“Pavements” is a film about the band Pavement.
See the movie on the big screen, with a big sound system, amongst Pavement heads!
The End of All Music presents:
ONE NIGHT ONLY OXFORD SCREENING
THE LYRIC THEATER
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18th
Doors: 6:30 p.m. // Show: 7 p.m.
$8 at the door or snag an early ticket online here.
**BRING A LAWN CHAIR**
(Folding chairs will be provided for those that don’t bring their own… We just want you to be comfy!)
ALL AGES.
THE BAR WILL BE OPEN.
We’ll be spinning some Pavement deep cuts before the movie starts.
About the film:
An examination of the iconic 90s indie band, “Pavements” appears to be just another music documentary, until it doesn’t. A prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid, the film intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously tracking the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.
Director’s Statement:
The music documentary has run out of gas. The musician biopic seems doomed to be a part of our lives forever, the lowest form of highbrow storytelling. But I also, against my better judgement, love all of these movies that are never very good, and rarely qualify as cinema. I love-to-hate cliche storytelling in phoney baloney biopics. I will watch any archival documentary that invites me to revel in the aesthetics of a bygone era that I miss dearly. I love musicals, but I’m skeptical and curious about the ongoing cultural project of repurposing bands we love and their catalogues for parallel mediums. With Pavements, I wanted to explore my dubious passion for all of this, and make a movie in a style of directing that was devoid of the pressure of “the shot” or “the take.”
My goal was to not direct scenes or shots, but entire experiences and allow them to be documented naturally – the opening of a museum, opening night of a musical – as a means of creating storytelling that plays out in public, but is all being done for a movie. Only the nonsense biopic scenes would be filmed “normally” but true to that genre of film, the images would be unremarkable, and the coverage would be endlessly traditional. Pavements is 4 or 5 films rolled into one, because I wish that all musical biopics and standard-issue documentaries were 30 minutes long. I’d watch more of them that way.
There has never been a band like Pavement, and I hope there has never been a film like Pavements. It both is, and is not. It presupposes that an iconic band are deserving of all the cultural victories typically afforded much more financially successful artists. But what I learned making the museum and the musical, and thus the film, is that Pavement are deserving of these tributes. It is time to ask questions about the way stories about musicians are told and sold, and for us as the audience to demand more innovation in our biographical portraits.
Some Reviews:
“Though Pavement is the star and the performers in its orbit are all in supporting roles, “Pavements” is distinguished by cinematic artistry that’s as distinctive as it is personal. “Range Life” may be a Pavement story, but “Pavements” is a Perry film.” – The New Yorker
“Part spoof and part serious, the film is about mythmaking as much as it is about music. The result is delightfully destabilizing.” – The NY Times
“Selling out” may be a fading notion, belonging to an older era of fanzines and cassette tapes. Yet in his work Mr. Perry keeps alive ideas of authenticity vs. falsity, of the struggle to stay true to something in a crass commercial world.” – Wall Street Journal
“It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?” –IndieWire
