The Musicians (Dave Gahan)

In 1988, Depeche Mode was the subject of the music documentary 101. The film, shot by veteran rock documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, was a capsule of the band's legendary final concert for their 1988 album tour, Music for the Masses at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. Upon closer inspection of 101, Masha Tupitsyn reworks the concert footage to reveal not just a portrait of a band, or a devoted fan base, but a gifted and anxious lead singer, for whom the landmark event represented both a breakthrough and a breakdown. The Musicians, a video series on the temporality and hidden testimony of music, carefully studies Dave Gahan’s haunting and dynamic Rose Bowl performance, revealing the hallucinatory chasm between a performer’s interiority and exteriority; the public singing voice and the inaudible inner voice. Tupitsyn unearths and pieces together 30 years of press interviews with Gahan about his fatal drug overdose in 1996--during which time he was clinically dead for two minutes--as well as his memories of Rose Bowl, creating an alternate audio track for the concert. Tupitsyn constructs Gahan’s inner voice as a druggy, suicidal, apparitional pitch that crosses the boundaries of time--portending and enacting its own destiny and doom. While 101 shows us a beautiful, young rockstar enjoying and weathering his success at the height of his creative powers, The Musicians--an auditory landscape that plays upon the phrase "hearing voices," an idiom for madness—moves between the past and the future, the audible and inaudible, the voice and the face, life and death, to listen to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual muteness that is often required to perform on a world stage.

-2022