f50
The Aryan Brotherhood R
evealing universal themes through a particular individ- ual narrative is a guiding principle that’s stayed with Marre. He shies away from didacticism, aiming to pre- sent a subject so that people can bring their own inter- pretation to it – though he accepts that obviously this will be shaped by editorial decisions determined by his premise for the film. He’s a firm believer that documentaries are better for not being stuffed full with background. “Information should be presented so that it speaks to people and if they want more they can get it. Particularly today – it’s so easy. This leaves the film-maker with a more creative process.”
Letting the music run is important in presenting the images and the dynamics “so the audience can understand the bigger pic- ture emotionally and intuitively to some extent”. Does he believe, then, that because there’s an element in music where language is no barrier, it facilitates cross-cultural communication – speaking to a basic connection that links us all as human? Does he believe that it can open our ears and hearts to people from very different soci- eties and reduce our fear of ‘the other’? It’s why he started making music documentaries, he says.
Although he’s now the ‘go-to’ man for music-based films,
Marre isn’t keen on being pigeonholed as such, pointing out he makes all kinds. Recalling his programme on the American prison gang who took control of the entire US federal prison service through “sheer force of personality and violence”, the Aryan Brotherhood were interesting, he says, because they were only 20 guys, but so powerful. They taught themselves the works of Machiavelli and the Japanese and Chinese languages. “I was fasci- nated by the idea of people who were so strong they could over- come the limitations of being locked away 24 hours a day. It start- ed as a neo-fascist gang but two of the big cheeses were Jewish.” Marre is still in touch with one of them.
His fascination for “people who are outside the currency of conventional society” shows as a commonly explored theme in his work. It suffuses his shoots with life-threatening danger. Marre however, unassumingly equates this with simply being in the right place at the right time: in South Africa filming black musicians at the height of a paranoid and threatened apartheid regime (Rhythms Of Resistance); and life on a knife edge with Columbian drug barons as he filmed music inspired by their egotism (Shot- guns And Accordions), this at the suggestion of a complete stranger, a bloke he bumped into in a shoe shop in Oxford Street.
As you might expect from a consummate film-maker, Marre is an engaging storyteller – spare, yet colourful and funny –with a self-deprecating humour.
“I was asked to make a film about the last tribe of cannibals, the Mangbetu, for the BBC’s Under The Sun. It began with a recce in the then Congo, finding the tribe, getting myself accepted there. The cannibalism was kind of symbolic by then. Surrounded by different sets of missionaries, they preferred the Catholics, thinking ‘These people are doing the same as us, symbolically eat- ing the flesh of Christ, drinking the blood of Christ.’ There was amazing music: the whole language of the talking drums and the way they used the acoustics of the canopy – drumming at different heights to send messages at certain times of day when the air was very clear – was fascinating”
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