No Wave legend Beth B’s latest project, Glowing, is something like a short story cycle. Beth B previously made eight short works about friends and contemporaries based on their performances of their writing, which range from poetic monologues to songs. Each was titled something like “Glowing Evelyn” or “Glowing Nick,” and the resulting feature film that includes all eight titles from the project in one hour-long film is aiming for a series of variations on the portrait film and the artistic tribute. It’s tied together by Jim Coleman’s scoring for all eight — viewers primarily familiar with his contributions to the noise rock band Cop Shoot Cop may be surprised at the prettier effects his distorted samples conjure up, although there’s not much variation to his ambience.
Virtually everyone in Glowing is a multi-hyphenate type of artist who does their own performances, resulting in a mix of spoken word pieces followed by musical numbers, with the overall impression of most of these recalling cabaret. Major exceptions are the disabled artist No Anger, whose work centered on their bodily disabilities is closer to performance art, and the poet/playwright Nick Flynn, who sticks to a monologue. As to the others, Little Annie kicks things off with her spoken word, followed by the most overtly cabaret-styled numbers of the film, while Joseph Keckler follows with ballads. As we work our way through the roster of performers in Glowing, it becomes evident that the quality of the writing and performances from the artists will inevitably be as variable as is found in any other anthology work, and this difficulty in detecting meaninful differences between the performers is furthered due to Beth B’s contributions, which at a point become as interchangeable as her cinematic subjects. Overhead shots of an artist being swallowed up by an enormous landscape of some kind — ranging from cityscapes to the water of a swimming pool — are used in all eight sections, as are slow-motion sequences of the performers walking around — and none of these aesthetic tactics offers much insight. So while the songs featured throughout may come courtesy of separate artists, there’s rarely anything truly new to look at.
Portraits generally require details, distinctive gestures, or a certain austerity: all of these are in short supply in Glowing, an issue Beth B didn’t face during her work in the No Wave era. Rose Tang, third in the lineup, nearly redeems her segment thanks the greater specificity rendered via her China-centric numbers, but there’s simply too little meaning to the way she is filmed and framed. Rather, shots of Tang either standing in one location or walking around primarily function to suggest that when it comes to filming digitally, there’s sometimes not much difference between a No Waver and a BBC puff piece documentary. Robert O. Leaver subsequently being soundtracked to more aggressive dance music relieves some of the tedium, but the decision to pair it with images of birds in flight and the performer driving a car fails to elevate the mateial much beyond mere visual accompaniment.
The closest thing to an exception to Glowing’s tendency to drone without rigor is Evelyn Frantti’s contribution. A sideshow performer who doesn’t seem to see this as an excuse to do old routines and who’s eccentric enough to treat a generic walking shot as an excuse to wear black fur and leather on a beach, Frantti’s segment involves a self-piercing act featuring unsparingly fleshy close-ups of needles moving through skin. The few drops of blood that appear mostly serve to emphasize and remind how bloodless nearly everyone else’s routines come across in this context, and as a reminder that the No Wave spirit hasn’t entirely left the art scene. However, when Beth B concludes with the promise of seeing the self described “gender terrorist queen of filth” Rose Wood as the closer, only for Wood to play it just as safe as Beth B, it becomes clear that the No Wave spirit is here more glimpsed than embraced, by both the director and the majority of her collaborators for this particular project. There’s not much else to replace it in Glowing beyond an ambience of words.
DIRECTOR: Beth B; CAST: No Anger, Nick Flynn, Rose Wood, Robert O. Leaver, Rose Tang; IN THEATERS: July 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 8 min.
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