There is a spectacular new film about the music of David Bowie

There is a mantra that is repeated cyclically in Brett Morgen's new documentary Moonage Daydream, which focuses on the universal figure of David Bowie: «Everything is in transit». Meditating on the transience of an individual's artistic existence within an ascetic consideration of life, considered by Bowie as a product of the viewer's own imagination, Morgen navigates the White Duke's evolutionary transition by engaging the viewer at the center of the experiential flow. David Bowie was the drag of everything, where life always begins. Not only did he produce the most interesting and meaningful music in the contemporary world, but he also created innovative and iconic stage costumes, record covers, set designs and videos. For Vittoria Broackes, director of the London of Design Biennale and co-curator of the David Bowie Is exhibition, Bowie's unique ability was always to understand the audience and anticipate the trend in various media. He was not only aware of what he wanted to communicate but also what was actually being received.

The three-dimensionality of his music was to take on character, form, body, so much so that he urged the audience to take on his song form as a way of life: «Illustrative and pictorial expression of the surrounding world». Employing two years to familiarize himself with millions of archival pieces, Morgen developed an intuitive sense of what materials to use and how they would project onto the viewer's perception, also working on the sensory and aural experience as was already the case in the David Bowie Is performance that guided the audience into the meanderings of his mind through the fusion of multiple compositions. Through the clippings of multiple sequences from documentaries and interviews Morgen captures the centrality of the metropolitan experience for Bowie beginning with the London suburbs where the figure of Ziggy Stardust was born and developed, a human manifestation of an alien being trying to convey a message of hope to the doomed human species; the alienation of Los Angeles, in which every star is overwhelmed by his darkness, to the portrayal of the White Duke as an expression of Berlin's architectonicity, whose style according to curator and writer Oriole Cullen was directly inspired by the clothing found in Berlin cabarets during the Weimar Republic .

« Morgen’s non-linear editing works in tension with the film’s overarching linear chronology. This complex structure is appropriate, since it portrays the temporal fluidity and “loose continuity” that Bowie wove across five decades and several mediums [...]. Being in transit was an important theme in David's life and reflecting his creative process, the approach also replicates the artist's treatment of time as a medium and his penchant for time travel. His songs, music videos, and performances portray a constant and dizzying transit between past, present, and future». For Lisa Perrot, professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato and author of the book David Bowie and The Art of Music Video, it is Bowie's artistic conformation that pushes the music documentary form beyond convention. Morgen combines the documentary style with music video aesthetics and surrealist assembly methods to create a new form of transmission, deconstructing the myth in its many forms. «Morgen treats Moonage Daydream as an audiovisual tapestry, woven from numerous archival materials: c songs, vocal recordings, still photographs and film footage [...],  punctuating them with sonic and visual effects. [...] Grounding the film in reality, the rawness and heightened proximity of these projections enhance the sensory experience. [...] The film allows Bowie to tell his story through his own words and his own art».

Come ha detto lo stesso Morgen: «If you ingest Bowie into your veins for seven years, you’re probably going to be a better person at the end of it than you were when you started […] Bowie invited us the way kabuki does, to kind of project and fill in the blanks. And so I tried to create a film in that manner […] We all have our own Bowie. You have your Bowie, I have my Bowie. I wanted the canvas to reflect back to each viewer their own Bowie, and ultimately themselves». The artist who best transposed his art through his body, creating an unprecedented impact on many generations of teenagers. As each new generation rediscovers incarnations and characters, the fashion world repeatedly finds Bowie and his images: «The point at which style, metamorphosis, performance and presentation converge».