By Chris Klimek, The Washington Post | “Janis Ian: Breaking Silence” is so close to being a great documentary that its easily remedied flaws are all the more vexing. Director Varda Bar-Kar (“Fandango at the Wall”) offers a conventional but still compelling synopsis of the iconoclastic singer-songwriter’s long career, from her seminal 1960s hit “Society’s Child” to her heartbreaking cancellation of a planned 2022 farewell tour after vocal scarring left her unable to sing. Bar-Kar’s mix of present-day talking heads with archival interviews and performance footage of Ian from (mostly) the 1960s and ’70s isn’t innovative, but it gives us the fundamentals of Ian’s artistic and personal struggles from the mouths of the people who experienced or witnessed them.
There’s no question the artist born Janis Fink warrants the veneration: The daughter of a New Jersey chicken farmer, she was all of 12 years old when she sent her composition “Hair of Spun Gold,” which she’d written at summer camp, to the folk music magazine Broadside, which published the song. That got her invited to play a “hootenanny” at the storied Greenwich Village club the Village Gate, as part of a lineup that included Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton.
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Go here to read more about this documentary:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/janis-ian-doc-offers-conventional-account-of-an-unconventional-artist/
Photo: Janice Ian movie poster |
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