The journey to this year’s Venice Film Festival began nearly two decades ago for documentary filmmaker Marie Lozier and pop icon Meryl Nisker—known to the world as Peaches. When they met backstage at a show, Lozier instinctively pointed her Bolex camera at the musician—and she didn’t stop filming for 17 years.
The result is “Peaches Goes Bananas,” an intimate, unconventional documentary that premieres in the Venice Film Festival’s sidebar.
This marks the second Peaches-focused project to hit the festival circuit this year, following Philipp Fussenegger and Jodi Landkammer's “Teaches of Peaches” in Berlin, and the singer sees no overlap.
“The projects are very different,” Nisker says. diverseThe first is a documentary of a particular album in a particular place at a particular time, [whereas] “Mary’s film – well, I don’t even consider it a documentary. It’s more like a painting or a portrait. Mary gets excited about an artist and then goes her own way.”
“The film is closely linked to the body, and how the body can be an artistic subject,” says director Marie Lussier. “The film shows how the body, through many stages and many eras, can create beauty. It is a film where music is felt physically.”
The director achieved this result by shooting with a hand-held movie camera that could not record sound.
“[Shooting with a Bolex] “Cinema is full of surprises,” says Lussier. “You don’t see what you’re shooting, so you focus on the moment, keeping your concentration very high, and then you discover all sorts of surprises when you get the result. It’s a completely different way of thinking about cinema, full of problems and surprises, which I love.”
“Separating the sound from the image can be as important as the image itself,” she adds. “You can create so many things when you’re not shooting in sync with sound. It really opens up a world of creativity.”
“Peach turns into banana”
Courtesy of Giornate Degli Autori
By delving into the singer’s personal archive, the film sheds new light on Nisker’s creative approach. Before becoming a Berlin-based icon, the young singer taught music to Toronto children, a process she likens to a kind of trial by fire in which the Peaches’ stage presence was shaped.
“The audience wants to feel like they’re part of the show, and they want to feel like they know something that you don’t,” Nisker says. “They don’t know anything — but the suspension of disbelief is really exciting, and it’s fun to play with that, and pretend you forgot to play.” [their favorite song.] “You have to find a way to interact without them controlling you.”
Seeing the icon singing children's songs in a completely different context to a noticeably young crowd was also a way of “de-centering the coolness of rock music.”
Instead, Lussier focuses on the singer’s relationship with her parents and sister, departing from some of the “Behind the Music” conventions by depicting deep love and devotion. But with love comes grief and loss—a factor made all the more acute by the family’s illness and the film’s 17-year shoot.
“When I went back to the footage many years later, I saw the powerful way Peaches looked at [her sister] “Suri, something I didn’t notice while filming,” says Lussier. “It made the editing process very emotional, very moving, because I was so close to her. I needed to coordinate these emotions to bring the film to life.”
Given the film's massive production, the passage of time emerges as a major theme – while seeing the artist interact with her parents underscores one of Nisker's main concerns.
“Discussion and understanding between generations is so important right now,” she says. “I also think parents and grandparents might be more punk-oriented than their kids. I mean, they’ve lived through cultural upheavals—they understand the punk situation!”
As a performance artist, Peaches wants to embody this attitude.
“[The culture] “There will always be a place for young people to find their symbols,” she says. “But those who are older now are saying, ‘I want to have it! We want this, we need to feel this way too.’ So I want to say [aging and menopause] “It's not the end, it's the beginning of something new, which is great. You don't have to worry about wearing white, for example.”
Marie Lucier and Peaches
