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How many times have you been frustrated with a documentary in which the camera cuts to a close-up of an instrumentalist's face just as the music gets really interesting? You will have no such issues with The Lost String, Anaïs Prosaïc's biographical film about guitarist Marc Ribot, which is full of excellent original and archival performance footage and includes four solo performances, recorded live, as bonus tracks. The Lost String may fall short in other ways, but it is invaluable in offering a candid view of this inventive artist at work in a variety of idioms and contexts. The film includes sequences of Ribot performing (and tweaking) classical guitar compositions, extended-technique études, free improvisations, processed ambient noise, and late-1980s/early-1990s No-Wave. It also covers Ribot's distinctive deconstructions of jazz, rock, and blues tunes, and it includes extended performances of Cuban son as reimagined by his band, Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans). Nevertheless, Ribot's creative breadth presents a challenge that is hard to meet in such a brief film (fifty-two minutes, plus thirty minutes of bonus material). Prosaïc's (unspoken) decision to focus on Ribot as soloist and bandleader, primarily in his role as an experimentalist on New York City's downtown scene, is commendable given the long-standing importance of the downtown music world as a hub of the U.S. musical avant-garde. However, The Lost String makes no attempt to offer a balanced portrait of the scene, and the film does not address Ribot's significant work as a side-musician, film composer, session player, and recording artist. These, along with a few other lacunae, will leave viewers with a lopsided understanding of Ribot's influence and creative profile. Viewers will also be stymied by the puzzling lack of explanatory information, including (for the most part) subtitles and narration. These points notwithstanding, the film is an important document brimming with intriguing material.
Even those who have not heard of Ribot are likely to have heard him. He is widely admired for his eloquent, rock- and blues-fueled guitar work on recordings by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and T-Bone Burnett; he plays Scotty Moore's guitar parts on the soundtrack of Walk the Line (2005); and his work is featured on Martin Scorsese's The Blues (2003) and