The National are a band of New Yorkers transplanted from Cincinnati, Ohio: Matt Berninger, Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner, Bryan Devendorf, and Scott Devendorf.

A Skin, A Night
A Film By Vincent Moon
Available on DVD May 20, 2008
Via Beggars Banquet

Packaged with The Virginia EP
12 tracks of National b-sides, live tracks and rarities.

1) YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN, VIRGINIA (previously unreleased)
2) SANTA CLARA (UK b-side)
3) BLANK SLATE (UK b-side)
4) TALL SAINT (demo)
5) WITHOUT PERMISSION (unreleased cover of Caroline Martin song)
6) FOREVER AFTER DAYS (demo)
7) REST OF YEARS (demo)
8) SLOW SHOW (demo)
9) LUCKY YOU (daytrotter session)
10) MANSION ON THE HILL (live)
11) FAKE EMPIRE (live)
12) ABOUT TODAY (live)

_______________________
About Human Skin
By Alec Hanley Bemis

An Entourage
You start a band and you end up with an entourage.

If one were to tick off the retinue that surrounds the American rock band, The National, Vincent Moon (born Mathieu Saura) would certainly be one of the first and most prominent members. He reached out to the group in 2002 after the low-key release of their first album. After one of the band’s earliest shows at Paris’s La Guinguette Pirate -- the fondly remembered and dearly departed pirate-ship-cum-floating rock venue -- Mathieu threw them a party. A darkened left bank residence. A clutch of pretty girls. A stroboscopic flash, then a rapid series. A friendship was born and, for Vincent, a career -- first as a writer for a small French webzine, later as an image maker and inspiration. First he made photographs, and eventually he made those pictures move.

Essentially, he celebrated The National when few others cared and, in return, the band let him in. What goes on in A Skin, A Night, though, is not the stuff of well-rehearsed insider history. Nor is it a series of rock’n’roll clichés. Nor is it specifically concerned with the making of The National’s fourth full-length album, Boxer, even though much of it was filmed during sessions for that record at Peter Katis’s Bridgeport, Connecticut studio.

A Skin, A Night is less a movie about The National than a movie about how music is made today -- not with classic rock bravado, or debauched indulgence, but through novelistic attention to detail, a collective implosion of personality, and worried worried nights.

"It's a painful process. Eventually you'll get there," says drummer Bryan Devendorf as a percussion track builds then fades. Rhythm slides into cacophony and comes out as rhythm again on the other side. Perhaps it’s one of the band’s songwriters, Aaron Dessner, who put it best: "It's like we're on a hunt. We're just hunting."

A Vision
As much as it’s a movie about The National’s process, A Skin, A Night is about Vincent Moon’s vision. Not since photographer Robert Frank shot The Americans in the middle 1950s has a wobbly eye captured so much poetry in the mundane. Once again, it's taken a European to portray the residents of these United States.

Moon’s subjects, however, are rarely tied down by language, nationality or personality. They are drawn in sound, dreamy notions, movement. As much as his vision exists outside of speech, however, one must admit the film is reminiscent of The National’s particular lyrical approach. It’s full of visual quasi-sequiturs: Children throw airplanes off a hill. High-rise apartments jut like teeth on the outskirts. Planes land safely…yet weary commuters ride from work to home on treacherous subway train…then, for minutes, Moon focuses on the trains themselves, the dreadful intention propelling their travels through heart of the city…Together, these images begin to cohere, and then they start to mean something in ways akin to the loose poetic ties that make The National’s lyrics so memorable. What’s most dangerous? Trains or planes or the city of people you’ll face at the end of the road?

An Ending
When the association between Vincent and The National began, he wasn’t yet known as the auteur behind La Blogotheque’s Les Concerts A Emporter aka The Take Away Shows. It was well before his tenure as image-maker for R.E.M. and Arcade Fire. And The National had yet to become one of the most beloved of the current crop of independent rock band.

Rather, the group’s members were working as design professionals in New York City -- in the process of giving up pictures for words and sound. Vincent, on the other hand, made the opposite journey. He chose image over language.

Finally, then, A Skin, A Night means more than words can say. It is a sixty-minute portrait of impressions, mutual affection, and intimate moments you’d never otherwise see: The cave-like basement studio annex known as Bongo Island! Backstage rituals before a crucial headline gig at the legendary London music venue Koko! The tap-tap-tap of Bryan Devendorf’s drum pads in a half-dozen major cities! Rip apart a song! “Get inside their clothes / with my green gloves / watch their videos…”

If The National’s lyrics seem to take us inside the human condition, Vincent Moon’s images take us outside, documenting the beauty of the sounds made by our human skin

WATCH THE TRAILER: http://www.thenationalboxer.com/film/
http://www.vincentmoon.com/
http://www.beggarsgroupusa.com/
http://americanmary.com/

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