USA: A documentary about air guitaring tells the story of an eclectic, wild sport

Record ID: 342826

  • Title: USA: A documentary about air guitaring tells the story of an eclectic, wild sport
  • Date: 11th May 2006
  • Summary: NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ALEXANDRA LIPSITZ, DIRECTOR OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM "AIR GUITAR NATION", SAYING: "People are very very involved and you start to like side with somebody and you're like wow - that person really rocked or that person really sucked. You want people to win and I can't even tell you how thrilling i
  • Embargoed: 26th May 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Usa
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVA9Q7D2YX3CT65007P5IS8I75L0
  • Story Text: One might not be able to see the guitar, but the vivid, excited guitar playing just can't be missed. Now, aficionados of the eclectic, some say "crazy" practice in which rock enthusiasts pretend to play guitars, can revel in the ether-shaking air guitaring details portrayed in a documentary film about the year that air guitar swept America.
    Even though many think of air-guitaring as a "joke", it exists as a competitive sport and the film, "Air Guitar Nation", featured at the recently concluded Tribeca Film Festival in New York, follows competitive air guitarists from New York to Los Angeles and onwards to northern Finland. Finland is the Mecca of international air guitar since the world air guitar championships began there in the early 90s. The film chronicles the birth of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships in 2003 and the personal journeys of the contestants who vie to become the first World Air Guitar Champion from the States.
    "Air Guitar Nation" is director Alexandra Lipsitz's first film. She spoke to Reuters TV in New York about what inspired her to follow air-guitarists and what surprised her the most during the journey.
    Lipsitz said, "I think one of the things that was most surprising was that air-guitar is about world peace. The Finns believe that you can't hold an air guitar and a gun at the same time and that by the end of the world championship, they broadcast on the internet and invite the whole world to air guitar at the same time and that if this were to happen, there would be world peace. And that concept was really very interesting to me, as well as just having an amazing time at a bar at four o' clock in the morning playing an invisible instrument."
    Two air guitarists who feature prominently in the film are David Jung, aka "C-Diddy", an actor out of Brooklyn and now Los Angeles and Dan Crane aka Bjorn Turoque, a writer, musician and the second best air guitarist in the U.S. in 2005.
    For all his wild appearance, Jung takes the sport or art of air guitaring very seriously. Reflecting on how he got into the sport, Jung said, "I don't think I got into air-guitar. I think air guitar got into me actually. When I started in New York, it was just kind of for the fun of it, for giggles, then it became something magnificent. It became a spiritual journey and I just had to go with it, I just followed where the light was shining."
    Crane, on the other hand, compares the high of air guitaring to a potent drug. He said, "Most people don't understand when the air kind of gets into your bloodstream, it's kind of an addiction. I mean it's like a drug and it's this amazingly powerful feeling to get up on stage in front of hundreds or thousands of people and just play an invisible instrument. I mean it's intangible, it's something you can't understand until you've done it."
    Both Jung and Crane think director Lipsitz did a great service to the world by following air guitarists and their competitions closely, calling her "the grizzly man of air guitar".
    Competitive guitaring is not only watched by a mass of fans, it also follows a very strict set of rules. For instance, one of the supposed criteria on which every competitive air guitarist is judged is airiness, something that has been described as "the extent to which the performance transcends the medium and becomes a higher form of artistic expression."
    Lipsitz believes the frenzy of air guitar competitions can be exhilarating. She said of the competitions, "People are very very involved and you start to like side with somebody and you're like wow - that person really rocked or that person really sucked. You want people to win and I can't even tell you how thrilling it is been to see people that I have seen perform over and over again win, and how sad it is when people are defeated. It really is amazing."
    Crane pitched in saying that air guitaring is a bit like "Mexican cock-fighting", a comment that didn't go down very well with "C-Diddy".
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register