It’s 1971 again in the year that music changed everything
Doc makes case that titular year served as cultural inflection point
Asif Kapadia lost count somewhere in the thousands. “I’m guessing,” he says. “It’s probably in the tens of thousands.”
As the director behind what he calls “archive-y” documentaries including “Senna,” “Diego Maradona” and the Oscarwinning “Amy,” Kapadia has spent more than his fair share of time in the editing suite. But for his latest project, the eightpart series “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything” (now available on Apple TV Plus), Kapadia says the sheer amount of footage overwhelmed everyone involved.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of work,” he concedes. “Years of work is an easier way to put it.”
Based on the David Hepworth book “Never a Dull Moment,” “1971” makes an ardent case that the titular year served as cultural inflection point and historical bellwether for the modern era.
Jumping off from the stream of monumental albums released or recorded in 1971 — Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Carole King’s “Tapestry,” David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory,” the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.,” to name but a few — each episode uses Kapadia’s typical filmmaking style, disembodied voices over archival footage (much of it previously unreleased), to build to its respective historical powder keg.
Speaking over Zoom alongside 1971’s producer and episodic director Danielle Peck, Kapadia admits, “It’s not the easiest way to make any documentary.”
“The payoff is you are put into that world in the present: you’re there in 1971, hanging out in a room with (John Lennon, Joni Mitchell or Jim Morrison) and it doesn’t all play like someone talking about what happened in the past. We wanted it to feel very contemporary.”
In the works since 2016, the musical prescience of “1971” is matched by its analogue to current world events.
“To me, the world got in sync with the project, rather than the project speaking to what was happening in the world,” Kapadia says. “Every day, I would turn on the news and yell, ‘That’s in the series!’ ”
“Nixon on Twitter would definitely have been Trump,” Peck adds.
The pair also cite the series’ coverage of the Attica Prison riot and Nixon’s attempt to stifle the Black Panthers as echoing the social unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Likewise, Kapadia says he hopes younger audiences see parallels between contemporary music and that highlighted in “1971.”
“Anything you may be into now somehow was formed in ’71.”
For Peck, who was tasked with outlining and sourcing much of the material, the experience of
working on the series often felt like a treasure hunt.
“A few brains were broken,” she jokes. To illustrate the point, she offers a story about tracking down footage of David Bowie in 1971.
“He was incredibly (musically) prolific, but there is only one bit of footage when he goes and visits Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York in September of ’71. That’s it! So how do you tell a man’s transformation story when he’s off camera?”
“That’s where we come in!” Kapadia exclaims. “Doing archive-based documentaries means things don’t need to be
perfect to work. If you set up the formula correctly and trust the process, it pays off when you then deliver it.”
In that way, he explains, “1971” works where other “classic rock” documentaries have failed, exactly because it doesn’t rely on new content to be successful. “It’s more work and much more money, but the payoff is that everything feels current.
“That’s the point, in a way. As soon as you take away the camera and talking heads then you can forget that person isn’t around and they’re living again.”