DARK, sometimes difficult, sometimes breathtaking, One More Time With Feeling (Andrew Dominik, 2016) documents the making of Nick Cave’s new album, Skeleton Tree in the wake of his son’s sudden death.
The album was partially complete when when fifteen-year-old Arthur Cave died in July 2015 after falling from a cliff near Cave’s home in Brighton and the inquest revealed that he had taken LSD for the first time shortly before the accident.
Cave has explained that making the documentary, shot largely in black and white and 3D, with just a few colour sequences, was a way to avoid having to discuss the painful subject of his son’s death with the media, however making this film doesn’t strike me as a particularly easy option either.
There are also uncomfortable interviews with a fractious and frustrated Nick, clearly still grieving and struggling as he continues to write and record, but there are also breathtaking, heartbreaking performances when we see Nick and the Bad Seeds at their brilliant best.
Positioning himself at his piano centre stage, surrounded by huge glowing film lights and with his fellow musicians the Bad Seeds around him, the camera circles and observes Nick as the album is performed, improvised, and recorded straight to tape.
Cave’s voice-over also adds to the general feeling of unease and loss, as he critiques himself – the bags under his eyes that weren’t there a year ago, his voice sounding weak because he forgot to warm up – and he ponders aloud about the elasticity of time and wonders how on earth he became an object of pity.
The documentary isn’t really about the music – although it does build and swell with emotion as the album takes shape – but about the creative process, grief and trauma, family life, love and mourning.
Nick even admits that these are not his best, or most polished songs – the trauma has been devastating to the creative process he is accustomed to – but this is something he simply had to do in order to carry on.
“Imagination needs room to breathe,” says Nick, in One More Time With Feeling, and trauma is all-encompassing and suffocating.
In the final minutes of the film, we are shown black and white near-static portraits of the film crew, the band, Nick’s wife Susie, and Arthur’s twin brother, Earl, before we are shown an empty frame – a blank, gray portrait of their missing son.
The audience respectfully applaud and as the credits roll, and an eerie rendition of a young Arthur Cave singing Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Deep Water’ penetrates the slowly emptying room, we know that the Skeleton Tree is complete, but the Cave family’s grieving is not.
