Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man provides intimate insight into the world that surrounds a charismatic but elusive artist. Even to people who don't quite understand the appeal of Walker's music, it's quite fascinating that he can compel people to follow him despite having an overall vision that is never abundantly clear -- sometimes even in the final product.

Noel Scott Engel began his storied musical career as a crooner in the boy band Walker Brothers.

Engel’s broody, melancholic vocals mixed well with the baroque, orchestral pop stylings of the day and quickly made him a massive teen heartthrob. (Even now the Walker Brothers music plays like the Jonas Brothers mixed with pre-Jesus Johnny Cash.) In these heady days, the band headlined bills that also featured the likes of nobodies like Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and even Engelbert Humperdinck. After the bandmates parted ways, Scott Walker retained the stage name and went on to make a series of challenging, psychedelic opuses (titled Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and so forth). Each was heralded as a masterpiece by a rapidly dwindling audience. In the late 70s, the Walker Brothers reunited to release one more hit record (the AM Gold classic "Don't Rush") which miraculously yielded Walker a 12-album contract. Given his track record of producing an album every 12 years, this has essentially served as a lifetime contract.

As in Stephen Kijack's previous documentary Cinemania, depicting a group of cinephiles debilitated by their love of obscure film, the geeks have inherited the earth. The film relies on a wealth of posters, records and magazine clippings to illustrate the odd trajectory of a cult figure archived by a cast of outsiders. In fact, Walker's fans also played a key role in the film's grassroots marketing campaign.

A particularly memorable scene is touchingly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard's portrait of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. In it, the camera lingers on the faces of Walker fans (among them Brian Eno, David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Alison Goldfrapp, Ute Lemper, Sting and Lulu) as they listen to Walker's music. It's undoubtedly a piece of music they've listened to dozens of times before. Yet Kijack beautifully conveys the struggle to express a primal connection to a piece of art that we rarely slow down long enough to recognize.

The film leaves a lot of seemingly obvious questions unexplored, such as how did a smalltown boy from Ohio make his way to England and become a teenage superstar? Do the avant-garde recordings that make up his later works sell well enough to support a lifestyle conducive to taking many years to record each album? Kijack also makes the rather austere choice to leave Walker's personal life (including his rumored bouts with alcohol and drug abuse) completely unexplored. Some viewers will find these choices appropriately elliptical given the subject and there is certainly something to be said for a music documentary that focuses entirely on the work. But considering both the dearth of information on Walker and that the project had his full cooperation it would be nice if 30 Century Man felt like a more complete document of this fringe character.

See Also: Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, Dig!, New York Doll, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Beat Girl, Blow Up, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch.