It can be hard to pinpoint why, or even how, Billy Shebar’s “Monk in Pieces” is so much better and more involving than the average documentary about the life of an artist. While this loving and attentive portrait of avant-garde icon Meredith Monk makes a decent effort to disguise its conventionality (in so far as its shape occasionally reflects the freeform recursiveness of its subject’s music), underneath it all the film is still a largely chronological tribute spliced together with the usual assortment of archival footage and talking heads — David Byrne chief among them. Shebar may not follow the transliterated Wikipedia page template by starting with Monk’s greatest triumph before doubling back to her modest childhood years, but the path that “Monk in Pieces” charts from the fringes of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s to the National Medal of Arts ceremony in 2015 isn’t exactly one that hasn’t been charted before.
Except here, in a biodoc that manages to trace the ancient magic of Monk’s creativity without making any claim to understand where it comes from or what it means, that path doesn’t feel like much of a path at all. From the beginning of her career as a solo dancer in an off-Broadway children’s musical theater adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” at the Actor’s Playhouse in 1961, Monk has never moved forward — or upward — so much as she’s led a fearless expedition deeper inside herself.
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Monk founded her own interdisciplinary performance company seven years later, and released the first of her radical vocal works not long after that (think: breathy, sometimes high-pitched warbling over a bed of soft piano or piston-like percussion), but her so-called success in the art world can’t be measured by the typical metrics of money and fame. It’s not that she’s necessarily above such things, only that they’ve always been irrelevant to her process of self-discovery.
While Shebar’s film may not be able to demystify that process, or to draw any particularly clear lines between Monk’s albums, operas, and experimental film projects (one of the interviewees credits her as the godmother of music videos), it radiates a sacred respect for the difference between what matters to its subject and what doesn’t. As a result, even the documentary’s most straightforward moments are steeped in the purity of creation for its own sake. Light on context, comfortable with the idea that Monk’s work speaks for itself despite its absence of intelligible language, and carried along by little more than the the whirlpool-like pull of her voice, “Monk in Pieces” transcends its format because it’s less the story of an artist than it is the story of artistry itself — of what it does, of why we need it, and of how it survives in the face of a world that loves discovery almost as much as it hates anything it hasn’t already heard or seen before.
A fiercely self-possessed but forever childlike 82-year-old who still has the same braids, the same pet turtle, and the same Tribeca loft she did more than half a century ago, Monk is less a woman of her time than she is a woman outside of it (some of the film’s most effective passages watch her shuffle around that apartment as the Glossolalia-like birdsong of her decades-old recordings flutters over the soundtrack). She may be associated with a certain era of the downtown art scene, but she never belonged to it, and it’s telling that the film’s judiciously chosen interview subjects — from music journalists to fellow luminaries like Merce Cunningham and Philip Glass — tend to talk about her like some rare phenomenon they once saw in the sky. Like the aurora borealis or a shooting star.
Even her former creative and romantic partner Ping Chong, who saw Monk’s raw humanity up close, and knows all too well that she’s just as vulnerable to the same wounds and rewards as the rest of us, seems to agree that his ex defies mortal understanding. Rooted in her focus on the voice as an instrument, Monk’s elemental music is both timeless and futuristic all at once; mainstream critics, almost all of them male, initially dismissed her pieces as the work of a woman who was talking to herself, but the shape of “Monk in Pieces” invites us to hear that she’s always been communing with forces beyond our recognition. They decried the awkward shuffling of her choreography as “a disgrace to dancing,” but Shebar’s film makes it clear that Monk was simply moving to a rhythm that most people couldn’t hear. A cosmic conductor.
It’s a rhythm that most people might not want to hear. “Monk in Pieces” is obviously enamored with its subject’s work, but the film doesn’t belabor the genius of each piece as it wends its way from one project to the next, stopping for the occasional detour into the pain of Monk’s past — much of it to do with the absence of her mother, a disappointed musician who was too busy recording radio jingles to be with her daughter at home — or the terror of her dreams, which are brought to life by a series of paper cutouts by artist Paul Barritt. Many viewers might only hear nonsense when they listen to “Dolmen Music,” and many more will probably agree with Byrne’s point that Monk’s work sounds like something “anyone could make,” and Shebar doesn’t waste his breath selling us on its virtues.
To his mind, that Monk’s work sounds like something anyone could have made is less important than the fact that nobody else did, and that Monk has always refused to do anything else. She was certainly aware of — and maybe even hurt by — years of empty seats, bad reviews, and non-existent revenue (“Monk in Pieces” is nothing if not a testament to what people can achieve with the benefit of a rent-controlled apartment), but the reaction to her work has always been a distraction from her need to create it, in much the same way as words got in the way of her voice before discovered that she could simply do without them.
Empowered by the indivisible viscerality of Monk’s work (a massive Zoom discussion on her career immediately devolves into a mess of voices unintelligible enough to sound like one of Monk’s performances), Shebar’s film relies on creative urgency to compensate for what it lacks in specific insight. “One wonders if she really knows what she’s doing,” a critic wrote in response to Monk’s interpretative requiem for the Holocaust, and Monk sometimes wonders the same thing, especially as she begins to take stock of her mortality towards the end of this doc.
And yet, “Monk in Pieces” makes it extremely clear that Monk has always known why she’s doing it. You can hear it in the way her “Gotham Lullaby” seamlessly flows into Björk’s cover of the song (performed on the night of 9/11, and chosen for its ability to articulate a pain that people lacked the language to describe), or in how her ancient melodies inspire you to answer them with your own. “Artists are the antennae of society,” she’s been known to say, and “Monk in Pieces” leverages conventional biodoc structure to fashion its subject into an instrument all her own.
We may not understand the signals she receives, and she may not always understand them either, but the movie makes it impossible to deny that Meredith Monk has ever just been talking to herself.
Grade: B+
“Monk in Pieces” is now playing in theaters.
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