Donna Summer could play more movingly beautiful notes than any other pop singer of her time or since. I'm not sure even Whitney Houston, great as she was, reached the scintillating heights that culminate in "Last Dance" (although she comes pretty close on "I Will Always Love You"). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) pulls off impressive vocal acrobatics, but to my ear she can't match Donna's bell-like brilliance in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers, well, her voice vibrates with a visceral resonance.
In the documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, which has its world premiere today at the Berlin Film Festival, we can revel in that voice. But directors Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano, Donna's daughter, aren't looking for a jukebox musical experience, content to press play on one hit after another. Rather, they create a portrait of a woman and artist far more complex, and talented, than has been appreciated. Summer not only possessed an impressive vocal gift, but she also wrote or co-wrote some of her most famous songs and impacted the course of pop music more profoundly than many realize. However, she wrestled with the mantle of fame and felt a deep conflict between her artistic impulses and the constraints of a deeply religious upbringing. She never fully resolved the tension between the exuberance inherent in her performative abilities and the compelling and shameful imperative to serve the Lord in accordance with what her faith demanded, as she interpreted it.
Directors: Brooklyn Sudano, Roger Ross Williams
Star: Donna Summer
The documentary opens with the isolated vocals, or rather orgasmic moans, of Summer recording her first international hit, 1975's "Love to Love You Baby" (written by Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte). She made her famous and ushered in the disco era, but the singer always had trouble feeling defined by the song's unprecedented frank expression of female sexual pleasure. In archival footage from the film, Summer's grandmother comments after the song's release, "I'll never be able to go to church again." Her mother says: “She knew she was going to surprise me. To say the least, she surprised me."
The film makes the interesting point that Summer "thought for the theater" and recorded songs as if she were embodying a character. “I approach it as an actress,” she explains. "I'm not trying to be me." In other words, just because Donna Summer recorded "Love to Love You Baby" didn't mean she was a one-woman orgasm.
However, the music industry (as well as music journalists and perhaps the public as well) preferred to confuse Donna with the song, labeling her a "sex rock" icon and "The First Lady of Love". The movie says, "She wasn't having it."
It took a few years, but Summer was finally able to show much more of her vocal range on songs of hers like her cover of "MacArthur Park." She co-wrote the single "I Feel Love", creating a rhythmic drum track that she described as creating a "floating feeling". The song inaugurated electronic dance music. As Elton John reflects in a new interview on the film, "I Feel Love" became a sensation at New York's Studio 54. He says, "It changed the way people thought about music."
Love to Love You, Donna Summer, is completely covered in footage of Summer and other old footage, with the exception of a few vérité moments of Sudano going through his mother's file and recruiting his aunts, uncles, and siblings in an effort to understand. to his mother. We learn that Donna grew up in racist Boston in the 1950s and '60s and was persecuted as a child by white anti-black youth, an encounter that left her with a permanent scar on her face. At 19, she landed a role in an international touring production of the musical Hair and settled in Germany, where she met her first husband, Helmuth Sommer.
In Germany she felt free: freed from the family and its binding religious dictates, freed from America's intense racism, and freed, to a degree, from the torturous memory of the sexual abuse she had been subjected to as a child by the pastor of a church. She would have continued living abroad in all likelihood if Casablanca Records, which helped make "Love to Love You Baby" a hit, hadn't called her back across the Atlantic.
Like another pop icon who grew up in church, Little Richard, she could never really escape the feelings of guilt surrounding her musical calling. She says in the film: “I felt like God could never forgive me because he had failed him. I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool. I just decided my life was meaningless."
Comments
Post a Comment