Friday, April 15, 2011

The Blair Brothers

Quite a few years ago I watched a documentary on PBS about a pair of slightly eccentric English brothers who spent two decades travelling around Indonesia in the 1970's and 1980's. They brought film cameras and sound recording equipment intending only to make one short documentary about a trip on a Bugis pirate ship to the Spice Islands. They ended up building a house in Bali, travelling everywhere, shooting hundreds of hours of film, without ever bothering to edit it. The film cans lay rusting in their Bali house for years. Finally it was edited and a four part documentary culled from the footage. The documentary was produced by Ringo Starr and in a part 5 that was made 10 years later Mick Jagger makes an appearance. Weird. Anyway now the whole thing is on YouTube: Part 1 of part 1 below. Hope you like it as much as I did.