The more I spoke with him and read his other interviews, the more I found his opacity to be less an evasive tactic than an invitation for thought. Refusing to be definitive, he graciously opened conversations with others and reengaged with his work. Albert Maysles did not simply create pretty pictures of the Rolling Stones. He engaged them with an approach that was rooted in his staunch philosophy of American documentary filmmaking—one that eschewed the manipulation of Hollywood continuity editing. Much has been written about the gap between the truth claims of direct cinema dogma and manipulation inherent in any film (Bordwell and Thompson 1997: 409–15; Hall 1991; Winston 1993: 44–45; Stahl 2013: 67–74). In Maysles’s films, continuity editing mixes with direct cinema features, for instance, the lack of a voice-of-God narrator, the shaky camera, and the rough editing. I’m less interested in whether or not the Maysleses were radical or imitative of Hollywood narrative practices. In this chapter, I’d like to investigate how the Maysleses and editor Charlotte Zwerin used a diverse set of cinematic techniques to make a rhetorical claim about music—that music can be a commodity, a social glue, and an artwork at the same time.
Reconfiguring Documentary Makes Room for Music
Before he picked up a camera, Albert Maysles was on an academic path. He had earned a master’s degree in psychology from Boston University and, as a graduate student, taught introductory courses there for three years. He began to veer from this path in 1955, speeding through the Russian countryside on a motorcycle with a Keystone 16mm wind-up camera and a few hundred feet of film. The Cold War was in full swing. Maysles wanted to meet the faceless people who were our supposed enemies.
A few months earlier in New York, Life Magazine had denied him a photo assignment on Russian psychiatry. On his way back to Boston, he had chanced a visit to the CBS offices. In a stroke of luck, the head of the news department agreed to loan him equipment. As Maysles explains in an interview elsewhere, he had experience with still photography but had never shot film.
“The guy said, ‘I understand that you’re going back to Boston, then coming back through on your way to Helsinki and then Russia. So when you stop off in New York on your way out, shoot a little bit on this roll of film, we’ll process it and take a look at it and give you a critique.’ That was my total filmic training” (in Dixon 2007: 59).
The result of Maysles’s trip to the Soviet Union was the fourteen-minute film Psychiatry in Russia (1955) that examined mental health care in three Soviet cities. It was televised by The Dave Garroway Show on NBC TV and WGBH public television in 1956. The film revealed non-Freudian psychiatric practices. That was interesting—for a psychologist during the Cold War. But Maysles also demonstrated another important concept in his first film: Russians are people. The report of differences of psychiatric treatment is accompanied by images of Russians smiling, interacting with each other, staring into the camera, and lovingly treating the mentally ill. Yet his inability to record sound limited the degree to which he could portray people. In our interview Maysles acknowledges this limitation:
“I knew that sound was important. But because I didn’t have any, I just sort of put that yearning aside and did whatever I could to familiarize ourselves with Russian people. So that does come across whether it’s a still photograph or a silent movie but not as strong as it might if it was made with talking and music.”
What Maysles had brought back from Russia for his first film were moving images that he could edit together with added narration, but he also came home a filmmaker. He reminisces about joining the Drew Associates—a collection of filmmakers who would rethink the goals of documentary film: “Things turned around in 1956, where I met up with Bob Drew, [D. A.] Pennebaker, and [Richard] Leacock. It was introduced to us a new form of documentary filming where you film what was actually happening…. It was such an important advance. It also achieved a much greater sense of opportunity for people to connect with one another, people of different cultures.”
One of the goals was to let the cameras retreat out of the attention of the people being filmed.
As Maysles puts it, “Spontaneity. Not controlling what’s going on. Observing. Letting things happen with the shot. And patience so that when it does come along you’re right there to get it in all its fullness.”
Many of these early direct cinema films had little music. Hollywood films used music to manipulate. Direct cinema was to be a method free from manipulation, a space in which audiences could make up their own minds.
As much as direct cinema filmmakers distinguished themselves in opposition to classical Hollywood cinema for being manipulative, they also drew from narrative cinema. Their films were dramatic; they used music (albeit diegetic) to score mood; they presented close-ups of faces and found objects to offer psychological focus and symbolic representation. While direct cinema offers great latitude for interpretation, elements of the films still work to narrow meaning. For this chapter, I’ll propose that both direct cinema and classical Hollywood cinema are ideal practices. The films themselves—for our purposes, Gimme Shelter—employ elements of both practices. Consider direct cinema to be a well from which filmmakers draw rather than a corpus of works or a stylistic circumscription of a film.
Gimme Shelter illustrates how a film in the wake of idealized direct cinema drew from narrative techniques and, in so doing, opened up space for music to have a larger role in creating meaning. The space in-between is a space in which music can shift from one role to another, from scoring, to symbolizing, to being an aesthetic experience of sound in motion.
The Independent Brothers
Maysles left Drew Associates in 1962 to form Maysles Films with his brother David, who had been working in Hollywood as an assistant producer (Vogels 2005: 5). Albert shot images and David recorded sound until David’s death in 1987. As a pair, they extended the concept of “being there” to filming the lives of ordinary people, unusual people, artists, musicians, and celebrities. By and large, most attention to their filmmaking is centered on the image. But gathering sound was just as thoughtful. That was where David came in.
During our interview, Maysles recounts, “Well, he was interested in music—jazz and so forth.”
Interest alone didn’t make David a great sound recordist. He developed a method of recording sound that augmented the goal of being there.
Maysles continues, “Sound for me was just a good sound. Can you understand it? And I could tell if the sound of the music was appropriate, if it was as good as it could be. Apparently my brother really knew what he was doing. And we had good equipment.”
They modified their audio equipment to extend recording time, synced the camera without a wire, and were able to get close with minimal technological presence.
“We changed the size of the reels. Because there was enough space to make the reels double the size, adding just a couple inches to the reels but giving double the amount of sound.”
David used a handheld Sennheiser 804 shotgun condenser microphone, which picked up what was directly in front with great detail while attenuating sound from the sides. The result is an intimacy with the subject, the sense that we are just listening to them. It also makes us unable to hear other things. What we can’t hear is just as important as what we do hear.
“It was more direct,” Maysles says, “If you held it properly, you got the closest you could to the source of sound. So you know, even to this day right now, most soundmen have a good microphone that’s maybe not as close to my brother’s, but that it’s hanging overhead which I think is always a distraction to everybody.”
Minimizing the equipment and isolating sound in the environment allowed the Maysleses to connect with
