Billie

James Erskine: Billie (2019), a documentary portrait of Billie Holiday, based on the research by Linda Lipnack Kuehl.

Billie / Billie.
    GB 2019. An Altitude and MPC presentation of a New Black Films and Reliance Entertainment Productions Documentary in association with Concord Music, BBC, Belga Films, Multiprises LLC and UMG. P: Victoria Gregory, Barry Clark Ewers, James Erskine, Laure Vaysse. Co-P: Shianne Brown. EX: Michelle Smith, Alex Holmes, Sophia Dilley, Emma Cahusac, Will Clarke, Andy Mason, Mike Runagall, Deepak Nayar, Emil Elmer. Co-EX: David Blackman, David Inkeles. Consultant P: Toby Byron.
    D+SC: James Erskine [based on the interviews made by and manuscripts written by Linda Lipnack Kuehl]. DP: Tim Cragg. S: Tom Wollaert (sound supervisor, audio restoration engineer), Patrick Hubart (re-recording mixer, sound editor, sound mixer). ED: Avdhesh Mohla.
    [A documentary portrait about jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915–1959), born Eleanora Fagan, and Linda Lipnack Kuehl's (1940–1978) quest to write her definitive biography.]
    Featuring: Credited: Billie Holiday, Linda Lipnack Kuehl, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher, Bobby Tucker, Jimmy Rowles, Sylvia Syms, etc. – Not listed in the end credits: Michele Smith, Louis Armstrong, Skinny Davenport (pimp), Jonathan "Jo" Jones, John Simmons, Melba Liston, Barney Josephson, John Hammond, Memry Midgett, Pigmeat Markham, Detroit Red, Billy Eckstine, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Artie Shaw, Sid Weiss, Mae Weiss, etc.
    [M: not credited: Billie Holiday as composer, writer of lyrics and / or singer.] ["Billie Holiday's estate, acquired in 2012 by music company Concord, came on board as producers." The Guardian, 6 Nov 2020.]
    [Soundtrack album, Verve Records 2020:]
1. Now Or Never (feat. Sy Oliver & His Orchestra) – Billie Holiday (3:18)
2. God Bless The Child – Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra (3:10)
3. Hoppin’ Around – The Sonhouse All Stars (2:37)
4. The Blues Are Brewin’ (feat. John Simmons & His Orchestra) – Billie Holiday (3:04)
5. Funeral In New Orleans – The Sonhouse All Stars (2:11)
6. Fine And Mellow – Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra (3:17)
7. Strange Fruit – Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra (3:12)
8. Just One More Chance – Billie Holiday & Ray Ellis and His Orchestra (3:46)
9. My Man – Billie Holiday (2:58)
10. I Only Have Eyes For You – Billie Holiday (2:54)
11. I’ll Never Smile Again – Billie Holiday & Ray Ellis and His Orchestra (3:27)
12. Don’t Explain (Live At Carnegie Hall / 1956) – Billie Holiday (2:28)
13. Porgy – Billie Holiday (2:54)
    [Also in the film: "Saddest Tale"].
    Colourized. Colourist: Marian Amaral.
    98 min
    Festival premiere: 5 Sep 2019 Telluride Film Festival.
    French premiere: 30 Sep 2020.
    British premiere: 13 Nov 2020.
    US premiere: 4 Dec 2020.
    Finnish premiere: 20 Nov 2020, released by Cinema Mondo with Finnish / Swedish intertitles and subtitles by Outi Kainulainen / Joanna Erkkilä. Intertitles in Finnish and Swedish only.
    Corona emergency security: 25% capacity, face masks, distancing, hand hygiene.
    Viewed at Kino Engel 1, Helsinki, 20 Nov 2020.

LOGLINE

"Crafted from extraordinary unheard interviews, and restoring key performances into color for the first time, BILLIE is the story of the singer who changed the face of American music, and the journalist who died trying to tell it."

