Joan Baez: I Am A Noise: Her Private, Public and Secret Life Dovetail in New Doc
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Since she first appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 at the age of 19, Joan Baez’s beauty, thrilling vibrato, and playful personality captured the public’s attention.
After appearing on the cover of Time at 21, she became a figurehead for civil rights and non-violence advocacy.
She has also been open book about her personal life, writing her first memoir, Daybreak, in 1968, her second, And a Voice To Sing With, in 1987. She was also the subject of a 2009 American Masters documentary, Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound. She was a good-humoured, likeable interview subject (I talked to her twice in the 1980s), who was candid about her successes and her shortcomings
Joan Baez, marching in Selma, Alabama with author James Baldwin (left)..
You might wonder what is left to tell about the now 82-year-old Baez in the documentary, Joan Baez: I Am A Noise, a film co-directed by Karen O'Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O'Boyle. I Am A Noise opens with a quote from novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Everyone has three lives: the public, the private and the secret.” The documentary, in a collage style, explores parts of each of these areas of her life.
Seven years ago, Baez gave the filmmakers the contents of a storage unit of materials her parents had kept, including cassette recordings that Baez and her parents sent back and forth throughout her career, as well has her adolescent drawings and journals. These archive materials are incorporated in the film in a sprawling collage film, created over seven years.
The material is integrated with excerpts from Baez’s Fare Thee Well retirement tour in her late seventies, along with sessions with her vocal therapist, lengthy voice-over commentary, archival interviews with her older sister, Pauline, and younger sister, the singer Mimi Fariña, interviews with Baez’s namesake mother, and audio from her taped therapy sessions.
This visual memoir paints a picture of a woman who, while leading a rich professional life, was plagued by personal demons. She began therapy at the age of 16, and, at various times of her life, continued to suffer from depression, insomnia, stomach aches, panic attacks, anxiety and difficulty with intimate relationships. “I think she was a very happy girl —but something was bothering her, her whole life,” says her mother in an archival interview.
Baez’s mother was born in Scotland. Her Mexican-born father, Albert Baez, was a physicist who co-invented the X-Ray telescope. He was also a Quaker and a pacifist who as a UNESCO researcher and teacher, took his young family to countries such as to Iran and Somalia.
Albert Baez is a key figure in the film, at first the idealized handsome and creative “Popsy” Later Baez and her sister Mimi came to see their father in a very different light.
Baez was born in New York, but raised in California, a dark-skinned girl who experienced some anti-Mexican bigotry in school but gained popularity with her singing. She internalized her parents’ intense concern with social injustice. But also made her feel inadequacy and perhaps, chagrin about her desire to be the center of attention. “I’m not a saint,” she wrote in a teen essay. “I am a noise.”
When her father moved with his family to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she briefly attended Boston College, before dropping out and performing at local coffee houses. She was an almost immediate success and in 1959 was invited to Newport Folk Festival.
A record deal followed shortly after. She and sister Pauline recall Joan tossing $100 bills from a balcony to the family below, which, sister Pauline says, angered her father.
Her fame affected her sisters as well. Her older sister, Pauline, retreated to a rural solitude. It also created resentment from Mimi, whose musical career was in Joan’s shadow.
Baez admits success went to her head, as she was “running around barefoot, long-haired, looking like the Virgin Mary and probably thinking I was a little bit like her.”
In retrospect, she says she was “the right voice at the right time.” Her dedication to social causes led her to Bob Dylan, who she promoted and sang with, only to be cruelly sidelined during his 1965 English tour. But while Dylan went his own way, Baez remained committed to social causes, including the 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King, and the Montgomery Civil Rights protests two years later.
I Am A Noise covers a lot of ground, but as Baez keeps reminding us, memory is selective. Baez discusses her marriage with anti-war activist David Harris and her “anger behind the big smile.” Her son, Gabe (who serves as her percussionist on tour) talks about her as a distant parent.
Going back, there’s a section on a year-long same sex relationship with a woman named Kim, which Baez says happened when she was 22 (in other interviews, she has said it was either 19 or 21). Some omissions are notable. We hear nothing about her relationship with Apple founder Steve Jobs. Nor does it mention her friendship with Czech leader Vaclav Havel, who credits her as a key supporter of the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
The last quarter of the film is devoted to the question of what has troubled Joan Baez throughout her life. The major revelation is that she believes she was struggling with repressed memories of sexual abuse perpetrated by her father against Baez and Mimi, memories that were recovered in therapy starting around 1990.
She also refers to a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, represented by her drawings of various characters, including animals, that she drew from her therapy. These she found creatively inspiring.
Much of this is uncertain. The theory that therapists can help patients recover memories of childhood sexual abuse, though popular in the ‘80s sand early ‘90s, is highly controversial. Both Baez’s parents denied she was sexually abused, and her father suggested she was a victim of what is known as False Memory Syndrome, referring to cases were memories are implanted by therapists through suggestion.
Baez says she believes her parents, too, suppressed their memories of her abuse. She’s aware that these allegations are “in the land of make-believe so most people don’t believe it,” but “if 20 percent of what I remember was true, it was enough to do the damage that it did.”
The film ends on a gentle note. We see Baez, in her leafy California home, exercising, playing with her dog, surrounded by her art and having, apparently, found some peace with her darkness.
Joan Baez: I Am A Noise. Directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle. Opens at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema October 6, and October 14 at Vancity in Vancouver.