This article was updated on Saturday, August 10 at 2:41 p.m.
“I am not a saint, I am a noise,” comes straight from the scribbled pages of Joan Baez’s childhood diary, a rather mature self-proclamation for a 13-year-old.
Released on Oct 6, the documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” paints a vulnerable portrait of a woman known to the world as an angelic ornament of the 1960s, from folk music stages to Civil Rights marches. Directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor break down Baez’s empowered figure to reveal a girl that hid her anxieties behind an acoustic guitar, chronicling her interpersonal trauma in an archival mosaic. With access to seemingly every inch of Baez’s documented memory, the directors’ portrayal of Baez prospers through its use of her cursive journal entries, enigmatic sketches, tape-recorded therapy sessions, letters, vintage photographs and archival footage of Baez and her family.
Nostalgia plays a bitter role in this recollection of Baez. She calls it the “bone-shattering task of remembering,” in a letter to her parents, Albert and Joan Baez. Raised by Quakers, Baez remembers a childhood tainted with moments where she felt desolate and chained to what she describes as “darkness” – with no explanation of why. Anxious monologues took up space in her mind and her journal, haunting her throughout the entirety of her music and activism careers.
While Baez started therapy at 16, she was already a barefoot sensation at the Newport Folk Festival just two years later, and fame caught her in its web before she was able to heal her childhood wounds, let alone uncover their roots. The world saw her as a frolicking symbol of peace, and for better or worse, that is how she saw herself, too — ignorant to her inner chaos.
So it lurked – following her through her first relationship with Kim Chappell, with whom she wrote the anti-war song “All the World Has Gone By,”; her love affair with the prodigal Bob Dylan, before he was anything but a “tattered little shamble of a human being” looking for a mother and somewhere to play his harmonica; and her marriage to activist David Harris which amounted to a pregnant Baez and Harris in jail for draft evasion. They divorced five years later. At 79 years old during the time of filming, Baez can confess that the thread running through these relationships is her inability to be intimate. “All the love was there, but it was unavailable,” she said.
In reference to her public persona Baez says, “I am not good with one-on-one relationships, I’m good with one-on-two thousand relationships.” The crowds that flocked to Baez’s honey-coated vibrato and the following she cultivated from her commitment to nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Movement are among her successful relationships. The documentary includes snippets from her 2018 farewell tour, illustrating the relationship between Baez and her audiences that still thrives even after six decades. Her son, Gabriel Harris, traveled with her on this tour as part of her band, allowing Baez the opportunity to tap into the vulnerability she composes in front of a crowd, in the context of their mother-and-son relationship – the only one-on-one relationship she’s had a chance to remedy.
Family is a recurring obstacle for Baez throughout this documentary. Her traumatic childhood as well as its residue on her inner and outer worlds was something hidden from her publicized image. It was also — until recently — absent from Baez’s understanding of herself. Sifting through her mother’s storage unit, Baez recalls the therapy she and her younger sister — folk singer Mimi Fariña – did later in life to recover repressed memories of their father’s sexual abuse. Elusive, unacknowledged, and denied by her parents, these memories swam in a deep emotional well Baez lacked conscious access to.
When speaking, Baez explains her struggles with mental health loosley. The documentary instead leans heavily on the vulnerable pages of her past journals. The word she uses for her episodes of darkness isn’t “unhappy” but rather “lost.” It’s almost as if she was exhausting her pen to find an answer. Animated sketches of animals and crumpled silhouettes are accompanied by raw and unprocessed thoughts scribbled in inky cursive — Baez’s mind is portrayed through a collage of well-preserved fragments of paper.
Anyone who resonates with the dark corners of Baez’s mind can come away from this documentary with a painfully honest path to reaching their own island of calm. With what’s left of her memory, Baez wades in a pool of forgiveness — whether or not she’s earned it doesn’t seem to matter. You can only look back at the life trailing behind you for so long.
Correction: a previous version of this article included an incorrect spelling of the documentary title, “Joan Baez I Am a Noise.” The article has been updated with the correct spelling.
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