'Night' Flight

This week, Brooklyn’s the National, whose Boxer was one of the best albums of 2007, released the DVD A Skin, A Night. The film was made by Vincent Moon, the Paris-based auteur responsible for La Blogotheque’s famous Take-Away Shows. The online performances that Moon captures for La Blogotheque put artists in unique settings, their songs often re-imagined within the acoustic framework and odd visual context. It’s a format that has become increasingly popular on the Web, with everything from the London-based Black Cab Sessions to Austin’s own Retread Sessions.

What Moon brings to his videos, however, is a sense of the beautifully bizarre, evoked in the intentionally lo-fi footage, distracted camera work, and often grating lighting. Consider Ramesh Srivastava's version of “Trouble,” posted last year, which sets the Voxtrot singer in a street carnival. Moon’s work always feels less about the songs than having the music serve a foil for his own artistic vision. It’s an approach that he applies to A Skin, A Night as well, which ultimately undermines the intent of the typical rock-doc or concert film format.

A Skin, A Night can't be properly considered either a film about the National (its subtitle), or a concert video (what it seems at the beginning). Moon follows the band through the recording of Boxer and a show at the Apollo Theater, capturing the quintet on the verge of uncertainty before their big break. They seem a band without bravado, toiling diligently under modest attention and generally unconcerned with the recognition that unknowingly awaits them. The opening scene even presents the band backstage at the Apollo discussing their uneasiness with Moon filming their every action, capturing their insecurities and nervousness.

The band needn’t have worried. The film is only moderately revealing, about either their history or interactions. To discredit A Skin, A Night for its lack of focus on the National in particular would somewhat miss the point of Moon’s conception, however. The National’s music is a cauldron of brooding, poetic angst, broken-hearted anthems that inevitably crescendo in cacophonous disillusion. Moon’s film is all about mood, and few contemporary bands are as musically moody as his subject.

As such, A Skin, A Night moves in impressionistic bursts, the camera riding along cars and trains, staring out at the grainy night with dull, earthen tones. Grey clouds loom above the Manhattan skyline, the music a muffled ambient wash of the city mingling in a dreamlike haze. Moon revels in using long, unedited shots from a handheld camera as he wanders through the Connecticut house where the band is recording, or through the theater from the crowd to backstage. He captures portraits of the members in stark, close silhouettes, shots uneasily framed as they jump in strange little moments, seemingly removed from context, like the stems of tracks being recorded in the studio.

The feeling of the entire film is one of isolation and introspection, which parallels Matt Berninger’s songwriting. When the film closes with the band performing “About Today,” Berninger turns his back on the crowd, clutching at himself as the guitars erupt at the front of the stage. While A Skin, A Night certainly isn’t the best possible documentation of the band, the National’s music is precisely the right accompaniment for Moon’s rough, momentary style.