elliott, on film

It’s been four years since elliott smith died, and it’s becoming steadily clearer that his impact and influence will continue to be felt well into the next decade. Yesterday saw the release of New Moon, an outtakes and alternates collection that highlights so much of what made Smith so remarkable. It also made me remember a little seen documentary called lucky three.

A few years ago my fiancee (then girlfriend) and i were flipping through the channels when we came across the image of Elliott Smith, in a yellow shirt, sitting in a spare kitchen playing “Between the Bars.” Naturally, at that point, we stopped changing the channel. The performance was intercut with shots taken around Smith’s home of Portland — traffic lights, train trestles, passing cars. The effect was both haunting and moving — Smith’s death was still recent at this point, and seeing the film was like accidentally coming across a box of pictures of a loved one who’d passed on.

Because the film was being show to burn out the ten minutes between the end of one movie and the start of another, for the longest time we had no idea what it was. An entry eventually turned up on IMDB — the movie was called Lucky Three, shot by Jem Cohen, who also did the Fugazi film Instrument and the R.E.M. concert film Road Movie (which I think I watched 700 times when I was in college). He has a website, which appears to be in only a semi-functional state, but like most things, Lucky Three has turned up on YouTube. I’m embedding it below — it’s a surprisingly affecting document, and one that any fan of Smith will want to see.