Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is the first authorised documentary film about late Nirvana band leader Kurt Cobain. Named after a mixtape Cobain recorded in 1988, the film shows an intimate portrait of the grunge legend, who committed suicide in 1994 aged just 27.
Montage of Heck, directed by Brett Morgen, includes footage from various Nirvana performances and unheard songs, as well as unreleased home movies, recordings, artwork, photography, journals, demos and songbooks. The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was shown at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival a month later. It was met with an overwhelmingly positive response from critics being praised as the most humanized portrayal of the musician yet. Before its international theatrical release, the film is scheduled to have its television premiere on HBO on 4 May 2015.
Along with the highly anticipated documentary, a companion book of the same title is being published by Insight Editions. The riveting book delves further into the material used in the film, presenting an illuminating and honest portrait of the singer who rarely revealed himself to the media. Although music made Cobain famous, the singer was also a gifted visual artist. Aside from the numerous album covers he designed for his band Nirvana, he created a vast number of paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures and left behind over four thousand pages of writings.
The book contains a mixture of animation stills, rare photography and other treasures from Kurt Cobain’s personal archive. It gives fans an unparalleled insight into the world of the late artist and successfully captures the contradictions that made up his character. A perfect complement to a milestone documentary that will forever change the way fans view Kurt Cobain.
Kurt Cobain was born on 20 February 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. Cobain was an American musician best known as the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the grunge band Nirvana. The band found breakthrough success with the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from ist second album “Nevermind”. To date, Nirvana has sold over 25 million albums in the US, and over 75 million worldwide. On 8 April 1994, Cobain was found dead at his home, the victim of what was officially ruled a suicide by a selfinflicted shotgun wound to the head.