SYNOPSIS

"Billie - BILLIE HOLIDAY, one of the greatest voices of all time, a woman of breath-taking talent and global popularity, was throughout her short life a figure of controversy - a black woman in a white man’s world, a victim and a rebel whose infamous Strange Fruit, the first protest song, earned her powerful enemies. She was also an enigma, her telling of her own life story a mix of half truths and free-form improvisations."

"Then in the late 1960’s journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out to write the definitive biography of Billie. Over the next decade, she tracked down and tape-recorded interviews with the extraordinary characters that populated the iconic singer’s short, tumultuous life."

"Raw, emotional and brutally honest, these incredible testimonies ranged from musical greats like Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Sylvia Syms and Count Basie to her cousin, school friends, lovers, lawyers, pimps and even the FBI agents who arrested her. But Linda’s book was never finished and the tapes unplayed – until now."

"With unprecedented and exclusive access to Linda's astonishing 200 hours of never-before-heard interviews, BILLIE showcases an American legend, capturing her depths and complexity through the voices of those who knew her best. Painstakingly restored with footage and stills colorized by one of the leading color artists, it is an arresting and powerful tale of one of the greatest singers who ever lived, and of Linda Lipnack Kuehl, the woman who would sacrifice her life in trying to tell it."

TELLURIDE 2019 PROGRAM NOTE (Fiona Armour): "By the late 70s, journalist and Billie Holiday superfan Linda Lipnack Kuehl had amassed hundreds of hours of recorded interviews in an effort to finish a book on the mysterious and tragic jazz icon. These tapes—with Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Sylvia Sims, Sid Weiss and others—remained unreleased following Kuehl’s sudden death. Forty years later, director James Erskine weaves Kuehl’s recordings into a powerful portrait of a thoroughly modern woman, as complicated and layered as her music. BILLIE reveals the singer’s magnetism, her darkness, her struggles against discrimination and segregation, and with addiction, tales of the men who couldn’t control her ... a hero who was victimized but never a victim. And Kuehl never shied away from the tough questions—this is a ruthlessly honest story of one woman told by another, the two united in their quests for authenticity." – Fiona Armour

AA: I don't know if it's a commonplace to make a comparison between two great performers who were born in the same year, became victims of untold suffering in childhood, changed their names, transcended their circumstances, created vast legacies of timeless interpretations as singers and songwriters, both globally known for their instantly recognizable voices, and died before they reached the age of 50: "La Môme" Édith Piaf (1915–1963) and "Lady Day" Billie Holiday (1915–1959).

Watching James Erskine's richly rewarding portrait documentary made me think about Olivier Dahan's Édith Piaf biopic La Môme (2007) in which Marion Cotillard gave a legendary performance in the leading role. Piaf and Holiday experienced things far beyond what anybody should endure, and agony was palpable in their performances until the end.

Already as a child, Holiday became a victim of rape, abuse and prostitution, and all her life she had to endure brutal racist persecution, sexual violence, duplicity, fraud and theft from the men and the managers in her life. The injustice she was made to suffer was extraordinary, but even more extraordinary was that she refused to assume the role of a victim.

Instead, Holiday became a fighter who lived her life to the extreme, becoming rich and famous despite racist discrimination, singing defiantly "Strange Fruit" every night although it meant losing her most lucrative gigs, burning her candle from both ends as an alcoholic, drug addict and "sex machine", and giving great performances as a singer to the end.

James Erskine bases his movie on the fabula and sujet narrative structure: the fabula is the mystery of Billie Holiday's life, and the sujet is Linda Lipnack Kuehl's eight-year quest to interview everybody who knew her. We keep meeting and hearing key colleagues and witnesses from John Hammond to Lester Young, from Sylvia Syms to Michele Smith. But incredibly, we also get to hear the cynical confessions of her abusers, starting from the pimp of her childhood.

In the age of Me Too and Black Lives Matter, this movie is burningly topical.

But Billie Holiday's artistic legacy is ageless. "I heard a singer who was like an improvising horn player", said John Hammond. "There was a truth in every note" says Sylvia Syms who also quotes Billie Holiday's own definitions of her interpretations: you have to sing like you almost cry to make the audience cry. You have to sing like you almost laugh to make the audience laugh.

