It is a very carefully constructed shambles, as it was intended to be – a chaotic pointer to chaotic times, hyped up beyond the point of no return, so that you finally accept almost every enormity as possible.
He has got rhythm all right, and if you want to know how to cut a film to it, watch this one. And the concert that is really the film’s finale, the natural summation of Pink’s neurosis, is as powerfully filmed as anything in Tommy, the other British success in this area.Ībove all, Parker’s visual synthesis with the music, much aided by Scarfe’s rip-roaring visions of doom and destruction which turn light into darkness at the flick of a pen rather than a switch, is almost perfect. But if Parker’s masterstrokes sometimes alienate rather than proving very much about alienation, his smaller visions, amply detailed by the camera, seem remarkably real. Pink (Bob Geldof, impersonating Waters himself, who was writing from hard experience) is so familiar a figure from rock’s drugged and drooling past that the moment when he flings the telly set through the window only gives one a sharp sense of deja vu. Photograph: Alamy Stock PhotoĪll this is not actually desperately original. Perhaps tension is sometimes a good thing to have around.Ī fire scene from the film. Except that, as a piece of pure cinematic technique, it is touched with an originality of expression and a thunderous conviction that lifts it a little beyond what is was as simply as aural tour de force. I found the album inflated, uneven but still quite something and that’s exactly what the film is. But he obviously doesn’t think they have resulted in a botch-up, and nor do I. The tensions between Parker, Waters and Scarfe have been well advertised, mostly by Parker. The album was later adapted into a 1982 feature film entitled Pink Floyd The Wall, directed by Alan Parker and featuring Irish musician Bob Geldof as Pink. At least something exists on celluloid, and millions who bought the album will see it. Which is a very good reason why people like Alan Parker should exist, even if his collaborators on this extraordinary film, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Gerald Scarfe, the artist, found his conception of it different to their own. It is simply not the sort of project the Spielbergs, Scorseses and Coppolas would interest themselves in. N o American director would or could have made Pink Floyd The Wall (Empire, AA).