Year Of The Horse

by Michiel van der Ent

What's special about the music of Neil Young and Crazy Horse is that it borders on the pathetic, but never crosses that border. The unpolished and intense music, an intriguing mix of melancholy, tenderness and anger, is quite moving, but you're not drenched in false emotions. Crazy Horse plays honest, straightforward rock. 

In the documentary about this band, Year of the Horse (script and direction: Jim Jarmusch), guitar-player Frank `Poncho' Sampedro says more than once that he's not confident about the project: it's improbable that an artsy-fartsy film director from New York will find out what thirty years of Crazy Horse mean, just by asking a couple of questions. Jarmusch is being modest; in his Director's Notes he writes: "We like the movie we made, because, if nothing else, you get to see and hear Crazy Horse playing their own transcendent brand of rock 'n roll." 

In addition to concert footage, the film includes interviews and `impressions': shots of passing scenery, glances in hotel rooms and dressing rooms, incidents on the road, and Neil Young staring reflectively out of the window of the bus. Images, in short, of the eternal traveling troubadour, living on the fringe of society. It's the gypsy romanticism of the rock legend. The gist of the interviews with band members and others involved is that Crazy Horse is a very special band, and most of all a fine band to play in. This being not very sensational, but nevertheless sympathetic, Jarmusch' modesty is quite fitting here. 

The film is shot on 16mm and Super-8, because, according to Jarmusch, "the raw beauty [of Super-8] somehow corresponds to the particular quality of the Horse's music". Modest or not modest, pretension is not alien to Jim Jarmusch: he believes to have found the visual counterpart of Crazy Horse's music. He's not alone in that, by the way. It was Neil Young who, pleased with the `Big Time' video that Jarmusch made for the band, suggested making Year of the Horse. 

Perhaps the choice of 16mm and Super-8 is the right one for a video of a few minutes. For an almost two hour feature it is not, and the concert sequences suffer considerably. Super-8 and 16mm footage is coarse and blurred, and the impression that you can't see everything very well becomes the dominant one. This is intensified by the `artistic' editing à la MTV: shots of different quality (black and white and color, underexposed and overexposed) succeed each other rapidly. What you see are flashes instead of a coherent registration. 

The observation aside that `raw' is an insufficient description of the music of Crazy Horse (and necessarily so, since there are more bands playing raw music), the visual style hinders a functional documentary - that is to say a documentary that shows its subject. The style is an ill-considered trick, pasted on the film, as it were. After seeing Year of the Horse I immediately bought a CD of the 1996 tour, during which the film was shot, but it wasn't the film that made me do so - it was the music.