Janis: Little Girl Blue

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Continuing the trend of revealing music documentaries of the past year, along comes Janis: Little Girl Blue. While an honest, engaging and quite touching biopic which collates a wide variety of primary sources about Janis Joplin’s early life, career and tragic death, the film does not succeed throughout in fully rooting her within her social context.

The central thesis of the documentary is implicit. A strong denunciation of drug and alcohol abuse is prevalent throughout, along with the frequent assertion of Joplin ‘never quite fitting in’ and ‘being the odd girl at the back of the room.’ Her quirkiness and original outlook on life are demonstrated through the mesmerising photographs and documents of her first twenty years, along with interviews with her sister, Laura Joplin, and her few high school friends. Born in Texas in 1947, Joplin’s adolescence coincided with the Civil Rights movement in the United States and footage depicts her at various peace marches and rallies. Interviews describe her being bullied at school because of her involvement in the movement, and a photograph of her as the only Caucasian within a crowd of African-Americans is the most powerful shot in the film.

The documentary falters slightly in its second half, where it depicts her career. Against a powerful and well-chosen soundtrack, it paints an accurate and painful vision of her descent into drug misuse and alcoholism. However, it sadly lacks the same emphasis on social reactions which dominated the first half. Her gradual move from blues to beatnik and the eventual change in band is documented but is not attached to the changes in external culture, or even much to the changes in herself. Her letters home, describing her hopes of several new starts, are still insightful but do not carry the same weight. In particular, her death by overdose at age twenty-seven is depicted by text and a succession of interviews, but there is no real link drawn between her death and the drug-dominated culture of the 60s.

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