TEMPORARY COLOR
2016 · 13m · USA
Directed by John Wilson
Genres: comedy, documentary
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Wilson is invited by documentary filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross to shadow their production of Contemporary Color, a touring multimedia concert featuring David Byrne; finding himself with little to do, he turns the camera on the boredom and bureaucracy of large-scale spectacle — while two escaped convicts run as a parallel subplot.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is the pre-HBO John Wilson — the same sensibility, the same wandering attention, the same genuine strangeness, before anyone was watching. For viewers who arrived via How To with John Wilson it is an essential artifact; for everyone else it is a mildly eccentric music-doc short. The score-6 is accurate: significant context rather than standalone masterwork.
John Wilson pre-HBO doing exactly what he'd later become famous for, with a true-crime subplot threaded through a Byrne documentary. The early-stage curiosity makes it valuable.
John Wilson's pre-HBO David Byrne backstage doc with a true-crime escaped-convicts subplot threaded through it. Wilson's free-associative digression already at scale — this is the auteur's signature before he had a platform, and that's exciting.
Festivals
- Slamdance Film Festival 2016