A Flag Waves In Brooklyn

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Contemporary Color.

I vaguely remember Color Guard being a thing we had at my high school -- I know it might shock and awe you that this particular film nerd writing at you today wasn't all that into sports back then (besides the occasional loitering around a wrestling match now and then, ahem) so I don't recall ever seeing them at work though, flinging their prop guns like ballistic missiles through the air.  They seemed like a sub-set within a sub-set, not quite band and not quite the cheer-leading squad. Something in between, but also outside of.

Contemporary Color, which documents the recent shows in Brooklyn that Talking Heads' legend David Byrne organized in an effort to toss this sport under a great big spotlight, pairing ten different teams with ten different modern musician-composers (people like St Vincent and Nico Muhly) captures that strange off-center vibe well. Quirk runs far and wide, oft gloriously so. It's just a very weird spectacle, one of a kind, and even though I'm personally allergic to jazz hands I found myself captivated anyway.

Documentarian-brothers Bill and Turner Ross usually train their eye on a small community (with films like Tchoupitoulas and Western) to suss out the over- and under-lapping strands that knot them together and hold them tight - here that sense of place is abstracted; it's about movement flowing into movement, sound into sound. Make no mistake this is first and foremost a concert film, capturing the spirit of the show, but the brothers allow plenty of backstage personality to flow in too. They give us gorgeous moments of homespun artistry (there's a shot of two young girls exhausted and giggling behind a scrim mid-performance that I adored) exploding onto a big stage. It's miraculously intimate and "Muppet Show" epic all at once.

Bonus! Several of the performers highlighted in the doc were there for the premiere screening on Thursday night to give us a performance, which I managed to capture on video! (Sidenote: I had to edit the music off of part of the performance because copyrighting was blocking it; the two male dancers are dancing to this song) Enjoy: