8
Dec/20

PJ HARVEY: A DOG CALLED MONEY

8
Dec/20

PJ Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Kabul, and Washington, DC, to inspire 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project

A DOG CALLED MONEY (Seamus Murphy, 2019)
Film Forum online
Opens virtually Wednesday, December 9, $12 for 48-hour rental
filmforum.org

Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy lays bare English musician PJ Harvey’s creative process in the irresistible documentary A Dog Called Money. Polly Jean Harvey initially hired Murphy to take photos for her 2011 album, Let England Shake, after having seen Murphy’s 2008 exhibit and book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. Murphy ended up making twelve short films with her, one for each song on the record, and in 2012 he asked Harvey if she wanted to accompany him on his trips to Kabul, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, where they would work separately, he on a book, she on a record. But the journeys led to a creative cornucopia that also resulted in their collaborating on the book The Hollow of the Hand, featuring his photographs and her poetry, as well as the 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary, which opens virtually December 9 at Film Forum.

Murphy follows Harvey, dressed all in black, as she goes through old photos and other detritus in a looted, destroyed home, sits on the rocky shore of a lake writing in her journal (with voice-over narration of her thoughts), hangs out with Corny’s crew in Anacostia, wanders into a theater in ruins (“I’ve heard twenty years ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets,” she says), has tea with a group of children, and visits with local musicians in Kabul’s “Tin Pan Alley.” Murphy cuts between these scenes and Harvey and her band recording new songs in a specially constructed studio in the basement of the historic arts center Somerset House in London. Harvey, who burst onto the alternative music scene in the 1990s with such seminal records as Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love, turns the sessions into an art installation by allowing people to watch from behind a one-way mirror; they can see her, but she can’t see them. It’s a genuine treat to observe Harvey’s process as she works with such musicians as John Parish, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Enrico Gabrielli, Mike Smith, Alessandro Stefana, James Johnston, Alaine Johannes, Adam “Cecil” Bartlett, Jean-Marc Butty, and Mick Harvey (no relation) on melody, vocalization, and instrumentation, the songs taking shape right before our eyes and ears.

Murphy draws direct parallels between what Harvey witnesses and the songs she is writing. She meets a woman walking with her hands behind her back, holding a chain with two keys, who says, “I would kill them with my own hands if I knew who was responsible”); in “Chain of Keys,” Harvey sings, “The woman’s old / The woman’s old and dressed in black / She keeps her hands / She keeps her hands behind her back / Imagine what / Imagine what her eyes have seen / We ask if she / We ask but she won’t let us in.” After playing with the Kabul musicians, she transforms their sounds into the powerful “Homo Sappy Blues.” She uses some of Corny’s crew’s exact words and actions in her lyrics for “A Dog Called Money.” She also captures the overall feeling of her experience in such tunes as “The Ministry of Defence” (“Those are the children’s cries from the dark / These are the words written under the arch / Scratched in the wall in biro pen / This is how the world will end”) and the stunning “I’ll Be Waiting” (“They swept across the land / They did not leave a thing / They did not leave a person / A stone or a tree / They did not leave anything / They did not leave anything / All that’s left is sand / All that’s left is sand”).

At first what seems like it could be cultural appropriation develops into something else, a genuine attempt to understand what is happening in these countries and around the world — as well as in America with the inclusion of DC — and sharing that through music. “Everyone driving in one direction / Everyone driving in every direction / Where to go? / Why? / What to say when I get there?” Harvey narrates near the start of the film, which opens with an extended close-up of a smiling boy with a dirty face, his nose pressed against the window of a car, the sound of traffic all around him. For ninety minutes, we are all that boy, and he is us. And we have a book, an album, and now a documentary to remember that.