What Happened, Miss Simone?

[osprey_archer]

There are moments when Liz Garbus’s documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? feels like a Youtube playlist: long clips of many of Nina Simone’s most famous songs (“Mississippi Goddam” is played, as far as I could tell, in full) and performances that were turning points in her career.

This is a documentary style that makes a certain amount of sense, particularly for a documentary about a performer: what better way to let the audience get to know her than to let her performances speak for themselves?

But I felt that What Happened, Miss Simone had a bit too much of a good thing in this regard, and often found myself yearning for just a little more interpretation. The documentary has interviews with her family (there are a couple of painful interviews about abuse - the abuse Simone suffered from her husband and the abuse she meted out to her daughter), with friends she met as a musician and friends she met in the course of her Civil Rights activism, but the interviews are tend to be tightly focused on Nina Simone, and I would have liked a little more context.

For the Civil Rights portions, I can fill in some of the context myself out of general knowledge, but I would have really appreciated more musical analysis of her songs. Nina Simone originally trained as a classical pianist (she grew up in the segregated south and had to cross literal railroad tracks over to the white section of town to go to her music teacher); when she played Carnegie Hall years later, she was sorry to be playing pop music rather than Bach. The documentary drops tantalizing hints about how this training influenced her pop music, but I would have been happy to hear a good deal more detail.

I think in the end this is what I wanted from the movie overall: more detail, more context. If the documentary had opened up just a little bit, if it had widened its focus so we get a wider view of the time and the place and the way those shaped Simone (and the way Simone shaped them), it might have offered even more insight into Nina Simone herself.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Yes: What happened a little more broadly, Ms. Garbus?

(Not that it *has* to make a difference, but I see from photos that Lis Garbus is white--so maybe she felt some reservations about wading in too deeply? Although from her filmography it's apparent she's tackled all sorts of difficult topics.)

[osprey_archer]

I wondered the same thing, but probably the only way to answer it is to watch her other documentaries and see if she wades in more deeply when the topic is less racially sensitive, or if the Youtube montage style is just her thing and all her stuff is like this... which sounds like a lot of work. But if I ever happen to see another one of her documentaries it's a question I'll keep in mind.

[ancientreader]

My spouse adores Nina Simone's music, so for her birthday one year I got her tickets to hear NS at Carnegie Hall. It must have been one of her last concerts, perhaps even the very last -- I can't recall the date, only that it would probably have been in the summer.

It was tragic: she entered very late and stumbled through the songs (and occasionally stumbled around the stage), her voice lifeless. I remember that she looked terrible, although that may be one piece of memory revising itself to match the other.

I've seen What Happened, and your criticisms are well taken. She was so brilliant; I've always wondered whether anything could have held back the catastrophe that befell her. The social context was what it was, and no doubt it played a role in triggering her mental illness and then exacerbated it. But if she had had good treatment, might she have found it possible to sustain herself?

[osprey_archer]

The documentary starts with a loooong clip from a concert where Simone is clearly struggling: she comes in, rambles on to the audience without ever quite making sense, and sits down and begins to play "Good King Wenceslas," and at some point I just started to feel like... why are they filming this? Why doesn't Garbus cut the clip short? It feels almost voyeuristic, like gawking at someone who's having a seizure.

Given the social context, and the treatments available at the time, I'm not sure how much an earlier diagnosis would have helped Simone - maybe, maybe not, you know? But I suppose it's always difficult to know with this kind of historical what-if.

[ancientreader]

Ugh, you're right about the available treatments. Somehow I was imagining her getting, say, the kind of care I get from my own psychiatrist, which of course ...

I'd forgotten that clip. Excruciating.