For me, Billie Holiday has always been an impressive presence, but I'm not a Billie Holiday person. I acknowledge the power of her personality, the originality of her interpretation and the subtlety of her sensuality, but I sense something unsettling in the melancholy that I cannot relate to.

Jazz is terra incognita for me, which is why I five years ago embarked on a project to start from scratch and asked Emu Lehtinen of Digelius Music to select for me a "jazz record of the week". Billie Holiday was Emu's greatest favourite, and unsurprisingly, one of his first selections was the ten disc box set Lady Day – The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944 (including Columbia's Brunswick, Vocalion and OKeh labels). So I was on my way, and I even liked the five disc box set of her late albums, including All Or Nothing At All, one of her very last ones. Although Billie Holiday had become physically ravaged, I sensed her spirit growing stronger.

James Erskine's film increases my admiration for Billie Holiday, most impressively because of her commitment to "Strange Fruit". It was a favourite for Peter von Bagh who discussed it in his radio programmes and concert specials since the early 1970s. It would have been rewarding to hear Emu Lehtinen and Peter von Bagh discussing this impressive film.

It must have been a daunting project to restore and make fully audible the hundreds of interviews and to collect the mosaic of film snippets and rare photographs. The movie has been made to look and sound as smooth as possible.

Too smooth and Photoshopped to my taste. The colourized images and passages are marvels of modern digital technology, but I prefer to remain a partisan of rough authenticity.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK:

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK:

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

"The story of how this film came about begins with producer Barry Clark-Ewers calling me one day and asking me if there was a film about a musician I had ever wanted to make. Immediately, Billie’s story came to mind, I’d always found her voice utterly entrancing and had read widely about her extraordinary life. During those readings, I’d come across the mystery of Linda Lipnack Kuehl and her “lost” tapes. I knew that a couple of writers had been given limited access to a few of Linda’s printed transcripts, but I had no idea if the tapes themselves actually existed. Barry said he’d go hunting, and within a few weeks had located the tapes in the possession of a New Jersey based collector who had acquired Linda’s work from her family in the late 1980’s - including a veritable treasure trove of 125 of the audio tapes, two hundred hours of interviews, together with Linda’s unpublished manuscript. Barry negotiated an option and off we flew to New York - to spend two days listening to the unplayed tapes in a studio, to verify that there was something actually on these nearly fifty year old tapes."

"What we heard was wonderful. The voices of Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday’s childhood pals and FBI agents, drifting and often crackling through time from the cafes, restaurants and night-clubs of the 1970s where Linda recorded them. Some of the tapes fell apart immediately, others were barely comprehensible, but many, many told us gems and insights “straight from the horse’s mouth”. We knew we were on to something."

"Of course the usual months of wrangling and hustling took place to get the budget together but finally we were in a go-position and began the process of digitally transferring the tapes - and most importantly figuring out which dialogues to use to tell Billie’s story - to both explore the contradictions of Billie’s life and give due place to her genius as a performer."

"While we were developing the film, we’d engaged quickly with the Billie Holiday estate to ensure that they were on board with the project and they agreed to share Executive Producers Michele Smith and Sophia Dilley with us to ensure the veracity of the story and provide us with their wealth of research. Also, to make sure that we were going to have the music the film needed - Billie’s genius was her voice, and as a film, unlike a book, the great asset we knew we’d have to see and hear Billie - to take the audience back in time to the cabaret clubs’ of the 1940s and for a moment feel what it was like to see Billie live."

"While we developed the narrative in the editing room in London, and dug deeper and deeper into Linda’s material, our team of researchers began looking for the right archive to tell the story. We knew that there was limited footage of Billie - but we wanted to make sure we could go back to source, where possible - tracking down long forgotten 16 mm and 35 mm prints so that we could include the best image. Stills-wise, contacting not just agencies but hundreds of individual photographers and their descendants to try and find images that hadn’t been seen before, striking gold in places such as with some of Jerry Dantzic’s stills that are featured and also three stills taken the last time Billie stood a stage."

