Rewind and Play (Alain Gomis, 2022) (Patreon)

One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acquired the unseen rushes from an episode of the French TV program "Jazz Portrait," created and hosted by one Henri Renaud, an interviewer whose smug officiousness is matched only by his discomfort in his own skin. I haven't seen any other episodes of "Jazz Portrait," and based on what we see in Rewind and Play I am in no hurry to track them down. Because what Gomis shows us quite clearly is that this man's project, consciously or not, is to explain jazz, to make it palatable for the Today Show / Good Morning Britain crowd. And we see him do this by being both dismissive and condescending to one of the greatest artists of the last century.

Thelonious Monk was in Paris following a brief European concert tour, and agreed to appear on "Jazz Portrait" although it's not entirely clear why. Renaud keeps referring to being in Monk's kitchen hearing him play twenty years ago, and while his repeated mention of this encounter makes him sound like an unironic version of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" (I was there!), it's possible that Monk was trying to do an old acquaintance a favor. But the extended passages we see of Monk trying to deflect Renaud's inane questions are simply painful to watch. At one point during the taping, Monk gets up and implores the man to forget the show altogether. "Let's go get some dinner!" 

Gomis's presentation of the material, largely untouched, not only displays the technical mechanics involved in "making TV," although there's that. When Monk doesn't provide satisfactory answers to Renaud's questions, the crew adopts a plan-b mode, showing Monk playing during extended shots, and then later shooting B-roll with Renaud pretending to listen appreciatively. But more than this, we are seeing how a media apparatus deals with an artist it finds difficult or uncooperative. French TV is trying to sell a product called "Thelonious Monk," and the man himself is perceived as an impediment to that pandering. Renaud and "Jazz Portraits" want to create a simplistic biography for Monk that explains his art -- his relationship with wife Nellie Monk, his early study of classical music, a supposed rejection of his first compositions as too "avant-garde" -- and it's evident to Monk that it's idiotic.

Rewind and Play would be fascinating enough if all Gomis did was deconstruct Renaud's project and highlight Monk's resistance to it. But because the producers could not accomplish the back-and-forth they wanted, with Monk playing a piece and Renaud's questions and comments explaining it, they ended up just letting Monk play. We hear classics like "'Round Midnight," "Crepuscle With Nellie," "Epistrophy," and more, and when we're given the chance to just listen to Monk, the formal meaning of his work is perfectly clear. From his skirting around the tonal center, to his use of keyboard runs and flourishes as punctuation, clearing the decks for a new musical idea, it's all right there. The fact that stagehands and lighting techs wander around him while he plays, as if he were tickling the ivories in some rundown piano bar, just shows that Monk could be brilliant under even the worst circumstances.

Final thought: Renaud's treatment of Monk was indeed condescending, but was it racist? Perhaps; one could hardly imagine a TV producer treating a white cultural icon like this, and if they did, they'd probably be more inclined to give everyone involved a proper dressing-down. At the same time, it doesn't mitigate the specificity of racism to recognize that, after all, racism is a particular strain of human stupidity, and Rewind and Play is a document that displays great art's ability to transcend even the most thoroughgoing mediocrity.