Film

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Name: Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Genre: Documentary, Music
Released: 2007
Cast: Scott Walker, David Bowie, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Marc Almond

Musical
Slow-burning

A portrait of Scott Walker, the reclusive pop star turned avant-garde experimentalist who spent decades making music that terrified and transfixed in equal measure. It's part biographical mystery, part sonic journey through a career of deliberate obliqueness. For anyone fascinated by artistic reinvention, creative courage, and what happens when someone decides popularity doesn't matter anymore.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you already admire the strange orchestral corners of 1960s pop and want fellow musicians explaining, in their own words, why one reclusive singer still matters.

Skip it if you want a tidy, chronological biography; this is a fragmentary tribute built from admirers' testimony, with a pace that lingers on mood more than on facts.

What it asks of you: It runs about ninety-five minutes and moves slowly, asking you to sit with long stretches of talk and music rather than follow a plot.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Searching for Sugar Man2012

A documentary mystery about a forgotten folk musician whose influence far exceeded his fame. Like Scott Walker, it's about artistic legacy discovered through obsessive fandom and the strange comfort of obscurity.

But The actual music discovery feels slightly anticlimactic after the buildup, and some viewers find the emotional payoff unearned.

24 Hour Party People2002

A wild, semi-fictionalized romp through Manchester's music scene that captures the chaos and vision behind cult creation. It shares Walker's fascination with how artists emerge from nowhere and reshape culture.

But It's deliberately chaotic and fractured, with constant fourth-wall breaking that annoys viewers who want straightforward narrative.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil2008

A tender, funny documentary about a band nobody cared about except themselves. It understands artistic devotion divorced from success in a way that echoes Walker's solitary vision.

But Watching aging metalheads struggle can feel slightly mournful, and the documentary doesn't glorify them—it just observes.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Synecdoche, New York2008

Both are about the loneliness of making art that's too strange for the world, and the question of whether that strangeness is genius or illness—or both.

Charlie Kaufman's film about an artist creating an incomprehensibly vast theatrical work that destroys everything in its path. It captures the terror and beauty of artistic ambition that cannot be contained or understood—exactly Walker's world.

But At 124 minutes it's dense, recursive, and genuinely confusing; it requires sustained intellectual engagement and leaves you more unsettled than satisfied.

A Brief History of Time1991

Errol Morris's cerebral documentary about Stephen Hawking—a master of communicating the incomprehensible. Both films sit with complex, difficult subjects and find humanity in opacity.

But It's deliberately slow and meditative; if you want conventional pacing and exposition, you'll find it frustrating.

Dig!2004

A seven-year documentary following two rock bands in parallel, capturing artistic ambition, jealousy, and the cost of vision. The collision of chaos and genius mirrors what drives Walker's work.

But It's exhausting and repetitive by design; the relentless documenting of dysfunction wears some viewers down deliberately.

The Act of Killing2012

A documentary that forces people to confront atrocity through reconstruction and performance. It shares Walker's belief that art must disturb and defamiliarize to reach truth.

But It's genuinely harrowing and ethically disquieting; watching monsters perform themselves is not easy or comfortable.

Cobain: Montage of Heck2015

A non-linear, almost collage-like portrait of an artist who couldn't survive his own visibility. It captures the psychological cost of being misunderstood at scale.

But The fragmented structure can feel frustratingly impressionistic, and it doesn't resolve the central tragedy—because it can't.

The Decline of Western Civilization1981

Penelope Spheeris's groundbreaking documentary of the LA punk scene captures artists existing at the margins by choice and necessity. A document of how creation happens outside the system.

But The production quality is deliberately primitive, and some interviews are nearly inaudible; it demands patience with its own roughness.

The Decline of Western Civilization poster

Grey Gardens1976

A mesmerizing documentary about two reclusive women living in squalor and grandeur. It's about how eccentricity, creativity, and social exile create their own strange world.

But It's neither kind nor unkind to its subjects, which some find exploitative and others find liberating; it refuses judgment either way.

Satyricon1969

Both Walker's albums and Satyricon refuse to make themselves easy for audiences; they demand that you enter their logic or leave. Both are beautiful in ways that feel almost accidental.

Fellini's hallucinatory, fragmentary epic about Rome's underworld moves like a fever dream through grotesque beauty and incomprehensible spectacle. It prioritizes vision and sensation over meaning in ways Walker's late work does sonically.

But There's no plot, little characterization, and sequences that seem designed to alienate. It's deliberately hostile to narrative comfort.