"One of the biggest decisions, was that to colorize the film. We felt strongly that because Billie’s life was lived in color we would be doing a dis-service to contemporary audiences and to the resonance of her story to leave it trapped in a world of black and white film. For us what drove this was the desire for the film to feel a great sense of immediacy, for audiences of all ages... Fortunately, I came across the work of the brilliant Marina Amaral and her best-selling Color of Time (about which there is more below). Marina did some test images for us, and I was blown away, and it is her brilliance that helps transport us back as if we are seeing with our own eyes Billie’s world, not limited by the technology of the day."

"Deep in the edit room, however, we were building Billie’s story - trying to make sense of her enigma and to ensure that the film wasn’t just “about” her, but felt her presence all the way through it. We had the images and footage of course, and we pulled together her surviving audio interviews, but what was essential to me, was to make sure there was enough room in the film to sit back and admire her power, her genius, and also to ensure the audience grasped that Billie’s story was told through the songs she sang. Taking the narrative of Billie, blending it with a coherent music structure and then tracing her life and her changing image was the essence of the film."

"But there was one more angle we were keen to explore, the story of Linda Lipnack Kuehl and why the tapes had never before been heard. The collector from whom we’d acquired the tapes, Toby Byron, didn’t know much about it, he’d been told she’d committed suicide before finishing the book, but we wanted to know why - what was it that had driven her to this? Was it the book, the tragedy of Billie’s story, and was it even suicide?"

"Again, Barry, the producer, got on the case and began tracking down Linda’s relatives by various means, the focus being to make connection with Myra Luftman, Linda’s sister, who we knew was a retired high school teacher, but not much more. Barry reached out to various ex-colleagues of hers and we eventually made the connection. The Luftmans were nervous about talking, the loss of Linda was clearly a deep wound in their family, but they kindly allowed me to spend time with them and we struck up a friendship. Myra, her husband Jerry, and their sons Douglas and David, understood that the film was a way of preserving Linda’s legacy, and began to tell us stories about Linda - who until that point had merely been a ghostly voice on a tape - they began to explain to us why Linda, as someone who worked to promote women’s rights, began her journey and the complications that befell her on the way. It was an incredible story, and a moving one. They also kindly shared their home movie collection so I could really bring Linda into the film visually."

"And so on our hands we had the story of two women, and their struggles to tell the truth of the world as the saw it. Utterly fascinating, but highly complex to consider how to bring the two together and also to ensure that the film was very clearly the story of Billie, since that was not just our goal, but had also been Linda’s."

"And this became the guiding principle of the edit - to make the film of Billie, a genius who fought hard against those that would crush her for daring to sing the truth - a story which holds an often unflattering mirror to society, while still pulsating with the sheer vigour of her powerful spirit, and yet to show the problems that Linda too had, in searching for a way to tell the truth."

"It was an incredibly tough edit, that demanded asking deep questions of ourselves as to how to bring Billie’s story to the screen in the right way. I was lucky to have my key editorial team of Shianne Brown (co-producer) and Avdhesh Molha (editor) to interrogate the material and of execs Michele Smith (head honcho at the Billie Holiday estate), Alex Holmes (director of Maiden) and producers Victoria Gregory and Barry Clark-Ewers to screen and advise on numerous cuts and bolster me through long nights when the spirit weakened."

-James Erskine

Technical Notes: Shooting Style

"Where possible the film was constructed with archive material, of Billie and Linda. In fact we were fastidious in this and in trying to make sure every image was correct to the period being spoken of, however we were aware that we needed to bind the material together with interstitial shooting of tapes and reel to reel, but we also wanted to give an impression of Linda’s journey specifically for the sections when we were reading from her manuscript. Working with Emmy winning DoP Tim Cragg (Three Identical Strangers) we worked to craft a look for the “road trip” shot on Super 8 mm (so that it complemented Linda’s own home movies which is the only material used when we are talking about Linda) and more alluring 4k images for the tapes themselves, setting up complex but realistic settings for the tape machines to compliment the ambience on the tapes."

