musicians the time to speak openly about the early and formative days of the Wailers’ music. And the title of the film can be misleading, suggesting a more evaluative look at his status once internationally successful, yet it could easily be part one of ten. There’s an expectation attributed with documentaries such as this to “do more” – but the intimacy with which the story is told and filmed goes unparalleled in biographical narratives and gives rise to the subtler details of Marley’s music, mingling with the film’s sincerity and privacy. Facts such as the origin of I Shot the Sherriff are nuances which prop up the film’s ability to charm and enlighten: after a doctor gave Esther birth control pills, Marley thought he was trying to destroy his seed and therefore his child, while of course threatening his freewheeling lifestyle. Details such as this almost humanise Marley as he became lost in the frenzied haze of political idol and cultural liberator and this film is a timid array of youthful idealism, revolutionary song writing and cultural deliverance.