★★★
Paul Michael Bloodgood directs this film about the band he founded and led, Bloodgood. While the tone here isn’t as self-congratulatory as it might have been, there’s not much new either. We watch clips of talking heads, archival concert footage, and pans of photographs in a style that hews closely to that of PBS and Ken Burns. And
Trenches of Rock starts at the beginning and follows the story of the band chronologically through a rotation of various drummers to the band of today, pausing for occasional references to bad decisions in signing with a label and the controversy over the idea of a Christian metal band. There’s not much that shakes the documentary house here.
But the film offers some interesting nuggets. For example, Bloodgood was more popular in Europe than in the US not because of its faith but because European media doesn’t pigeonhole music like we do in the US. Instead of being sold under the counter in Christian bookstores as happened here, the film tells us that Bloodgood was seen primarily as a metal band whose music might alternate with that of Madonna on the radio. Another worthwhile point is the way Bloodgood merged extreme emotion, violence and theatricality with its Christian message. With percussion crashing and guitar wailing, the band would enact whippings and crucifixions on the stage, dramatizing demons or the Passion in histrionic terms like Iggy Pop might have. It’s an aesthetic that Catholics could recognize in artists from Mel Gibson to as far back as the medieval lives of martyrs and saints, and it’s a pity that Bloodgood doesn’t discuss it to some extent. In fact,
Trenches of Rock spends little time discussing its faith at all except in terms of rules for the band members. The movie might have been richer if we'd heard more of the faith that informed it.
Trenches of Rock shows us a popular band that found a thought-provoking, paradoxical place in our culture. It’s disappointing that Bloodgood, the director, couldn’t bring more technical proficiency to the film and more insight into what the band was actually doing in its time, blending its faith, the metal aesthetic, and the 80s.
Atlanta Film Festival: Saturday, March 25, 2:30 pm at Towne Cinema, Avondale Estates
