Screened as part of NZIFF 2007

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man 2006

Directed by Stephen Kijak

The definitive portrait of Scott Walker, rock's most fascinating and elusive outsider.

UK / USA In English
96 minutes 35mm

Director

Photography

Grant Gee

Editor

Grant Gee
,
Mat Whitecross

Music

Scott Walker

Narrator

Sara Kestelman

With

Scott Walker
,
David Bowie
,
Jarvis Cocker
,
Lulu
,
Marc Almond
,
Brian Eno
,
Damon Albarn

Festivals

London 2006; Berlin, SXSW 2007

Elsewhere

"This definitive portrait of rock's most fascinating and elusive outsider has pretty much everything you could possibly want from a music doc. For a start it has a story to tell, charting the progress of flop teen-idol Scotty Engel, who left America for 60s Britain, hit big with the swoonsome boy-band pop of The Walker Brothers, then launched into a series of solo albums blending his baritonal MOR croon with seedy Jacques Brel imagery. As the records got further out, sales declined, and Scott Walker seemed destined to slope out of the spotlight. . . were it not for the fact that we now find him in the studio making a new album leaving conventional ‘pop' structures way behind in its avant-garde wake. There's a song about the hanging of Mussolini, for instance, which requires a slab of meat to be punched for the mics... It's an inspiring tale about an artist pursuing his own furrow whatever the cost, and respect oozes from contributors including David Bowie, Damon Albarn and the ever-urbane Jarvis Cocker. Given his reputation for reclusiveness (it's rumoured he once crashed his car to avoid a gig), Walker himself proves a refreshingly straightforward interviewee, thankfully a lot less pretentious than some of his work... An unhesitating recommendation for fans and neophytes alike." — Trevor Johnston, Time Out