Film reviews: Best Before Death | Scheme Birds, Edinburgh International Film Festival

EARLY on in Best Before Death, its subject, Scottish artist and musician Bill Drummond, explains his mistrust of the documentary process. Filmmakers always have a different agenda to the subject being profiled, he complains, and over the course of the film we see him questioning and resisting director Paul Duane’s efforts to get him to explain or contextualise his artistic life and career while pursuing his current project: a 12-year-world tour in which he travels to different cities that are meaningful to him (Kolkata in India and Lexington in the US) and embeds himself in the local community by performing a series of mundane-seeming tasks over the course of a few weeks. For an artist who has, ironically, become best know for his radical attempts to erase his work from the cultural landscape (most notably the back catalogue of the KLF), or make work that only exists in the moment it’s made (like burning a million quid or his choir project The17), Drummond’s playfully uncooperative approach feels like his own way of wresting control of the film away from Duane. By attempting to make it as unilluminating as possible he is, in effect, also making it part of his own radical artistic process. And yet Duane clearly knows that this in itself illuminates something interesting about Drummond and the playful push and pull that ensues, as Drummond repeatedly deconstructs the film while it’s being made, makes for a far more interesting and entertaining portrait of an inscrutable artist than the usual documentary primers we tend to get.