Skip to content 
Paul Thomas Anderson’s eye for animated music on screen dates back to the late 1990s when, after “Boogie Nights,” he made Technicolor mini-work music videos with his girlfriend Fiona Apple — or made a San Fernando Valley-sized shrine to Aimee Mann with his third feature, “Magnolia.” Since then, he’s been kicked around by HAIM as he turns one third of his Los Angelino influence, Alana Haim, into a screen actress. He has recorded for Radiohead and regularly collaborated with band member Jonny Greenwood to create some of the most memorable scores of the 21st century. Many young filmmakers now associate the mischievous notes of “Phantom Thread” with the poisonous promise of new love and obsessive creation.
Last December, PTA teamed up with Geese frontman Cameron Winter to film, while operating his own Panavision camera, his solo stage show at Carnegie Hall, running through sparse piano arrangements of tracks from his solo album, “Heavy Metal.” The result is a 72-minute film that’s now being released roadshow-style by Janus Films before its inevitable stay on the Criterion Collection, a wonderful arrangement in its own right: a painfully painful, earnest but not earnestly tender concert film. (Josh Safdie counts as a producer, and the quality and gritty setting of the film in New York can’t help but print it.)
The blonde, blond Winter can look a little uncomfortable in his own skin in the public eye, as he did on stage ahead of “Cameron Winter at Carnegie” at the New York Film Festival’s world premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But on the piano, laser-cut into his song, he’s gently relaxed, seemingly at ease as his tight glissando voice and nimble piano fingerwork produce tender country ballads reminiscent of Harry Nilsson and Van Morrison. (The usual comparisons to Tom Waits and Rufus Wainright are fair, too, but Winter is his own weirdo.) If you weren’t previously sold on the antic rock frenzy of Winter Geese – quickly becoming one of the most popular contemporary art rock bands of the moment – you are about to be. Paul Thomas MacAndrews has created a rhapsodic shrine to the man who is nevertheless the size of a ballad in emotional scale.
Winter, in December, played and sang to a sold-out crowd of more than 2,700 at the stately cultural temple of Carnegie Hall, and at times this film can feel like a religious experience, an impulse, a lonely vigil. The singer/songwriter was 23 at the time of the concert, a year older than Bob Dylan when he headlined Carnegie Hall, and also at the height of his fame. Mounted on a mobile crane that sometimes takes care of the stage when they are not otherwise holding Winter, Anderson’s camera captures the emotion and chiaroscuro of stage lights illuminating and fading off the singer’s face.
The result is a hynoptic, concert film up there with “Stop Making Sense” but for introverts. Songs like the popular single “$0” take on an even more sinister quality as a relationship-driven love protagonist (“You make me feel like a dollar in your hand / You make me feel like a man without a dollar”). Without production, his indie album “Love Takes Miles” plays even better. While many of the songs go into the same key and bleed into each other, that makes for a more complex experience. The lack of an interlude except for a sweet prologue and moving coda makes for an experience that is also immersive, deep, and the kind of truth you can feel somewhere in your body even if you can’t quite express it.
Grade: A-
“Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall premiered at the New York Film Festival. Janus Films will release it in theaters beginning November 20th.”
