Neil Young is a man of many strange passions – toy trains, old cars, hi-fi audio, screeching feedback – but none are so confounding as his pursuit of filmmaking.
Starting with his resoundingly drubbed "documentary/fantasy piece" Journey through the Past in 1974, Young – moonlighting under his frequent cognomen, Bernard Shakey – has created a string of difficult, baffling films maudits that take off at fascinating tangents from his musical output.
Abruptly and often inexplicably cut together, Young's half-dozen movies can be tough to endure, but they are often even tougher to see, dispersed over laserdiscs and bootleg VHS tapes. A retrospective now touring through Toronto and Vancouver spotlights these little-known films, from Young's debut, Journey, through 1982's big-budget anti-nuclear fiasco Human Highway, up to 2012's pantomime curio A Day at the Gallery (featuring Shepard Fairey and some of his canvases).
Taken together like this, the Bernard Shakey films resist easy dismissal as a dilettante's self-indulgence, looking much less like the isolated flame-outs they must have once seemed (the headline of one Human Highway review: "Young's Nuke Film a Bomb"). They emerge instead as a coherent body of work from a filmmaker so resolutely lo-fi and nakedly earnest that his single-minded cinema works willfully – almost perversely – against the radio-friendly appeal of his music.
This contrary, abrasive quality should be familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the lengthy solos Young performs with Crazy Horse in concert, alternating between droning longueurs and deafening squalls, conducted with little regard for listeners who just want to hear the rest of Like a Hurricane.
Such determined gruffness and entropy was a hallmark of Young's peers and inspirations when he started making Journey through the Past. "My favourite filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard," he has remarked, citing a director whose then-recent Rolling Stones doc Sympathy for the Devil – in which the band's rehearsals get interrupted by Black Panthers reading aloud from Eldridge Cleaver – was hardly commercial fare.
Hollywood dropout Dennis Hopper provided another filmmaking model, as part of Young's circle in artsy Topanga Canyon. Following up his box-office smash Easy Rider with the lyrical but often inscrutable The Last Movie, a mescal-fueled fever dream set in Peru, Hopper burned bridges with an industry that had granted him carte blanche.
As a filmmaker, Bernard Shakey has been similarly moody and rebellious, enamoured of movies like Godard, but with no time for Hollywood convention, like Hopper. His first brush with moviemaking, Journey through the Past, is a doomy mishmash of styles and subjects, part uneasy rock doc like Godard's Sympathy, uninterested in letting Young's jamming play out, and part acid-western like Hopper's Last Movie, following the voyage of a young traveller from the desert to the coast, where a cavalry of black-clad klansmen storm him in slo-mo on the beach.
Admirably aimless, the film relies on such visionary moments introduced out of the blue, creating an experience that could seem befuddling if you resist Shakey's rhythms, or lulling and stoned if you go ahead and submit (Paul Thomas Anderson cites one blissed-out sequence as a touchstone for last year's Inherent Vice).
Journey remains Shakey's signature film: almost accessible, but entirely weird. His sophomore outing was much more conventional. The adventurous spirit of 1979's Rust Never Sleeps, a straightforward concert film, is confined to its stagecraft: Roadies dressed like Jawas from Star Wars prop up a gargantuan microphone on stage, surrounded by massive speaker stacks, next to which Young and Crazy Horse look pint-sized.
Similarly likeable but by-the-numbers concert docs by Hal Ashby and Jonathan Demme also tour with the retrospective (Jim Jarmusch's rougher-hewn Year of the Horse is missing from the lineup, though his Dead Man, with its bone-chilling score provided by Young, is on the docket in Vancouver).
Far more interesting is 1987's Muddy Track, Shakey's mid-career, over-it take on the rockumentary genre, corralled from the hours of washed-out, hand-held video footage he shot during a high-strung European tour. "Only the bad things," he says near the outset, setting the stage for the footage to follow, "that's what I want." Bad things, inept playing, tantrums, distortion, and above all else, noise: Shakey makes a point of privileging these unpleasantries that others leave out.
Shakey's fiction films may less noisy, but they're just as confrontational. The ill-starred Human Highway – entirely improvised but studio-shot, requiring Young to spend millions – channels Jerry Lewis at his shrillest, Technicolor musicals at their fakest, and high-concept art-rockers Devo at their most bizarre (they rip through a tremendous version of Hey Hey, My My with their singer seated in a crib, dressed in a baby mask).
The inevitability of nuclear holocaust is the cheery message here, while 2003's Greendale climaxes with a character shouting through a megaphone, denouncing the connivance of big business and George W. Bush's White House. Greendale adapts Young's concept album about the devil delighting in small-town America's downfall, with obviously amateur actors lip-syncing the lyrics in grainy close-ups, filmed with a Super 8mm camera.
The shots can be shuddery, and the film can be strident, but this is the real, cussed, uncompromised Bernard Shakey aesthetic. Bless him for sticking to it, all these years.
The Bernard Shakey Film Retrospective: Neil Young on Screen is playing at The Royal in Toronto from July 23 to July 26 and at The Cinematheque in Vancouver July 31, Aug. 1-4, Aug. 6 and Aug. 10.