Wednesday 28 October 2026
Forever Young
After nearly 50 years, David Bowie’s shelved concert film is finally getting a spectacular premiere. What happens when a work first meets its audience in a different era, with different expectations of how it should look and sound?
Yesterday, The Guardian reported that documentary director Brett Morgen has spent nearly ten years restoring two concert films of David Bowie, shot at Earl’s Court in 1978 during the Isolar II tour. Bowie shelved the original cut, directed by Blowup actor David Hemmings, after finding it »distasteful«.1 The film, Stage, was meant to open in cinemas that year. Instead, it will screen in arenas from February 2027, using multiple screens and 7.1 surround sound. Morgen suffered a heart attack while making his 2022 Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream,2 and has since spent more than a thousand hours colour-grading the footage to »look and feel like something you would experience today«.
»The embalmer wants the body to stay forever young, immune to time, but nothing can be unsealed into the moment in which it was sealed«
Just as he choreographed his career to perfection, Bowie choreographed almost everything about his own death. His last album, Blackstar, was released on his sixty-ninth birthday, and he died two days later.3 But Stage was a different matter. Whatever Bowie thought of the film in 1978, he could hardly have anticipated that someone would spend a decade restoring it for audiences in 2027.
The French film critic André Bazin described what a camera does long before anyone pointed one at a rock concert. Photography and film, he argued in 1945, satisfy the »mummy complex« – the impulse to preserve a living form against the fact that it won’t last. He traced this impulse from Egyptian embalming and death masks to photography, all attempts to preserve something against the passage of time.4 Viewed through that lens, Hemmings’ cameras had already embalmed Bowie when they started rolling in 1978. What Morgen has spent a decade doing is a second embalming, performed on a body already preserved, to make it look alive by the standards of a later generation.
Perhaps an even purer act of embalming would have been to leave the film unseen. Restore it, shelve it, then twenty years later restore it again to a new standard, and shelve it again. A process of indefinite care without an audience: that’s closer to what an actual tomb does. Egyptian embalmers weren’t preparing a body for visitors. The maintenance itself was the ritual, the tomb was sealed, and no screening was scheduled at the end of it.
Writer and critic Susan Sontag put the same instinct more bluntly: all photographs are memento mori, and to photograph someone is to participate in their mortality.5 Grading the Earl’s Court footage until it feels contemporary only sharpens the paradox. Every second made to look like »now« becomes more firmly fixed as »then«.
The trouble with embalming is that it tries to hold a moment still forever, but time keeps moving around it. The embalmer wants the body to stay forever young, immune to time, but nothing can be unsealed into the moment in which it was sealed. The writer T. S. Eliot made a similar argument about literature. A genuinely new work doesn’t just take its place alongside the old ones; it changes how we read what came before, so that the past is reordered by the present as much as the present is shaped by the past.6 His own example was blunt: a single new poem, he thought, forces the whole existing order of everything written before it to shift, if only slightly, to make room for it. Something similar happens with Stage. The film has waited nearly 50 years for its first audience. The footage may have been restored, but the world in which it means something has changed too.
You could argue that this is just marketing: an old concert film dressed up for 2027 and sold as something new. But Stage is unusual in one important respect. Though the concerts took place in the late 1970s, the film itself never reached an audience. There’s no established reception to revisit, no original audience whose response has become part of its history. Its first public screening won’t revive an old reception. It will create one.
Some of what gets called new culture in the coming decades may turn out to work this way: old material reaching audiences for the first time, under conditions that allow it to mean something new. The embalmer sets out to defeat time. But preservation can’t stop time from changing what is preserved.
References
1 Dave Simpson (2026) »’How on Earth Is This Man Not Sweating?’ The Director Who Spent 10 Years Painstakingly Remastering Bowie’s ‘Greatest Filmed Performance’«. The Guardian, 27 October 2026.
2 Antonia Blyth (2022) »Brett Morgen Reveals He Flatlined After Heart Attack While Making ‘Moonage Daydream’, Felt Bowie “Was Guiding Me Through Recovery”«. Deadline, May 2022. https://deadline.com/2022/05/brett-morgen-moonage-daydream-interview-news-david-bowie-1235030380/
3 Jon Pareles (2016) »David Bowie Dies at 69: Star Transcended Music, Art and Fashion«. Obituary, The New York Times, 11 January 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/arts/music/david-bowie-dies-at-69.html
4 André Bazin (1967) What Is Cinema? Volume I. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5 Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
6 T. S. Eliot (1920) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen.