Bendjelloul: Searching For Sugar Man (2012)

It’s hard to say exactly what or who Searching For Sugar Man is about, since it takes place at the intersection of three equally incredible stories. On the one hand, there’s the story of Sixto Rodriguez, also known as Rodriguez, or Sugar Man, a Detroit singer-songwriter who was touted as a visionary by pretty much everyone who encountered him in the early 70s, when he released a couple of albums that nevertheless failed to garner him any real critical mass or commercial appeal. At the same time, there’s the story of Stephen "Sugar" Segerman and Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a pair of South African Rodriguez fans who set out to discover what became of their favourite singer-songwriter after he abruptly vanished in the mid-70s. On top of that, there’s the story of how Rodriguez came to be an icon in apartheid South Africa in the first place, where he eclipsed even the Beatles and Elvis, achieving a cult status he had never known in the United States. All three stories are obsessed with an obscurity and obfuscation that has more or less vanished from a music industry in which every artist’s biography and discography is only a click away, to the point where it often feels as if the real subject of the documentary is the pre-globalised lifeworld that made it possible for Rodriguez to captivate a nation’s youth without even being remotely aware of it. Time and again, Bendjelloul reminds us that three decades of embargo rendered South Africans equally remote from what was obscure as from what was popular, as evinced in their astonishment that Rodriguez wasn’t as famous overseas, along with their dawning sense that they’d absorbed all his fame and fandom only to obscure it elsewhere. Against that backdrop, it’s even more incredible to discover that, far from retreating to some sublime obscurity or lurking in some washed-up, self-imposed exile, Rodriguez has simply been living in the same house in Detroit he’s occupied for forty years, hiding in plain sight, working on construction sites and raising a family. What’s even more unbelievable is how seamlessly and serenely he slips back into music once he discovers that he has a fanbase, travelling to South Africa for the first time in his life to greet crowds for whom his appearance was tantamount to Elvis coming back from the dead and performing a live concert, in a kind of degree zero of the comeback culture haunting the music industry today. And that means that, when we do finally meet Rodriguez, he’s even more mystical, mythological and ethereal in person than in reputation – an artist who envisaged total continuity between music and the rest of his life, a singer singularly unwilling to even exploit his obscurity in an age of musical obscurantism and, above all, a genius loci of Detroit itself, where he was briefly associated with Motown and ran for Mayor, only to find himself spending the next couple of decades in demolition work. By the end, the film’s synergy between Detroit and Cape Town (or at least apartheid Cape Town) makes perfect sense – they’re both places “that tell you not to dream big, not to expect any more,” both in desperate need of an inner-city poet-prophet as perhaps only Detroit could have produced one.