Most of this is a Led Zeppelin gig with endless soloing by Jimmy Page. If that's your bag, dive in, you'll love it for the music at least. For me, it brought back how much I hated this kind of thing as a kid in the '70s, and my feelings, it turns out, haven't changed: this much muso Sturm und Drang actually does feel as stressful and dreary as being caught in a storm. Another reminder of why punk felt so necessary to so many of us. Yet still, call me naive, I came to this with certain hopes, I suppose of some kind of transcendent experience. I mean, these guys were masters of their craft, no?
This morning I read the following in a book of Joan Didion essays: 'Make a place available to your eyes and in many ways it is no longer available to your imagination.' This is like that, except here the greater immediacy of the moving image is undermining the mystique of photos already 'available to our eyes.' Taken in full, Zeppelin's legendary majesty turns into an actual if not literal lead balloon: four regular guys, not gods, on a stage playing music full of daft pomposity, inflected by sword and sorcery as silly as it can ever be. No surprise that when it comes to turning that sensibility into film images, you end up with the dull banality of the fantasy sequences here.
So much for about two thirds of the Zeppelin mystique: the post-hippy sense that all this knights, elves and sexy wenches stuff might mean anything and thereby make credible art out of the self-indulgent noodling. Most of the rest is just sex and it fares no better. The artful fraying on the crotch of Plant's too tight jeans looks like the tawdry, obvious, Freudian manipulation it is.
It's like going back in time and finding out just how much we're scamming ourselves when we give in to nostalgia.
This morning I read the following in a book of Joan Didion essays: 'Make a place available to your eyes and in many ways it is no longer available to your imagination.' This is like that, except here the greater immediacy of the moving image is undermining the mystique of photos already 'available to our eyes.' Taken in full, Zeppelin's legendary majesty turns into an actual if not literal lead balloon: four regular guys, not gods, on a stage playing music full of daft pomposity, inflected by sword and sorcery as silly as it can ever be. No surprise that when it comes to turning that sensibility into film images, you end up with the dull banality of the fantasy sequences here.
So much for about two thirds of the Zeppelin mystique: the post-hippy sense that all this knights, elves and sexy wenches stuff might mean anything and thereby make credible art out of the self-indulgent noodling. Most of the rest is just sex and it fares no better. The artful fraying on the crotch of Plant's too tight jeans looks like the tawdry, obvious, Freudian manipulation it is.
It's like going back in time and finding out just how much we're scamming ourselves when we give in to nostalgia.
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