One More Time with Feeling

I watched this recently and was hugely moved by it. One of the best documentaries on one of the finest artists of the last ten years.

It works brilliantly as a companion piece to the earlier Nick Cave documentary; 20000 days on earth, an equally visceral and beautifully crafted film. Why isn't this man awarded the accolades he so rightfully deserves.

Moving, gripping and artful. Highly reccomended and essential viewing for anyone who has the slightest interest in music docs, or the process of creation.

To call One More Time With Feeling a great achievement and leave it at that would be to ignore just how unique it is in a vast sea of documentaries. Instead of being about the death of Nick Cave's son and treating that as the primary subject, the film revolves around Nick Cave's creative process and in the meantime how his personal loss affected that process. There are a lot of philosophical ideas going around, so even though the premise and structure of the film is simple, it's a very weight film to experience. Andrew Dominik can create an atmosphere like no other (for an example, see The Assassination of Jesse James) and here he's able to so perfectly capture the kind of thoughtful ideas and imagery that are associated with Cave's internal process. This is a great one and not to be missed.

3D is used here as an art form, a new experience for me. Also the black and white really adds to the vibe. We get to grieve with Nick about his son Arthur's death. We see him not as a rock star but as a human being dealing with loss. The songs used from his 16th album Skeleton Tree were just amazing. It feels like we're there in the recording studio with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Like we are a part of the music, and its brilliant.

I saw it in a packed cinema and everyone sat glued to their seats when the credits start rolling. It's that good.

Go see it in 3D while you still can. It will change you forever.

I wouldn't call myself a Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds fanboy, more like a passer-by who appreciates what he has heard of their works especially Cave and Warren Ellis's works providing film scores over recent years, so perhaps One More Time with Feeling doesn't mean as much to me as it would to long serving fans that have been with the band since their inception.

This music documentary that centres almost entirely around Cave in the recording studio working on the Skeleton Tree album is directed by Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik and the Chopper and Assassination of Jesse James overcomes the disappointing reception of his last feature film Killing Them Softly to deliver a beautifully captured documentation of the album making process that also happens to touch upon the tragic loss of Cave's son Arthur that turned his world upside down.

There's nothing typical about Cave the musician and Cave the human and Dominik's film follows the mantra to a tee with Cave allowed to provide rambling voice overs and deep life pondering monologues on camera to fill in blanks but it would've been more effective for a watcher like myself had Dominik and Cave himself toned down the ponderous to instead talk more to the everyman as much of the diatribe or deep musings end up becoming a little too much to bare.

One thing that never gets hard to bare however is Dominik's directing style (unfortunately the version of the film I watched wasn't in the intended 3-D format) and the filmmaker uses his cinematic senses to great effect as the camera invades and wanders the recording studio. There is also little denying the power of some of Cave and his bands work here with members like the majestical Warren Ellis combining with Cave to deliver some heart-wrenching and soul searching songs born out of unimaginable loss and if nothing else, these musical moments make One More Time with Feeling worth the price of admission.

Final Say –

An absolute must for fans of Cave and his music, this anything but a by the numbers music doco is an intimate look into the bands creative sensibilities and a sometimes touching portrait of a man touched by grief. If however there was a little less airplay given to various and overlong ramblings, One More Time with Feeling would've been a film for everyone, not just those willing to nod in approval to every little word Cave speaks.

3 forgotten piano chords out of 5

The premiere of 20,000 Days on Earth, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's 2014 documentary about musician and author Nick Cave, was preceded by red carpet pizazz, and the irreverent film itself ended – beside the sea – with an optimistic message of boundless hope and creativity.

It's these memories that make Andrew Dominik's mesmeric new documentary even sadder. We're used to seeing the elegant, lyrical Cave effortlessly turning horror into romance. But here we see him slouched in a tracksuit top, unsure what to say or do to console his grieving wife, who clutches a painting that their son, Arthur, drew when he was five.

Our knowledge of the fate of Arthur Cave, who fell to his death last year aged 15, is assumed and it looms over the film like a literal shadow. Shot almost entirely in monochrome, the mood is mournful throughout, punctuated by the briefest levity, usually between Cave and Warren Ellis, his long-time collaborator.

The film makes few narrative concessions. There's no dramatic moment when the bad news comes through. No crash zooms on crying faces. Early on, Cave reflects on something Ellis has said: that past, present and future exist all at once. And this is how it feels in the final edit, as we never know which footage (if any) is from before the tragedy and which came after.

We are given no names in subtitles and the context is barely explained. It's not informative in the typical sense. This isn't a criticism but a fact. Rather than a charting of specific events, One More Time With Feeling is a document of mood and emotion. Punctuating this texture are studio recordings. The tracks from The Bad Seeds' new LP, Skeleton Tree, released the day after this one- off cinematic event, are universally downbeat: looping, suffocating, darkly ambient swirls and tragic piano descents. More than ever, the lyrics are aching and sometimes abstract. Cave is the master of effective verbal repetition; and, as he mentions at one point, no line is wasted. Dominik lets four or five tracks play out in full while his camera prowls the moody studio darkness. His direction is tasteful, atmospheric, and sensitive.

And necessarily so, because the feelings are raw. Cave talks unbearably movingly about the impossibility of softening his grief with lyrics. (I was reminded of Theodor Adorno's comment about how there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.) He's also coming to terms with the fact that the trauma cannot be escaped, such is its "elastic" grasp, always pulling the bereaved back. However eloquently Cave has sung or spoken about death and loss in the past, the situation here is obviously something profound and unique, and the aftermath is a maze of indefinable despair, beyond the best poet.

Watch with caution, for this is a difficult documentary which is not designed to console or comfort. It exists to draw you unsentimentally into the sombre rhythm of grief. Yet the fact that a perfectly calibrated and deeply moving work of art could come out of such a moment in an artist's life does, on some level, leave us with a kind of hope.