The lack of respect with which the Black musician Thelonious Monk was treated in Autumn, 1969. At the end of his European tour, legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk appears on an interview show in Paris for French state television.
Rewind and Play, 리와인드 & 플레이
Berlin International Film Festival 
Denmark H DOX 
Brazil In-Edit Brasil 
South Korea12 Jecheon International Music & Film Festival 
Brazil Denmark South Korea
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
This is quite possibly the most uncomfortable I've ever been watching a film/documentary, and I recommend you watch it if you can.
Imagine this.
You are shy. Extremely shy. In fact, you don't like to talk, especially to strangers. And yet here you are, in a foreign country, being interviewed by someone who speaks another language (although he also speaks yours). You are a jazz pianist. Quite famous in some places.
So here you are, for 1 hour, on a stage that is all lit up. Have you ever been on a lit stage? It's hot. Really friggin hot. Thelonius Monk is wearing a suit and a hat and he's got longish hair and a huge beard. And he's under…
Though it has some occasional moments of radiant beauty, mostly found in Thelonius Monks' piano playing, this film is a brutal watch. To see an exceptional musical genius like Thelonius be slowly reduced to a piece of easily digestible entertainment for a white European audience is soulcrushing.
It reminded me strongly of 'Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris.' in which a Swedish TV-crew blatantly misunderstands and disrespects Baldwin while supposedly making a documentary about the writer. Though the two films bear some resemblance, there's also a major difference: Baldwin is a verbal communicator, Monk is a musical one. This means that he cannot defend himself from televised exploitation in the same way Baldwin could. Where Monk lacks Baldwin's verbal…
One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acquired the unseen rushes from an episode of the French TV program "Jazz Portrait," created and hosted by one Henri Renaud, an interviewer whose smug officiousness is matched only by his discomfort in his own skin. I haven't seen any other episodes of "Jazz Portrait," and based on what we see in Rewind and Play I am in no hurry to track them down. Because what Gomis shows us quite clearly is that this man's project, consciously or not, is to explain jazz, to make it palatable for the Today Show / Good Morning Britain crowd. And we see…
Such a powerful, incredible piece. Close-ups of Monks' face covered in sweat when he gives his all to the music only to be shambled by the reality of the situation when the French tv-host asks him to play another one this is an incredibly well edited film about the only black person in a room of white people, moulding him into a polished, sensored picture of ivity and peacefulness in a room that is everything else but peaceful.
Place a genius in an asylum and watch them go mad. The asylum Thelonious Monk is confined to is that of French television in 1969. To their eyes he becomes Thelonious the Performing Monkey, his words dismissed and tasked to play and play again. Sweat pours from his brow beneath his host’s patronising attitude and the heat of the studio’s lights. You watch and cringe and want this titan to fight back, but he’s too decent for that, suffering under the spotlight in humbled isolation.
This is a bunch of found B roll of a TV interview Monk gave in Paris in 1969 which affords me the definitive answer to the question "What would you do with a time machine?"
Answer: I would go back to 1969 and throw this TV interviewer into the Seine.
You can just take my word for it that I know what BTS a music interview looks like and this is, without hesitation, the most monstrously bad interview I have ever seen.
This production is a nightmare of epic scale - humiliating, degrading, insulting to a musician I happen to believe, with all my heart, is the Mozart of the 20th century (only better) which, btw, he proves WHEN HE'S…
Basically an hour of Thelonius Monk being tortured by the French. Disrespectful, awkward, terrible interview. His piano playing remains sublime.
Bomb . Now!
Thelonious Monk hangs out with his coolass wife, smokes some cigs, and pets a cute dog. Then a French TV program tries to interview him and capture some performance footage.
And the “tries” part is what’s crucial here, since by presenting outtakes from the shoot, Rewind & Play reveals troubling contrasts between the contrived highbrow arts program and its subject, who despite being treated as some sort of “difficult eccentric” is clearly no dummy. Once you’ve sat through this bespectacled French dickhead vetoing Monk’s matter of fact answers to stupid questions, you’re REALLY going to be bristling at him asking a sweating, exasperated Monk to play just one more tune for the cameras.
I find little to object to in the…
was looking for something shorter to vibe out to before i had to start thanksgiving cooking, and not only did this deliver entirely, but it's anti-documentary assemblage of the detritus of a strained tv segment prompted me down some of my favorite lines of thought around framing, construction, contextualization, and power relations, and where the stances of the original producers and Gomis on all those things conflict and overlap. as an archival doc completely inspiring, ready to get that mac n cheese goin!
Pretty remarkable experiment - although it definitely helps if you like jazz and/or Monk specifically, but I can't recall a film ever repurposing footage in quite the way this does.
Trust the tale, not he who tells it, etc etc.
Anyone who has ever poked around in the underbelly of a film archive has found unedited material that somehow plays as though it hardly needs editing, the subtext of the material comes through so strongly. This is the only time I’ve seen anyone use the idea effectively, however.
It made me think about Peter Watkins’ contemporary essays about the dangerous conformity of television’s Universal Clock, how the medium flattens out the significance of what it purports to convey.
The only way to describe this is to say, just watch it. The experience of watching this film is its own self-critique. It’s really stressful and edgy to just sit there and see Monk playing some of the most beautiful music you’ve…