Technical Notes: Colorisation

"Almost no images of Billie exist in color, and no footage. And yet Billie’s world was one of color and therefore we felt if we were to really enter Billie’s world, we needed to find a technique to step beyond the artful monochrome images of the period."

"The question was how to deal with this - we knew that we needed someone who could not just color in the images, but whose work could vividly evoke the period and make the right artistic choices. It was then that I happened across the work of Marina Amaral - a brilliant young Brazilian artist whose best-selling book The Color of Time - had illustrated history in a whole new light. When I got a hold of Marina’s number, I was delighted that she was enthusiastic about the project and signed on. The next matter was to figure out how to color the moving footage, an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process - and yet we needed to do this within our budget. Fortunately, I’d spent most of the previous couple of years in India making the theatrical doc Sachin: A Billion Dreams and formed a close bond with a company in Mumbai called Red Chillies - and they were up for the challenge."

"Therein became an elaborate global work-flow, where key frames were selected in London, sent to Marina in Brazil to set the look, and then these palettes sent to Mumbai for the rotor-scoping and compositing work, before finally being sent back to the UK for final editing and on to Belgium, and our lab there called The Fridge to try and match the overall color grading of the film."

"With various film-stocks and lighting conditions for both the still images and moving footage, the artistic challenge was incredible, to harmonise the look. However, what I hope we have achieved, is the narrative intention - which is to make Billie and her world feel arresting and contemporary - and to help her story to resonate with audiences, and particularly younger audiences."

Technical Notes: Audio Restoration

"Having secured access to Linda’s tapes we now had to listen to them and make sense of them narratively but also overcome considerable challenges on a technical level. Linda’s interviews were recorded on a domestic tape recorder in the 1970’s, as a writer encountering people on the road, they were often captured in cafes, restaurants, or nightclubs, with heavy background sound and often music. While the revelations of the tapes were worth every cent - how often do we get a chance to delve back and get contemporary interviews of a woman who died 80 years ago - the challenge was how we would elevate these to a standard where they were easily heard. Fortunately, we found a man called Tom Wollaert at a company called Sonhouse who impressed me showing me how he’d done work to remove music on other projects and showed me a whole host of whizz-bangery that I still don’t comprehend that, with hundreds of hours of pain-staking work could be used to transform the material."

Yle Radio 1
Jazzklubi

Markku Salo: Billie Holiday elämäkertojen ja uuden elokuvan valossa
Julkaistu: 14.2.2021 klo 20.00
Poistuu: poistuu ma 14.2.2022

"Ohjelman lähtökohtina ovat James Erskinen tuore dokumenttielokuva "Billie" sekä Donald Clarken elämäkertateos "Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday". Ohjelmassa kuultavan musiikin lomassa selviää, kuinka jazzlaulu syntyi, millaista oli jazzmuusikoiden elämä huumeiden keskellä 1940-luvun jälkipuolella ja kuinka Holidayn musiikillinen taival eteni traagisesti mutta silti laadukkaan taiteellisesti."

1. Benny Goodman and his Orchestra: Riffin’ the Scotch (1933) / The Voice of Jazz (Charly)
2. Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra: Foolin’ Myself (1937) / The Voice of Jazz (Charly)
3. Billie Holiday and The Eddie Heywood Trio: I Love My Man (Billie's Blues, no 2) (1944) / The Complete Commodore Recordings (Commodore)
4. Billie Holiday with John Simmons And His Orchestra: Guilty (1946) / The Complete Decca Recordings (GRP)
5. Billie Holiday And Her Orchestra: Yesterdays (1952) / The Complete Verve Recordings (Verve)
6. Billie Holiday & Count Basie Orchestra: Lover Man (1954) / Perfect Complete Collection (Sound Hills)
7. Billie Holiday Septet: What's New (1955) / The Complete Verve Recordings (Verve)
8. Billie Holiday Septet: I Cover the Waterfront (1956) / Perfect Complete Collection (Sound Hills)
9. Billie Holiday with Ray Ellis and his Orchestra: You've Changed (1958) / Lady in Satin (Columbia)

Toimittajana Markku Salo.
AA: An excellent program and music selection.