Australia | 2011| Directed by Lynn-Maree Milburn & Richard Lowenstein
Logline: A portrait of an Australian post-punk guitarist, singer, songwriter who influenced and inspired many musicians and colleagues with his sonic dissonance and emotional fragility.
Orange, amber and blue, the fire of the tortured soul, igniting, burning bright, with smouldering passionate embers of chaos and disorder, melody and ambience, lamentation and desire, the shards of demonic fury, sardonic reflective moments piercing the pretensions of the average poseur. Guitarist, singer, songwriter, Rowland S. Howard was a reluctant pioneer, a disquiet rebel, a faux-charlatan and a sonic magician, a key component of the Australian post-punk rock music scene in Melbourne, especially during the 70s and 80s, most notably alongside Nick Cave in The Birthday Party.
Richard Lowenstein and Lynne-Maree Milburn have made a deeply poignant documentary that is wildly articulate and passionately committed to the character and soul of Rowland Howard. It is one of those tragic portraits that begins as a tribute and ends as an obituary. Howard died at the end of 2009 from liver cancer, and because the doco was initiated while he was still alive many of the interviewees talk of him in the present tense, whilst others refer to him in the past tense and are obviously more emotionally affected.
Nick Cave who worked with Howard in The Boys Next Door and then later, and to much critical success, as The Birthday Party, speaks candidly about his admiration for the experimental guitarist whose style, presence, and attitude, had an undeniable effect on him. An old flame – and arguably the love of his life – Genevieve McGuckin, remembers Howard with a raw and beautiful honesty. Other modern rock luminaries, such as Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, all speak highly of the man.
There is a visual poetry to Autoluminescent, which takes its title from a solo track of Howard’s, the use of focus and the darkly colourful palette, the macro lens close-ups, the abstract imagery. Howard’s lyrics, and powerfully symbolic they were, Black Milk, for example, are mused over lovingly by the camera’s eye, excerpts from his unpublished manuscript are narrated by J.P. Shilo. Vintage video clips from interviews with a younger, but no less frail, angular, effeminate Howard, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his intense blue eyes piercing the camera lens, his tiny mouth forming the words that echo through the opiate night.
From Shivers, penned at sixteen in the band The Young Charlatans and released as a single, to The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party with Nick Cave, where they left Australian shores and tried their luck in London, subsequently stormed Berlin, spiked the New York City underground, then Cave and Howard parted ways, and Rowland became a member of Crime and the City Solution, then formed These Immortal Souls with McGuckin, and two solo albums, Teenage Snuff Film, where he covered Billy Idol’s White Wedding, and finally, Pop Crimes, in October 2009. Rowland died two months later.
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