Died Young, Stayed Pretty Directed by Eileen Yaghoobian
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A similar contest has been unfolding, albeit on a smaller scale, between American video maker Merle Becker and Canadian video maker Eileen Yaghoobian, both of whom set out to document the world of rock poster artists. Back in 2004 Yaghoobian began a three-year shoot in which she lived with and interviewed various contemporary poster artists around the U.S.; her movie, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, premiered in Toronto in November 2008 and screened once at the Music Box last September (it returns to Chicago in March as part of the second Chicago International Movies and Music Festival). Around the same time Yaghoobian began, Becker decided to make a documentary on rock poster art, tracing its history from the 50s to the present, and in 2005 she launched a similar but more compact tour; her movie, American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art, premiered in San Francisco last June. This weekend it begins a weeklong run at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Given the star ratings above, you’re probably wondering which documentary is more worthy of your time, and though I preferred American Artifact, the answer will probably have more to do with your age, your income, and your level of concern with the politics of indie cred. In an e-mail, Yaghoobian points out that she lived with each of her subjects for as long as 40 days, sleeping on their floors and following them around 24/7. (Can there be a more genuine DIY gesture than sleeping on the floor?) Becker positions herself as a tourist from the pop-culture establishment; in voice-over narration she explains that she quit a “cushy corporate TV job” (at MTV) to drive around the country in search of the rock-poster underground and returned to real life when she was done. And if working for MTV weren’t damning enough, her press notes reveal that American Artifact has been added to the permanent collection of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (UPDATE: Yaghoobian reports that her documentary will be added to the Hall of Fame’s collection later this year.)
Ultimately, the more mainstream American Artifact and the more underground Died Young, Stayed Pretty speak to a similar tension in the very medium they explore. From the 60s onward, rock posters have existed in a sort of cultural limbo, part art and part advertising. Posters that subvert commercial imagery eventually become valuable commodities themselves, though whether that phenomenon validates the artist or negates him is a debate unlikely to be settled any time soon. v
