The journey to this year’s Venice Film Festival began almost twenty years ago for documentary filmmaker Marie Losier and pop icon Merrill Nisker – better known to the world as Peaches. When Losier met backstage at a show, she instinctively pointed her Bolex camera at the musician – and then didn’t stop filming for seventeen years.
The result is “Peaches Goes Bananas,” an intimate and unconventional documentary premiering in the sidebar of Venice Days.
The project marks the second Peaches-centric project to hit the festival circuit this year, following Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer’s ‘Teaches of Peaches’ in Berlin, and the singer sees no overlap.
“The projects are so different,” says Nisker Variety. “One is more of a documentary of a certain album at a certain place in time, [whereas] Marie’s film – well, I don’t even consider it a documentary. It’s more of a painting, a portrait. Marie becomes enthusiastic about an artist and then goes her own way.”
“The film is strongly connected to the body, and how the body can be an art object,” says director Marie Losier. “The film shows how a body can create beauty at many stages and many ages. And it is a film in which the music is physically felt.”
The filmmaker achieved that result by shooting with a portable film camera that could not record sound.
“[Shooting with a Bolex] is full of surprises,” says Losier. “You don’t see what you’re filming, so you concentrate on the moment, staying very focused, and then discover all kinds of surprises when you get the result. It’s a very different way of thinking about cinema, full of problems and surprises, which I like.”
“Separating sound and image can be just as important as the image itself,” she continues. “You can think of so much more if you don’t film with synchronized sound. It really opens up a universe of creativity.”
The film delves into the musician’s personal archives and sheds new light on Nisker’s own creative approach. For long before she emerged as a Berlin icon, the young singer was teaching music to Torontonian toddlers, and she likens the process to a kind of trial by fire in which Peaches’ stage presence was forged.
“The audience wants to feel part of the show, to feel like they know something that you don’t,” Nisker says. “They don’t – but the suspension of disbelief is really exciting, and it’s fun to play with that, like you forgot to play [their favorite song.] You have to find a way to get along without them taking over.”
And seeing the icon sing nursery rhymes in a very different context to a decidedly younger audience was also a way to “decentralize the coolness of rock music.”
Instead, Losier centralizes the singer’s relationship with her parents and sister, deviating from certain Behind the Music conventions with a display of deep love and devotion. But with love also comes heartache and loss – a factor made more acute by family illness and the film’s 17-year shoot.
“When I returned to the images so many years later, I saw the powerful way Peaches stared at them [her sister] Suri, something I had not noticed at the time,” says Losier. “It made the editing process very moving and very emotional because I was so close to it. I had to orchestrate those emotions to bring the film to life.
Given the film’s massive production, the passage of time emerges as a major theme, while the artist’s interaction with her own parents underlines one of Nisker’s greatest concerns.
“Intergenerational discussion and understanding are most important right now,” she says. “I also think that parents and grandparents can often be punker than their children. I mean, they’ve been through cultural revolutions – they understand the punk attitude!”
As a performing artist, Peaches wants to embody that attitude.
“[The culture] There will always be a place where young people can find their icons,” she says. “But those who are a bit older now say: I want mine! We want this, we should feel this way too. So I want to say [aging and menopause] is not the end. It’s the start of something new – and it’s great. For example, you don’t have to worry about wearing white.”
