Anyone familiar with the supersized DVD stores that dot our cities will also be familiar with their dedicated ‘music’ sections. Row upon row of discs stuffed with ‘exclusive interviews!’ and ‘bonus extra special live footage!’. Each music documentary title promises fans a chance to hear and see their beloved band, potentially showing another side to that heard on audio recordings. The titles run the gamut from straight concert footage (a documentary of a sort, albeit dull) to critical and thorough engagements with an artist’s history, context and philosophies.

The Backbeat section of the MIFF program offers a range of films pitched somewhere in the middle, but with more stress on the historical than the concert experience.
If a lot of those DVD shelves are filled with marketing pap’dosing up on praise for whoever the saintly subject may be’at MIFF we regularly get a parallel of this in films like We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen. That is, solid but not particularly remarkable documentaries about some once-underrated-now-influential band or artist. These films are musical treats for fans, but with little cinematic value and little real attempt to justify their importance as films or documents.

This film also shows up another of the Festival’s regular weak spots’the disproportionate number of films about the history of rock and punk. Alongside the Minutemen doco, this year sees American Hardcore and Punk’s Not Dead, two films addressing punk’s musical and philosophical roots. If we add to this the punkish frenzy of the Pixies doco, loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies, you have just under a third of the 2006 music documentaries allotted to one musical genre. It’s an important and significant genre, obviously, but the MIFF programmers seem to have a distinct leaning toward excavating the historical myths around punk and early rock. This is all neatly symbolised in the choice of Jean-Luc Godard’s important’but hardly essential’Sympathy for the Devil as one of the flagship docos.

As it happens, the better musical moments at MIFF come in the places away from this rock-focus. Rock the Bells and Beyond Beats and Rhymes are hip hop documentaries with quite different agendas. Rock the Bells follows Chang Weisberg’s attempt at getting the notoriously disorganised and reluctant Wu Tang Clan together for one show. The drama in simply getting Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard to arrive becomes the central theme of a film that delivers live footage and behind-the-scenes action. By focussing on one event, the film maintains an easy narrative and squeezes all the suspense of real life into something that’s as much about artists as it is the chaos of organising a large-scale event. Beyond Beats and Rhymes, on the other hand, does everything its subtitle suggests’A Hip-Hop Head Weighs in on Manhood in Hip-Hop Culture. As hip hop shifts and progresses from its early roots as the underground music of the urban oppressed to being the music of choice for many privileged whites, the genre finds itself increasingly in the role of oppressor’treating women, homosexuals and particular races as targets of denigration. This, obviously, is not cool’and film-maker Byron Hurt calls out this hypocrisy in a personal but much needed intervention into the genre.

The strength of these two films suggest where the best musical documentaries often come from: focus on a singular but groundbreaking event (Think of Wilco’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart or Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter.) or reporting on interesting, current phenomenon. The latter is where MIFF Backbeat often seems to be missing, even though the other documentary sections of the Festival are often loaded with relevant films. It’s hard to believe these topical musical documentaries aren’t being made in big numbers.

Where, for instance, are the MIFF films about electronic music? Let’s hope in 2007 we get to see Speaking in Code: Adventures in the New Electronic Underground, an exciting production by sQuare that focuses on the ultra-creative electronic music underground. It’s a film that should speak to the globalised nature of music and film these days’jet-setting artists, transatlantic musical and filmic productions, creative centres (Berlin, Cologne, Detroit) with dispersed performance locations (Madrid, London, Florida). Let’s hope one of Speaking in Code’s flights around the world finds it in Melbourne. It’d be a shock of contemporary buzz in the grey-haired baby boomer rock ‘n’ roll love-in.