Pitchfork

Clad in baggy jeans and a black t-shirt, her long hair hiding her face, a generally unself-conscious Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) stands front and center in Mark Borthwick's experimental film Speaking for Trees. Standing in tall grass in anonymous woodlands, Marshall plays an electric guitar-- presumably plugged into a portable amp kept carefully out of the frame-- and sings some of her own songs ("You Are Free" and "I Don't Blame You", among others) as well as covers of tracks by Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, The Rolling Stones, and M. Ward. The boundaries between the songs blur, turning the performance into a medley-- a snippet of one track interrupts another as Marshall wanders the frame, accompanied only by crickets and cicadas and the wind through the leaves. The camera is largely stationary-- shooting extremely long shots-- and occasionally the exposure is altered, bleaching the picture. The sunlight is garish; the trees are stoic, moved only by the wind. The film, as low-key as Marshall's music, lasts nearly two hours.

It's a simple concept, but that doesn't mean it's not high concept. Released on DVD and packaged alongside a 64-page booklet of Borthwick's photography and a one-song CD, the film's naturalism is exactingly calculated: Marshall sings extemporaneously, stopping to push her hair out of her face or swat flies buzzing around a mic clipped to her shirt, and the film wants to amplify these small interruptions as evidence of its improvisatory nature and signifiers of the notoriously shy singer's personality. But these actions are an effect more of the environment than of Marshall's performance style-- any performer in this setting would do the same. Furthermore, despite the high definition of DVD, the film's pronounced graininess does not allow for very much detail, which renders Marshall's face as little more than a blur, as if it has been digitally blotted.

Speaking for Trees obscures Marshall even as it presents her literally at the center of the frame. On one hand, the compelling, often maddening sense of mystery surrounding Marshall remains intact. On the other, despite her haunting voice and more-than-capable guitar playing, neither she nor her music is the film's true subject; instead, it's Borthwick's ingenious concept that comes across most strongly. By trying to place Marshall's barebones music within an equally barebones setting, he has essentially turned the camera on himself.

The DVD includes three other short films, each of which is soundtracked by one of Marshall's songs and set on a beach that is as nondescript as the woods in "Speaking for Trees". "Maybe Not" features a mother and child walking through the surf; two girls, wet with saltwater, dance to "Free"; and bleached-out shots of rocks and waves accompany "Half of You". These pieces are just as straightforward as Speaking for Trees, and Borthwick's minimal camerawork transforms them into live-action postcards. They're more intriguing than Speaking for Trees-- and not just because they're shorter or there is more activity in the frame, but because they're primarily visual rather than musical and/or documentary pieces.

The accompanying CD is as conceptual as Speaking for Trees' titular film: For one thing, it only has one song, whimsically titled "Willie Deadwilder". The track itself is more than 18 minutes of Marshall singing and M. Ward playing the same theme on acoustic guitar over and over. Just as the film foregoes all cinematic niceties, "Willie Deadwilder" eschews a pronounced song structure in favor of a short vocal melody that repeats throughout the song-- in other words, no verses, choruses, guitar solos, bridges, or breakdowns.

Such an undertaking is pure folly yet somehow Marshall makes it not just listenable but deeply intriguing. Featuring a performance that sounds just as off the cuff as the one in Speaking for Trees, the song begins with the title character and his lover Rebecca, an archetypal couple descended from Frankie and Johnny and John Prine's "Donald and Lydia", among too many others to list. But "Willie Deadwilder" is not the story-song this first section suggests, as Marshall breaks her narrator's distance and inserts herself into the proceedings: "The first time I saw her," she sings in Willie's voice before switching to Rebecca's and finally dropping the two characters altogether. As the song continues, she namedrops St. Augustine and recalls hearing Dylan sing "Ramona" in the back of a cab. She then thanks friends and strangers for specific gifts: A girl who gave her a turquoise ring, a journalist who gave her a sweater, a man who gave her a song and flowers, another who gave her sanity.

Like "I Don't Blame You" and "You Are Free", "Willie Deadwilder" is music as a meditation on music, specifically on its capacity for self-expression, and its power to connect and communicate. It's a song about several songs, and this meta aspect never sounds forced or calculated-- instead, it seems artful and intuitive. Like Sonic Youth's "Diamond Sea", every aspect of the track-- its lyrics, length, sense of performance-- conveys this idea: "This is...our song/ And it will go on and on/ A moment in time traveling on/ Even if it is too long, I don't care."

Sold together in handsomely minimalist packaging, the film and song complement each other in surprising ways, but the set remains an oddity: One is too dull and the other too long to be of much use to any but the most obsessive fans-- but to those Cat Power aficionados, they form a strange, often fascinating curio.