PTA's Concert Film Captures Winter At Carnegie Hall — SkimNews
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- Paul Thomas Anderson co-directed "Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall" with Benny Safdie, with Mubi distributing the 1-hour-11-minute concert film across the London and New York festival circuits.
- Cameron Winter, the 24-year-old frontman of New York rock band Geese, performs solo at Carnegie Hall with just a grand piano, his delivery shaped by audible admiration for Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Nick Cave.
- PTA shot on warm 35mm color stock to capture the venue's old-fashioned music-hall ambience, framing the 3,000-seat audience as both a blurry mass and a sequence of highly focused individuals — each locked in their own communion with an artist who never turns to face them.
- The film is positioned as the inverse of Jonathan Demme's 1984 Talking Heads doc "Stop Making Sense"; the review likens the visual approach instead to Demme's 1985 promo for New Order's "The Perfect Kiss."
- Winter's esoteric set prompted an audience member sitting three rows from the front to leave after the second song barely began, caught off guard by the stark simplicity given the classical sprawl of the songs.
- Winter's only moment of showmanship — pretending to leave the stage after 30 minutes — leaves viewers unable to tell whether it's a joke or a panic attack that has subsided.
Why it matters: For PTA, the film marks a deliberate counter-move within the concert-movie genre: where Scorsese-style docs go bigger, PTA runs the opposite direction with 35mm intimacy and ambiguous performance, framing the doc as "an interrogation of the highly personal nature of art." For Mubi, which holds distribution rights, festival play positions an esoteric, one-man-at-a-piano concert doc squarely at the arthouse niche rather than chasing mainstream crossover.
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