Catching Fire : The Story of Anita Pallenberg

I have been branded a witch, a promiscuous woman, a killer. Maybe it is the characters I perform in the movies that people associate with myself … like a blank space where others project their thoughts and deficiencies, but vengeance is not necessary. I am taking back my spirit. I articulate as a female in need of yet another escapade.” Recommended by the authors of the Catching Fire film, “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg” is a documentary from actress-scientist Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill.

Scarlett Johansson, working with made up thesis of source text written by actress and style icon Anita Pallenberg, provided voice over. The blender he narrates “the pen survives” if it is “found by her children, after her death,” in 2017 to her children and lawyer, contained these words. At least Pallenberg for the better part of the documentary proved her evolution qualitative earned by her in modern culture.

However most of recent biographical Catching Fire films have been constructed, such workers with video materials and interviews use video, audio and photographic materials, films of piece from interviews and so on, especially with those who knew her such as her children Marlon and Angela, her director Volker Schlöndorff and even Keith Richard himself overviews Pallenberg and leaves her credibility in the relationship with him at the surface. “Neither of us wanted to be with them for their power” is an audio clip from similarly sidelined icon Marianne Faithful.

“We had our own power,” the assertion says. Nevertheless, the documentary centers around Pallenberg’s life during her tenure with The Rolling Stones.

The youth of Pallenberg goes back to her ‘wild child’ days and recounts how she has parents of Italian-German descent who were quite strict, and who lost everything by World War II. This shows how turbulent her childhood which was impacted by the war was to her personality. Still, this thread is abandoned later in the doc, aside from one assertion that she and Richards understood each other because they were both children during the war.

The rest of the documentary Catching Fire captures her exciting interlude in America beginning in 1963 and associating with the cut throaty artistic society who were Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg among others. “I loved the feeling of culture exploding,” she reminisces her incredible days in New York City. She includes a series of different things that she did intending some ideas of these that paved ways to her inner artist without neighborhooding those ideas.

Instead, we get a very detailed re-telling of how she met the Rolling Stones and fell in love with Brian Jones, whom she described as her “doppelganger.” This was a baleful and mutually damaging to both parties, enmeshed and fueled by drugs predominately, with Jones, violence soon thereafter.

This phase in her life is accompanied by plenty of archival material that makes everything seem glossier than it really is rather than helping resolve the nonlinear structure.

The only occasion we will discover anything about Pallenberg as an artist belongs to the tales of director Schlön dorff about making ‘Degree of murder’ with her. This then moves into a picture of huge proportions in her career as ‘The Great Tyrant in Barbarella’ that takes one’s breath away. Out of all the talking heads, Mini Schlon dorff seems to be the only one with interest into who was Pallenberg as an artist and wishes to preserve this part of her legacy.

Of course, this is also the stage of her life where her relations with Jones went up in flames; she found comfort in Richards who was to be her companion for the next ten years whom she briefly dated also Mick Jagger as they shot Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. And yes, it is rather anomalous that one center piece, Gimme Shelter,’ and the other, You can’t always get what you want,’ were created with her in mind. However, the film would have benefited from some degree of criticism on the images of women she created rather than the excessive focus on all the poonanny related to it as if it was some sort of sales appeal.

Again, it proves just how firmly ingrained is this film’s narrative, looking to untangle Pallenberg’s story vis-à-vis all these men’s images built around her.

This doc still wants to present her as the rock diva in charge of the pages, despite marketing herself some other way which she doesn’t want to be. This is because we only see a select few ‘gems’ of the unpublished materials and still wonder how much more such a book would be based on her “wants”, “desires” and “inner thoughts”. Did she speak about her kids? Did she speak about her passion for creation?

Even worse, the most significant events in her lifetime during this period – her relations with Jagger, escaping with Richards and home & child from jail time for drug abuse, the death of their third child, drowning Scott Cantrell Castello themed after ‘deer hunter’- all of these are seen from an outsider view. Nevertheless, how did those occurrences influenced Pallenberg which we have issues accessing ? No, it is only in such a background that we catch several fleeting glimpses of her internal realm. While struggling with her heroin habit, she said, “I felt like some horrible wretch who brandished death and devastation everywhere about herself. Up until now, that is all that this doc has allowed her to let her tell her story.

The two mutually agreed to separate and did so in 1979. It was around this time that Pallenberg managed a stent of sobriety. Even though the Catching Fire film is called “The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” it does not sustain any excitement in Pallenberg’s trajectory the moment this storyline is aligned with that of the Stones. For example, even in two hours depicting the life of Pallenberg during the last forty years, during which she started working as a model, acting, and so on, the documentary confines this period of her life in a brief montage followed by flattering comments by Kate Moss. What is the point here if this part of her life doesn’t warrant authentic representation? Bloom and Zill never regarded this as a narrative necessity, which has us puzzled by what the cross in their reason is.

There is a last note of voice-over when Pallenberg states, “I imagine writing this [memoir] has helped in coming out of the shadow.” This is indeed unfortunate, however, that her narrative has been constructed through visions that only perceive her as a nut case or a source of inspiration without every judiciousness and understanding of the multi-faceted artist, mother and woman that she is.

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