Neil Young with Crosby, Stills and Nash in Ottawa. Photo by Adrian Buss, courtesy of Wikimedia.

By John Yemen, Lost Dominion Screening Collective

Canadian rock star Neil Young has directed or co-directed five feature films during his long and varied career: Journey Through the Past (1974), Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Human Highway (1982), Greendale (2003) and CSNY/Déjà Vu (2008).  He also acted as producer or co-producer of five additional concert films and is currently working on a documentary called LincVolt, chronicling his attempts to turn a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a pollution-free vehicle.

He’s been so prolific that we could easily fill a full festival with Neil Young films. Though we’re not going that far, we’re showing both Rust Never Sleeps and Greendale as part of the Canadian Cult Revue at the Mayfair Theatre on July 21.

Unsurprising for a musician with such an overwhelming output – 33 albums during 45 years –  Young’s work as a film director and producer has been largely overshadowed by his albums. It’s also true that his cinematic collaborations with high-profile directors, such as Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme, have been granted more critical and public attention than his self-directed films.

Directing and producing under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, that lower-profile may have been Young’s intent. Or perhaps it was just a way to get people to focus on the music instead of the medium. Certainly more than a few casual fans have been successfully fooled by the Shakey credit, a phenomenon not likely to continue in the Age of Google. It’s clear that filmmaking has been more than just his hobby.

The story of Young’s film career is also the story of his collaboration with director and producer Larry (L.A.) Johnson, who passed away in January and who worked on most of Young’s films, including the pair we’re showing. He also worked on Martin Scorcese’s The Last Waltz and the famous 1960s documentary Woodstock.

Most recently Johnson helped produce Young’s Living With War album and was working on LincVoltt. It’s unlikely that we would have Young films without him. Perhaps there is no better time to look back.

Rust Never Sleeps is a straight-ahead concert-film, one of Young’s most accessible. It’s certainly more accessible than his post-apocalyptic comedy Human Highway, which he co-directed with veteran Hollywood actor Dean (Blue Velvet) Stockwell and which featured Devo and Dennis Hopper, among others. In comparison, Rust Never Sleeps might seem tame, but it’s far from that. It’s a portrait of an artist with the world at his feet after more than a decade of critical acclaim and commercial success.

With playful era-specific details (clearly Star Wars made an impression), one of its most interesting aspects is how it points the way forward for Young’s work in the 1980s, melding the idealism of the hippie generation with the ferocity of punk rock. It’s at least as enjoyable as Young’s later collaborations with Jonathan Demme, and captures his performance at what many fans consider to be his youthful peak (others, like me, think it’s just Neil hitting his stride). 

Twenty-five years later, he wrote and recorded his Greendale album in outrage over the George W. Bush Administration’s attempts to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. The film was a companion piece to the album and concert tour that year. It’s more complex than Rust Never Sleeps in structure, but it shows the same preoccupations with notions of idealism and integrity.

Greendale is a hybrid concert film filled with dramatic and musical vignettes, part of a larger environmentally themed project that is still evolving. What started out as an album and then morphed into film, in June became a graphic novel published by Vertigo Comics.

Clearly one of Young’s favourite projects, he directed, produced, wrote, edited and was the cinematographer/cameraman (shooting mostly on super-8mm film). He also cast a friend of his daughter in the lead role – environmental activist Sun Green.  It has a home-movie feel that makes perfect sense for the subject-matter – families and their place in a world challenged by greed and environmental degradation.

When it was first released in 2003, the movie received attention, but far less than the album.  With the graphic novel now revisiting the story, the film is now gaining a lot of first and second viewings. In the summer of the BP oil disaster, there’s an even-greater poignancy.  This is compelling, personal filmmaking from one of the biggest rock stars of our time.