Resynator

Resynator was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Friday, May 17th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film!

You can trip on my Synthesizer, electronic world for every boy and every girl.

The synthesizer is probably the best new instrument since…I don’t know? What was the last instrument invented after all the drums, brass, woodwinds, strings came out hundreds and hundreds of years ago? The accordion? Who knows. But the synthesizer helped transform music, and how to play music, and gave me a lot of danceable tracks and I appreciate it.

Now, for Alison Tavel, the director and theoretical subject of this documentary, she grew up hearing that her dad invented the synthesizer, and worked with all of these famous people. Her dad whom she never met, because he died when she was just ten weeks old in a car accident. She never knew what to believe, figured a lot of it was just weird lies, and never questioned it. But now that she is in her mid 20s, she wanted to know the truth, and unpacked his creation packed away in a box in their attic, the Resynator.

And this documentary is about that journey. The journey to find out what the Resynator was, why it isn’t famous, what could it do, does it still work, and what happened with her father. And you know, of course, learn a little bit more about herself along the way.

This is when she realized she shouldn’t have lost the user manual. As like any good documentary, Alison is going to find out some harsh things about her dad. Things her mom kept from her, because it wasn’t relevant. But things that were also great and accurate about things he did and accomplish.

And in the journey, she wants the good and the bad, she finds out what stories were tall truths and which ones were mostly correct. That’s how we get sections of this documentary with people like Peter Gabriel, who was said to have bought three Resynators, and he is able to confirm the accuracy of the story and be a nice win.

This is a feel good documentary overall, of a woman discovering herself, and coming to terms with things that were kept from her for good reason. And that is a fine idea for a documentary.

But real life can mimic other things, and sure enough, this just feels like a story I have heard over and over again in terms of documentaries. Someone going off to discover the truth about a relative, who died when they were young, and not liking the overall picture they find. For some reason, they also put this on camera for us all to see. It is a very common type of documentary. And Resynator, with some cool information on a synthesizer machine that did not get to the mainstream as many thought it might, was interesting for sure. And unfortunately the rest is just more of the same.

This is all very strange to say for documentary since it isn’t fiction, but like I said, see enough of these things and you can see the commonalities. Oh well. Plenty of people will watch this documentary and probably love it! So if the topic sounds interesting, it certainly will deliver on that front.

2 out of 4.