Varda Bar-Kar's beautifully crafted documentary of one of our time's until now too-hidden heroes is, like her earlier "Fandango at the Wall", a feast of both filmmaking and subject.
Janis Ian is nothing less than a national treasure--her songs, her singing of them, and also her life. The steadiness of Ian's compassion and the ferocity of her attention are both exemplary. Her work carries the long tradition of American narrative song into current-world context and content. From her first hit, a song about interracial dating in the 1960s, "Society's Child," to the much-covered classic "Jesse," to the fireband-bright declarations of the late-life song, "I'm Still Standing," Ian has been ground-breaker, silence breaker, truth sayer.
Anyone who's heard Ian's songs still recalls them. But only some know the lifelong body of work, and fewer still know Ian's own life story, or quite realize how much courage, from start to now, it must have taken. Bar-Kar's always-moving and always-questioning camera, mix of interviews, archival footage, animation, and reenactment gives us that life--significant and moving in itself--its pitched lows, its highs, its determinations, loves, losses.
Above all, the film gives us Ian's fidelity to what matters, her fidelity to what is (old fashioned though the thought is) right, and her fidelity to, above all, simply what is.
For a person who knows Ian's music, Breaking Silence will expand what lies around, behind, and beneath it. For those who don't (yet), the documentary stands on its own, both as introduction to the songs and as an introduction to one unexpected and sui generis person, who's spent a lifetime in the making of sense through the making of art.
