When there’s no visual record to draw from, he uses rotoscoped reenactments, à la Waking Life, synced to Cobain’s audio diaries and sound-collage experiments to reconstruct events from his pre-fame life.
Morgen makes these challenges real through the innovative tactic of animating the copious drawings and scribblings in Cobain’s journals, so that they quicken again with their creator’s intent. There were lots of breaks in the bone along the way: the heartbreak of his parent’s divorce, a hyperactive temperament, a chronic stomach ailment, an unhealthy reliance on self-medication for all his physical and emotional pains, and-perhaps the hardest burden of all-a ceaseless ambition to be an accomplished artist of uncompromising integrity, as defined as a refusal to bow to any force or power that would ask him to be anything other than exactly who he was. It’s not a path connected in a straight line.
#DEFINE MONTAGE OF HECK ARCHIVE#
We only know that story because Cobain recorded it on a private cassette tape, one of hundreds in an archive of recordings, drawings, journals, and videos turned over to documentarian Brett Morgen, who, with the blessing of Cobain’s widow Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain, spun this unseen treasure trove into Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, a poignant, profound, unflinching and heartrending portrait that scratches away our own mythologizing of an icon to reveal how a person goes from the happy, tow-headed toddler seen in early home movies to a shotgunned corpse in only 27 years. The only thing sparing the life of the man who would be lauded as “the voice of the grunge generation” and an inestimable contributor to the history of American music was that he guessed wrong about which track the train was traveling on. After being publicly humiliated at school over a girl, he went out alone in the middle of the night to a run of parallel train tracks near his hometown of Aberdeen, WA, and lay down, weighted with concrete blocks, waiting for the approaching freight train to cut him in two. In his short and tortured life Kurt Cobain attempted suicide at least three times: a pill-and-champagne overdose that put him in a coma in Rome, the shotgun blast that did him in a month later, and, unbeknownst to anyone, a first attempt when he was 15 years old.
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