Week-to-Week: Renaissance, a film by—and about—Beyoncé
Documents of creativity, controlled intimacies, and the unavoidable Taylor Swift comparison
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There’s a moment early in Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé where we get a montage of what can best be described as Beyoncé vs. Incompetence. She talks about how she often finds that her exacting vision for her tour—or any other part of her career—is challenged by the men around her, and the documentary footage cycles through a series of examples.
It’s a battle that Beyoncé wins every time, to be clear: this is one of the most singularly powerful artists in the music industry, after all. But it’s telling that even she is still dealing with men hearing her intentions and resisting her vision, either because it fails to match their own or because they don’t want to go through the extra work necessary to make it happen. In one scene, she returns to a previous conversation about a particular technical element, pulling up receipts that what she wants exists, despite what a man tried to insist earlier. And in another, after she asks for a different lens for a wide-angle handheld moment within the concert, the man initially insists no wider angle exists…until she doesn’t back down and all of a sudden there’s a 6MM lens they could take a look at.
If you came directly to Renaissance from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film, scenes like these might have been unexpected, but anyone who’s seen either her Homecoming concert film on Netflix or her HBO documentary Life is But A Dream knows that this is a hallmark of Beyoncé’s public image. More than anything else, Beyoncé wants you to know that she is in complete creative control of her career, both as a feminist—but, to echo Angelica Jade Bastien’s critique of the Renaissance film’s apolitical framing, not explicitly feminist—statement in a male-dominated industry and as a more specific articulation of agency in relation to her origins within girl groups, the role of her manager father, and of course her partnership with Jay-Z.
Yes, I do want to bring Taylor Swift into this conversation, as there’s really no way to avoid it: two of the world’s biggest artists releasing concert films two months apart using the same business model is a potent contextual framework, and they even encouraged it by attending each other’s premieres. But while headlines might seek to turn this into a competition at the box office (a battle Swift was always going to win), for me it’s a question of how the contrasting approaches to designing a concert film (and the concerts within them) speak to their respective self-images.
Because while Taylor Swift’s reclamation narrative draws its power from the intimacy she’s created with her fans, Beyoncé’s story demands she remind us that she is far more than the performer you see onstage.
The wide-angle lens scene I mentioned earlier is a great example of how Beyoncé’s “concert documentary” approach functions narratively, because I was transported back to it some two hours later when the moment in question happened within the concert, and we saw the footage the lens captured. It was a moment that we know—because of the evidence presented—only happened the way it did because Beyoncé was insistent on finding a way to execute her creative vision. However, it also meant that I wasn’t really “in the moment” for the song or the performance itself, because I was too busy thinking about the work that went into it.
And yet as Beyoncé herself explains during the documentary, this was actually a prevailing aesthetic choice for the Renaissance tour as a whole: rather than hiding the stage crew responsible for moving setpieces into place and changing over the elaborate set between songs, Beyoncé insisted they wear reflective jumpsuits so that her fans would see the amount of work that was put into the show. It’s a choice that extends to the filming of the concert: you regularly see the camera operators like you’re watching a live broadcast, and there are times where you’ll be watching a wide shot of a clip and then immediately transport into the camera you just saw onstage for a different angle.
It’s a direct contrast to the Eras Tour film’s approach: Swift recorded three concerts back-to-back, but from different angles so that the wide shots could be free of the cameras that were used to film close-ups and onstage action. That approach emphasizes an intimate form of spectatorship, effectively transporting the viewer into the concert by giving them either a front row seat or a bird’s eye view as the moment warrants.
But the Renaissance film is not at all interested in intimacy in that context. We get plenty of closeups on Beyoncé onstage, of course, but the primary goal of the footage is to extend her initial vision to the experience of seeing the concert in this new format. Just take her signature aesthetic move: the match cuts between different costumes, which was so crucial to the Homecoming doc. And yes, on a basic level, it’s just badass when you see the colors change for the first time, and it never gets old. However, in Homecoming it was also a constant reminder that she put on this performance twice across Coachella’s two weekends, a testament to her work getting back into shape following the birth of her twins.
