Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars

Although the music on his Ziggy Stardust album is one of David Bowie’s career highs, it was the theatricality surrounding it that was truly revolutionary. His androgynous glam-spaceman persona was stunningly exotic in 1973, and the sense of drama created by the lavishly conceived live shows helped make the Ziggy period one of the most heavily mythologized in rock and roll. (Rocky Horror, Velvet Goldmine, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch would all have been impossible without Ziggy; you decide if that’s good or bad.) Part of the reason might be that it ended so abruptly and before the faithful were ready—attributable as much to Bowie’s exhaustion and boredom as his canny sense of showmanship (always leave ’em wanting more). D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film documents the precise moment of Ziggy’s official retirement, the London performance where Bowie announced that he was hanging up his microphone—ambiguously enough to further fuel his PR machine, since it was unclear whether Bowie or Ziggy was the one quitting. Pennebaker, apparently brought in at the last minute, may not have been the best choice—his unblinking-eye cinema verite style was at odds with the most deliberately artificial musician of his day. Still, though segments of Ziggy Stardust have aged poorly (there may be nothing so painful as hippie pantomime), it remains a vital snapshot of Bowie’s greatest contribution to rock, the notion that a musician’s identity could be artistically crafted just as much as his music. Oak Street Cinema, (612) 331-3134, oakstreetcinema.org