"Are they panhandlers?...or performers practising [sic] ancient arts in a society that has left them behind?" If only Bunny Dexter's documentary on England's street performers (called "buskers") were even half as interesting as this quote from the back of the video jacket suggests. Pompously separated by pointless and self-evident title cards (such as "Hours" and "Money"), Buskers loosely strings together a series of brief interview clips and scenes of street performers in no real narrative order. The interviews are, for the most part, pedestrian (Louise Bolton, who licenses performers in Covent Garden, for instance, waxes long on C.G.'s booking system for buskers). Even the performances are lackluster: in one scene we see a busker being routed by local police but the audio is poor and we're unable to hear most of the conversation; in another, main interviewee Alex Roberts (on violin) gets in high dudgeon over a plugged-in Pink Floyd-playing solo guitarist who's crowding Roberts' turf in the tube station (the irony of a prominently displayed "No Busking" sign is apparently lost on both Roberts and the filmmaker). A lazy, tossed-off documentary that could and should have been far more interesting. Not recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)
Buskers
(1997) 28 min. $39.95. Maple Lake Releasing. PPR. Color cover. Vol. 14, Issue 3
Buskers
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