And in the case of Renaissance, this extends further by performing the excesses of her creativity: rather than simply swapping between two different costumes, the concert highlights the sheer volume of aesthetics she’s used over the course of the tour, with at least 5 or 6 different “looks” for some songs that extend to her entire team of dancers, backup singers, and band. You’re constantly reminded that this is not simply a recording of a performance: it is a document of a tour, with so much vision that one concert can’t contain it. There’s even a moment where, during a power outage at one of the shows, she has three minutes before she goes back onstage and decides on a whim to change into an entirely new outfit just for fun.
And because we see so much of Beyoncé’s work from her director’s chair—she has such a distinct posture in them, you can see it across both this and Homecoming—the film’s performance of creativity is always connected back to her as an artist…well, rather, her as a multi-hyphenate. In one of the documentary sequences—which are probably a little too frequent, to be honest—she says outright that she wants to be seen as different versions of herself. There’s the person she is when she’s performing, there’s the executive she is when running her business, and then there’s the person she is as a mother. The documentary segments are constantly ensuring that we see the performance through these lenses, and this bleeds into the performance itself with Blue Ivy’s cameo that brings the family dynamic into the show itself.
The result for me was that I didn’t leave the Renaissance film feeling like I had been to the Renaissance tour, but I don’t really think that was its intention. I notably went to a mid-day IMAX screening on Friday which was far from sold out, meaning I didn’t get a full “opening night” crowd, so it’s hard for me to say if there would have been more of a concert vibe with a packed showing (although the video below suggests this happened in that context). But I just didn’t feel like anything about the aesthetic choices encourages that response: just look at how often the film cuts to the crowd, as opposed to the spectacle, documenting their responses. That itself is crucial to the film’s narrative—the documentary points to the concert as a safe space for marginalized people tied to both House music and ballroom culture (although, to Bastien’s point, never what they’re safe from), including her “Uncle Johnny” that introduced her to the genre and inspired the album. But because the film’s point-of-view shifts so often, and because the documentary segments often feel staged to establish those narratives, there’s a distance to the spectatorship that made it harder to imagine acting like they were at a concert (behavior that, in my theater, was limited to some chair-dancing and one young woman who recorded herself doing the “Mute Challenge” during “Energy”).
But this is pretty consistent with Beyoncé’s public image, as evidenced in the carefully controlled personal narratives put forward in the previous documentary projects and the complete absence of “personal” social media. This isn’t to say that Beyoncé is neglectful of her fans: the “Beyhive” gets both an extended shoutout toward the end of the film and a huge presence in the final sequence’s costuming/stage design (which notably doesn’t seem to change between performances, at least according to the film). But above all, she wants fans to see her as the creative force behind the entire Beyoncé experience, across any and all platforms. The Beyoncé that directed this film is a curator of the various other Beyoncés, ensuring fans understand the nuances of each without ever being able to access them intimately.
It’s also a Beyoncé that exists because of how criticism of her creativity has shaped her as an artist. She notably positions her “business” self as an extension of her father, while also documenting a reunion between the entire lineup of Destiny’s Child during the tour that reminds us of how his management practices led to the replacement of two of the original members. She’s never attempted to hide these complications of her past—she rather reclaims them, more powerful for how she has managed to articulate a sense of authority and agency despite the “manufactured” origins of her career (or her music write large, as seen when memes contrasted her self-titled album’s huge list of writers and producers to Beck’s solo-produced album after the 2015 Grammys). Similarly, there’s power in creating a nearly three hour document of your creativity where your powerful hip-hop music mogul husband mostly exists as a hype man for your tween daughter, as opposed to a shadow looming over your own success.
