I’m not generally the type of music fan who is interested in owning any live performances by my favorite artists on DVD (or video, for that matter). A good live album is about as far as I tend to go. So when Ani DiFranco released her first official DVD, Render I decided to wait for the reviews to come in before purchasing it. In the end I never did buy it because the most positive reviews found the movie mediocre at best. Even as a die hard Ani fan I just couldn’t justify the purchase when no one seemed thrilled about it.
Ani’s next foray into DVD, Trust, was released on November 9, 2004. Early this year I found myself on her website with some extra cash burning a hole in my virtual pocket and decided to give this one a chance – largely because I hadn’t heard much about it one way or another.
Unlike Render, Trust is a complete concert experience with virtually no backstage or candid shots – at least not in the sense of listening to Ani talk about this or that. The DVD features a selection of songs from two shows in Washington, D.C. in May 2004. Ever the political crusader, Trust also includes footage of Congressman Dennis Kucinich and images of some of the folks who table outside of her shows. Ani is joined by upright bassist Todd Sickafoose (who has been touring with her for awhile now) and occasionally by guitarist Tony Scherr. Clocking in at exactly 1.5 hours, this DVD is truly like attending one of DiFranco’s shows.
Like most DVD’s Trust gives the viewer the option to watch the entire thing from start to finish or to skip around and pick individual songs. The first song opens with a bit of animation before moving into “Educated Guess.” In this first scene you see DiFranco frolicking around Washington, D.C. and then the frame progresses to Ani and Todd in a dimly lit room playing. This is the pre-show scenery – we get to see Ani walking around town, writing up her set list for the night, and fans queuing up to get inside the venue. Midway through the song the show “begins” and the camera switches to Ani on stage. The rest of the video is a mix of stage and that dimly lit room (somewhere backstage, a practice space?).
Unfortunately it takes a little while for the filmmaker to get this sequence down pat. The first few switches between the stage and room are choppy and some of the angles are just bad. While showing the audience is important to this video – especially since a sign language interpreter was on hand for the entire performance – the shadowy shots of the backs of people’s heads just don’t work. While we could argue that seeing only a tiny piece of the person on stage through the sea of people is fairly normal at a concert that is not what I want to see on a live DVD.
This one complaint is worked out by the time the second song, “Origami,” comes along. The rest of the DVD is a smooth transition back and forth between the stage and room with a few carefully placed behind the scenes moments. Trust contains 21 songs from Ani’s albums Not So Soft through Knuckle Down - although at the time this was released the tracks from the latter were still unreleased. Just like any other show, this one includes a fairly diverse selection and with such a large catalog of work it would be impossible to include everyone’s favorites. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of the more recent work like “Modulation,” “Manhole,” and “Knuckle Down,” but older songs like “Shameless,” “God’s Country,” and the ever present spoken word piece “Coming Up” are like old friends.
Trust is a solid offering in the world of live performance videos. The sound quality is superb and the filmmaker captured every ounce of intimacy possible. I think a good bit of this is due the clips from the practice room which only feature Ani and Todd, but also from the editing of the stage pieces to remove a lot of the audience noise. The footage quality, with the exception of the one inconsistency mentioned above, is also quite outstanding. Despite misgivings about Render it seems Ani got it right this time around. I highly recommend Trust to any fans of Ani DiFranco.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.