White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights

Feb 26 - Feb 27, 2010

(Emmett Malloy, USA, 2009, DVD, 93 min)

White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights is a stylish rock-doc that follows the Jack and Meg White's 2007 Canadian tour. The band played remote towns and provinces, while finding time at each tour stop to make an unusual promotional appearance, playing on city buses, boats, bowling alleys (where they rolled a full game while rocking), and even one free daytime show in which they only played a single note.
 
Director Malloy mixes gorgeously grainy black-and-white with color footage of Jack and Meg White onstage and off. The Stripes stripped-down, pop-art stage sets make a perfect backdrop for the spare, sonic attack of their music, and the lo-fi punch of their sound seems especially fitting for the landscape of the sparsely populated Canadian countryside. 
 

"A rock-and-roll love letter to D.A. Pennebaker, Canada, pre-Internet music culture, and, above all, the White Stripes, director Emmett Malloy's Under the Great White Northern Lights is like a modernized version of Don't Look Back set in one of William T. Vollman's Seven Dreams." —The Village Voice 

Watch the trailer...


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