And this brings us back to Taylor Swift. Swift is equally as invested in the business side of her career—see: my points about the capitalism underlying the Taylor’s Version project—but she has long been invested in obscuring those details in favor of a narrative that foregrounds her relationship and connection with her fans. Swift wants to cultivate a parasocial relationship with the Swifties, and her concert was designed to make 70,000 people a night feel like she was speaking directly to them, which the film extends to millions more. Implicitly, the concert emphasizes and supports her creativity as an artist, and the feat of performing that show so many times over the past year. But to underline that point would disrupt a crucial part of her star text, in the same way that not underlining it would disrupt Beyoncé’s, and so there’s no costume changes in the Eras Tour film, and they collapse the three filmed concerts into one as “seamlessly” as they can with no evidence of the production.
Both approaches do exactly what the artists want them to do. For Taylor Swift, at a moment where she is asserting her agency over her music and her career, the camera immerses us in her intimate spectacle, joining her on a journey through her career and the eras within. For Beyoncé, as she continues to bypass traditional pop star trajectories in favor of uncompromising creativity, the camera takes the audience everywhere they need to be to understand how she guided that creativity. Both films capture the spectacle and artistry of their subjects, but whereas Taylor aims to immerse us in the experience of “being there,” Beyoncé is more focused on immersing us in the creative mind that created “there” in the first place, and making sure we never forget it as the film progresses.
Stray observations
If the disparity between the box office results surprises you, it shouldn’t—”Taylor Swift sings every song she’s famous for” vs. “Beyoncé primarily performs songs an average person has never heard before” was never a fair fight, on that front. Whereas the design of the Eras Tour is built to interest people who are aware of Swift but wouldn’t shell out money to head to a concert, nothing about the cultural impact of Renaissance was really designed to do the same.
Swift doesn’t ignore the narratives around her career in her concert, but she integrates them into the intimacy of moments like her introduction to “Champagne Problems” at the piano. That creates less dissonance than the scenes in Renaissance of Beyoncé and her mother at a makeup mirror, which feel fake in a way that kind of took me out of the film compared to the documentary footage of the concert’s creation which felt like it was giving me new context organically. (Swift also made her own documentary, Netflix’s Miss Americana, and doesn’t replicate those narratives directly in the concert film in the way Beyoncé does).
Once the two films eventually make their way to streaming—not to $20 VOD rentals, which Swift is using as an additional window next week—I’d be curious to compare the number of crowd inserts between them. I really felt like Renaissance had exponentially more.
I’ll be really interested in any kind of postmortems of how AMC handled the two releases. They clearly reduced Renaissance’s footprint based on less demand, but it also had higher ticket prices, and is also losing out on the premium large format screens sooner (with my local AMC shifting to Die Hard next weekend). I’m also curious how they estimated exclusive merch this time—they sold out of the Eras Tour merch during the opening weekend, but they’re selling off leftovers at deep discounts now that we’re deep into its run.
There’s a segment in Renaissance where Beyoncé highlights her backup singers and talks about framing them as a girl group within the concert, but the rehearsals tease a much more extensive introduction that we never actually see, which meant they still seemed pretty underdeveloped.
I was pleased, though, that my immediate thought of “Wow, that horn player is extremely pregnant” did get a followup with footage of them learning she was pregnant and tracking the baby’s development throughout the tour.
I’m behind on much of the season’s other films, to be honest, but I did get to Saltburn last weekend which meant that I had proper context for the “People who knew nothing about the premise of Saltburn react to Saltburn” TikToks that I’ve had on my FYP since. My hope is to get to The Holdovers sometime next week, as it’s coming to my local arthouse.
Complete creative control? It's not like she writes her material (or at least without a half dozen "producers" on them.
I haven’t come around to watching either concert film, because I will see Taylor Swift here in Amsterdam next summer and do not want the movie to be my first time experiencing the Eras Tour. I did go to the Renaissance Tour and loved every minute of it but I can’t get myself to go to the cinema and watch it again for nearly three hours. I will wait for it to be on streaming services and enjoy it comfortably from my living room, haha.