Phases of the Moon

MANILA, Philippines - Much has been said about the illustrious Vincent Moon. (Real name: Mathieu Saura. His alias is a villainous character culled from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Form of the Sword.) When talk of the director’s visit to the Philippines surfaced, people clucked in delight, swarming Big Bad Wolf for his film screening when the visit came to fruition.

There has been hearsay about what Vincent Moon is like in person, with reactions ranging from inspiring to arrogant to alarmingly nice and welcoming. Mostly, people are just happy that he found the time to stop by here.

Although famous for Les Concerts à emporter or Take Away Shows, Vincent Moon has graduated onto other things. He started out making these for French music blog La Blogothèque. He filmed a plethora of musicians playing songs, following them with a camera while they were out and about in Paris, his hometown.

Moon’s style is very distinct. He favors single-shot videos, with a preference for the spontaneous and unplanned. People are drawn to the rawness and intimacy of his work. “My pleasure when I shoot these films is to not know what’s going to happen,” Moon says. He has a funny way of convincing people to do what he wants them to do. A walk to dinner has Grizzly Bear singing The Knife a cappella.

His much-viewed Take Away Show features Canadian band Arcade Fire filing into a tiny elevator, playing Neon Bible. In place of percussion, pages of a magazine are torn. After a somber performance, the elevator doors open to a hungry Parisian crowd, and the band plays Wake Up, sung by Win Butler with a megaphone surrounded by a circle of people.

“That’s the beauty of it for me: being there in the moment and just improvising,” Moon shares. “That’s how all my films are, completely like that. I never plan anything.”

This c’est la vie philosophy spills over to his own life. Moon has been a nomad for three years. Prior to Manila, he had come from Australia and Indonesia, after which he’ll be flying off to Croatia. There is something attractive about the way he’s chosen to live his life. “I just go somewhere and if something happens, it happens,” he says. It’s an easy thing to say — if you don’t append it with the resolute “If it doesn’t happen, it’s okay; it’s not a big deal,” which he does.

When I asked Vincent Moon to sign this, he said, “Why do you have this?”

Moon calls himself a constant traveler. “It’s a beautiful position that I really treasure,” he says, but what brought him on his journey around the world was “a failed love story.” “It just happened, you know? You follow the signs of life,” he narrates. “I just ended up being homeless at some point.” On the road, he nurtured an interest in cultural nuances and syncretism — “I like cultures meeting to make something else” — stoking his interest in traditional music and its rituals. “I’m much more spiritual than I was before,” he explains. “Indie rock music is great, but what I’m into now is so much more interesting. It touches something ‘wow.’”

On my copy of The National’s A Skin, A Night — a documentary he made that he claims to hate — he inscribed: il est facile de guitar / le monde plus difficile est de marcher sans toucher terre. Roughly translated, it reads: “It is easy to play guitar / the more difficult world is to go without touching land.” While sufficiently mysterious, it may strangely describe Moon’s shift from modern music — something easy for him — to something with a more complex and far-reaching breadth. It’s difficult to face something unknown, without steadier footing, but just because it’s foreign, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

His three-week jaunt to the Philippines was intended to be an exploration of some of the different tribal music and traditions. He managed to visit a few places up north and down south, and put together three vastly different musical experiences by the time he had to leave. On the day of his flight out, he held a screening at the UP Film Institute, sharing what he has discovered about our brothers and sisters. “I like that, going from one country to another and witnessing how a culture is transmitted,” he adds. “It’s all about transmission, how transmission evolves, what is gained and lost in the process.”

“I think that reality is what defines a lot of how people create nowadays in our generation,” he ponders. “Basically, being amateurs, no more professionals of art, artists and shit like that. Just people making stuff, just for the pleasure of making, that’s the beauty of it.”

Moon has hundreds of unfinished films and places left to go to. “I don’t care about the results,” Moon asserts again. “That was the best thing.”