The journey towards this year’s Venice Film Festival began nearly two decades ago for documentarian Marie Losier and pop icon Merrill Nisker – better known to the world as Peaches. Upon meeting backstage at a show, Losier instinctively turned her Bolex camera on the musician — and then didn’t stop filming for 17 years.
The result is “Peaches Goes Bananas,” an intimate and unconventional doc premiering out the Venice Days sidebar.
The project marks the second Peaches-focused project to hit this year’s festival circuit, following Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer’s “Teaches of Peaches” in Berlin, and the singer sees no overlap.
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“The projects are so different,” Nisker tells 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 documentary. It’s more of a painting, a portrait. Marie gets excited about an artist and then goes her own way.”
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“The film is very linked to the body, and how the body can be an object of art,” says director Marie Losier. “The film shows how a body across many stages and many ages can create beauty. And it’s a film where the music is felt physically.”
The filmmaker achieved that result by shooting with a hand-held film camera that couldn’t record sound.
“[Shooting with a Bolex] is full of surprises,” says Losier. “You don’t see what you film, so you focus on the moment, while staying very concentrated, and then discover all kinds of surprises when you get the result. It’s a very different way of thinking cinema, full of problems and surprises, which I love.”
“Separating sound from image can be as important as the image itself,” she continues. “You can invent so much more when not filming with synchronized sound. It really opens a universe of creativity.”
Dipping into the musician’s personal archives, the film shines a new light on Nisker’s own creative approach. For well before she emerged as a Berlin-based icon, the young singer taught music to Torontonian tots, and she likens the process to a kind of trial by fire in which the Peaches stage presence was forged.
“Audiences want to feel part of the show, to feel like they know something that you don’t,” says Nisker. “They don’t – but the suspension of disbelief is really exciting, and it’s fun to play with that, pretending like you forgot to play [their favorite song.] You have to find a way to interact without them taking over.”
And seeing the icon sing nursery rhymes in a much different context to a markedly younger crowd was also a way to “decentralize the coolness of rock music.”
Instead, Losier centralizes the singer’s relationship with her parents and sister, departing from certain Behind the Music conventions with a depiction of deep love and devotion. But with love comes heartache and loss – a factor made all the more acute by family illness and the film’s 17-year-shoot.
“Returning to the footage so many years later I saw the powerful way Peaches gazed upon [her sister] Suri, something I hadn’t noticed while in the moment,” says Losier. “It made the editing process very moving, and very emotional, because I was so close to it. I needed to orchestrate those emotions to bring the film to life.”
Given the film’s mammoth production, the very passage of time emerges as a key theme – while seeing the artist interact with her own parents underscores one of Nisker’s main concerns.
“Intergenerational discussion and understanding is most important right now,” she says. “I also think that parents and grandparents can often be more punk than their kids. I mean, they’ve lived through cultural revolutions – they understand the punk attitude!”
As a performing artist, Peaches wants to embody that attitude.
“[The culture] will always have a place for young people to find their icons,” she says. “But those a bit older are now like, I want mine! We want this, we need to feel this way too. So I want say [aging and menopause] is not the end. It’s the beginning of a new thing – and it’s great. You don’t have to worry about wearing white, for instance.”
