In a dream team collaboration between Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett and filmmaker Danny Cohen, ‘Anonymous Club’ is a poignant meditation that focuses on the bigger picture.
Barnett’s brilliance as a performer lies in her ability to be wholly relatable, with the innate skill of poetically sharing her own experiences that make you feel that you are not alone – in that we all share the same hopes, fears, and dreams.
‘Anonymous Club’ which is showing now in theatres, is shot beautifully on 16mm film, that artfully captures Barnetts slightly elusive, yet magnetic character. Cohen has delivered a stunningly beautiful and poetic portrait with his first feature-length documentary, which navigates around Barnett’s reclusive nature intuitively and creatively, in part due to his arming Barnett with a voice recorder.
Filmed over a three-year period, Cohen captures Barnett at a reflective stage of her life, having alreday gone on to achieve success, its less about what fame looks like from a glamourous angle, and more about the internal process of living with it all.
Formatted in the style of an audio diary, Barnett reflects “I overthink what I need to say, and then I don’t say anything. Maybe it’s more useful just to talk.”
The doco beautifully shares her process, in the way she navigates through her world, sharing her struggles with self-confidence and the way she sees herself as an artist, where she feels like she fits in when it comes to fame, and the pressures that celebrity inevitably brings, poignantly stating, “When I had nothing, I wasn’t happy, and when I had everything, I wasn’t happy.”
At the crux of it, that is all you can really ask for, to create something that is relatable, and insightful in that it begs a bigger question, and at the end of the day the genius of the doco is best summed up in Barnett’s words “The best way to demonstrate the importance of a creative life, is just to live it.”
For fans, who are keen to organise a viewing for friends, check out FanForce to bring it to a screen near you.
