ABSTRACT
Musicians and bands have long been focus of the music documentary or “rockumentary,” a sub-genre of non-fiction filmmaking dating back to Dont Look Back, Woodstock and Gimme Shelter. In this chapter, the authors explore how filmmakers incorporation of personal video and audio footage both humanizes the sordid details of their subjects' lives and raises ethical questions about whether this is reason enough to subject deceased musicians to further public scrutiny. The subjects of Amy and Cobain: Montage of Heck share much in common, as do their documentaries' formal design, which seems grounded in the accelerated intermedial culture of the twenty-first century. In terms of the music documentaries under focus, it is worth noting Baron's discussion of the particular kinds of private footage that might create a feeling of transgression in the viewer. As this chapter has aimed to show, both music documentaries are concerned with revising unofficial and negatively skewed accounts of their subjects' lives by altering their public images.
