SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT Greg Carey and Wade Jackson’s Waiting: The Van Duren Story

Since the turn of the century, an intriguing subgenre in music documentary has emerged that sees filmmakers looking to revive the songs and reposition the legacies of certain artists whose compelling work was not met with commercial success. Arguably the most famous of this cohort is Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012), about the Detroit-born singer-songwriter Rodriguez. Other, similarly excellent films have been made about musicians Gene Clark, Gram Parsons and the band Love (even if those artists all attained relatively respectable levels of fame). These documentaries share a common denominator: they all celebrate American artists but were made by Europeans. The late Bendjelloul was a Swede; the 2004 Parsons film, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, was created by a German (Gandulf Hennig); and those on Clark (The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark, Jack & Paul Kendall, 2013) and Love (Love Story, Chris Hall & Mike Kerry, 2006), by Brits.

There is a trend, therefore, of such films being produced by outsiders peering into the exotic mythology and romance of American culture, their admiration for their respective subjects born of the advantages of observing from afar. The pattern continues with Waiting: The Van Duren Story (Greg Carey & Wade Jackson, 2018), a documentary about