Film of the Alternative cinema: Authors' Collections series
USA, 2003
Director: Wim Wenders
Director Wim Wenders explores the lives of his favorite blues artists — Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, and J. B. Lenoir — in a film that is part history and part personal pilgrimage. The film tells the story of these artists' lives in music through a fictional film-within-a-film, rare archival footage, and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians, including Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle Eye Cherry, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cassandra Wilson, Garland Jeffreys, Los Lobos, and others.
Says Wenders: “These songs meant the world to me. I felt there was more truth in them than in any book I had read about America, or in any movie I had ever seen. I've tried to describe, more like a poem than in a 'documentary,' what moved me so much in their songs and voices.“
Performances in The Soul of a Man T-Bone Burnett Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Eagle-Eye Cherry Shemekia Copeland The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion Alvin Youngblood Hart Skip James Garland Jeffreys Chris Thomas King J. B. Lenoir Los Lobos John Mayall Bonnie Raitt Lou Reed Vernon Reid Marc Ribot James „Blood” Ulmer Lucinda Williams Cassandra Wilson
Cast: Skip James: Keith B. Brown Blind Willie Johnson: Chris Thomas King