Back when rock ‘n’ roll was still a new adventure, Janis Joplin proved it wasn’t only a boys’ club.
The big-voiced, bluesy singer dominated the stage, forged her own path and paved the way for the female singers who followed.
Yet 45 years after her death from a drug overdose in 1970, music is still "a very male-dominated industry", says Amy Berg, director of the new documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue.
The film includes onscreen interviews with Joplin’s former bandmates and other 1960s musicians – almost all of them male. Berg says several female performers from the era turned her down, including Grace Slick, the former lead singer of Jefferson Airplane.
"Grace Slick did not think that people wanted to see her how she looks today, because she was such a beautiful pop star in her 20s," Berg says at the Venice Film Festival, where Janis had its world premiere this week. "That's kind of tragic, I think. I really wanted to get that female perspective."
Fortunately, there is a female voice at the heart of the film – Joplin’s own.
The documentary features some of her best-known performances – including her breakout set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and her woozy appearance at Woodstock two years later – as well as a previously unseen version of her biggest hit Me and Bobby McGee. Berg also builds the movie around letters Joplin wrote to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas, chronicling her quest to find musical success and love.
Read by singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, also known as Cat Power, they are by turns excited, proud and poignantly insecure.
"If you watch Janis, you see this woman who just seems fearless, and then you read these letters and it's such a different persona," says Berg, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2007 for the clerical sex-abuse documentary Deliver Us from Evil.
“You see this very vulnerable, raw woman seeking validation.”
Made with the approval of Joplin’s siblings, the film traces her talent and her troubles back to Port Arthur, a hometown where she never felt at home. There’s an excruciating scene in which Joplin goes back for a high-school reunion, where her rock-star confidence completely deserts her.
“It was a middle-class Southern community,” Berg says. “And she wanted equality, she wanted integration, she wanted free expression, she wanted to sing the blues. She wanted to go out and explore.”
By chance, Janis – part of a healthy crop of documentaries at this year's Venice festival – follows Asif Kapadia's acclaimed Amy Winehouse documentary Amy. Both singers fought unhappiness with drinking and drugs, and both are members of the macabre 27 Club of musicians who died at that age, alongside Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Kurt Cobain. But Berg says there are as many differences as similarities between Joplin and Winehouse.
“You can’t look at Amy Winehouse and not see her influence coming from Janis,” Berg says. “But they had a different relationship with fame.”
While Winehouse looked distracted or uncomfortable in many of her live performances, Joplin blossomed onstage, performing with wit, power and passion. When she sang Piece of My Heart, she sounded like she meant it.
“She loved performing,” Berg says. “She was liberated the minute she stepped out there.”
The film marks a departure for Berg, who is best known for social-issues documentaries including Deliver Us from Evil and the true-crime tale, West of Memphis.
But she says profiling an artist she idolises was a passion project.
“At certain points in my life, when I was going through something great or something awful, I’ve found myself going back to her music,” Berg says. “It’s like a healing thing for me.
“I was so hard on myself in the edit bay, because I just want to make her proud.”
