"There are two movies on this train," Aitken says of the project. Beautiful art/music combinations like Olaf Breuning's slow-smoldering "Smoke Bomb" are edited alongside Mavis Staples singing "Holy Ghost" over slow-pan footage of economically-depressed middle American towns that the train passes through. The resulting 61 one-minute films (which were combined into a single documentary) offer live concert footage and mediations on "perspective", "motion", and "the Frontier". Station to Station is a documentary about a train that artist Doug Aitken designed as a Levis-sponsored mobile light installation, which travels 4000 miles over the course of a month. "No fear!" she cries again-the picture of an artist whose struggle and perseverance underscore the genius that is her legacy. In a moment of commanding triumph, the woman who canonized "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" steps out from old documentary footage and insists for the camera: "I'll tell you what freedom is: freedom is no fear!" and the words crackle and ripple through the air like a comet. (She later said, after settling in Europe, that America felt like a "bad dream.") We also see the trauma of her husband’s domestic abuse juxtaposed with a life-affirming improvisational performance that is said to have confounded even Miles Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1987. Simone’s diary entries decry the emptiness of overworking herself on the road in a racist America. that was something we all wanted to say, but not one black man would say 'Mississippi Goddamn’." Her daughter then reminds us that Simone "used the blues as a stage for something bigger": "They're shooting us down one by one," Simone tells a mournful crowd after the assassination of her friend Martin Luther King, Jr., "And don't you forget it." When we heard her sing "Mississippi Goddam". The documentary borrows its title from Maya Angelou's famous question about Simone’s life, and at one point, before we see Simone electrifying the crowd at a Malcolm X-led protest, an elderly gentleman makes the statement: "No man in the Civil Rights movement was willing to say what she did. What Happened, Miss Simone? culls footage from Nina Simone's Civil Rights-era performances to tell the story of a woman who grew up "young, gifted, and black" in the Jim Crow South.
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