Documentary scholar Bill Nichols notes that documentaries are historical documents (1991: ix–xi). In this case, there are two layers of historicity: the event of the festival, including the lead-up to and the death of Meredith Hunter, and the moment of reflection or debriefing. This umbrella continually returns us to spontaneity and complexity. As a central place, out of time with the tour, we learn to expect to jump from anywhere to anywhere within the film. In the film, David Maysles is a step away from addressing the audience directly by explaining the edit to drummer Charlie Watts.
Watts says, “It’s really hard to see this together, isn’t it?”
“It’ll take time,” responds David.
“What?”
“Eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks? You think you can do it that quick?”
And then David speaks simultaneously to Watts and to the audience: “This gives us freedom. All you guys watching it. We may only be on you for a minute, then go to almost anything.”
David’s statement prepares us for jumping from the ribs of the umbrella to any other part.
Cuts, to either film or audiotape, can have varying degrees of continuity as we pass over the cut. By nature, cuts are violent. They elide time through physical separation and splicing. (Computer video editing still relies on the metaphor of continuous strips ready for blade cuts or trimming.) We then move through levels of the image-making apparatus, from the film editing to the event planning to the stage to wandering through the crowds at Altamont.
The next two sections of this chapter analyze scenes from the film to show how the edit places music in productively slippery relations to the image. As we watch the band listening to their own music, music becomes different things. Witnessing the shift from music being one thing to an other gives us the experience of music as an idea and music as its own phenomenon. Editing music in film can transform music into an idea. Music can represent an emotion, establish a sense of continuity through discontinuous images, or referentially tie us to something that we culturally associate with the song. Gimme Shelter strategically presents music in many different forms, connecting ideas and material. As distinct from language or visual imagery, music has a temporality that flows in time. It is more efficient at getting us to experience truth as continuous and discontinuous change. The Maysleses’ use of music in Gimme Shelter shows truth to be something that is in constant motion, conditional, complex, and partial.
The Many Ways of Listening to “Wild Horses”
As Maysles and I discuss the difficulty of getting close to Mick Jagger, we begin to talk about the many close-up shots of another one of the band members—drummer Charlie Watts. Maysles recalls a moment of getting close with his camera.
“It was a wonderful moment when they were listening to the playback of ‘Wild Horses,’” he says.
Maysles explains, “Lots of times you get your best material when you’re not filming a performance onstage but the subjects are listening to the playback in the sound studio. You can get right up close on their hands and on their faces. You feel the music coming even more from them than when they are actually performing.”
Generally, we think of audio as the support for an image. Sound lends realism to the visual, but what if it was the image’s role to support the sound? I am aware of how students listen with their eyes when I teach. When playing music, students instinctively watch me for cues. Gestures, facial expressions, tapping a beat, pointing, and looking all help to accent music. A camera can frame this act of visual listening.
Al Maysles’s cinematography and Charlotte Zwerin’s editing encourage us to view and, more importantly, listen to this sequence in a particular way. In Jonathan Vogels’s analysis of these studio sequences, he suggests that they develop the band’s character(s) as laconic image-makers.
Whether in the studio, hotel room, or backstage, the film also reveals the group to be surprisingly distanced from their own music. In passive roles as listeners and observers, they are generally transfixed by their own performances, listening intently, sometimes mouthing the words, or dancing a little. Only briefly, in a scene at the Muscle Shoals Recording Studio in Alabama does Jagger suggest how to edit a song; grinning foolishly, he punctuates his direction with a swig from a liquor bottle. (2005: 87)
I think that Vogels is looking more than he is listening. The sequence of the band listening to the playback of “Wild Horses” moves music from the background to the foreground through Zwerin’s minimal edit and through Albert Maysles’s cinematography.
The “Wild Horses” sequence puts us there—not “there” as in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but “there” as in the social space of listening. The setting introduces a feeling of scrutiny just as seeing a microscope, telescope, or other tool of investigation might. The camera augments attentiveness to the music. The sequence ends with a shot that lasts more than two minutes, starting with a close-up of Jagger and then artfully panning between close shots of band members listening to the playback. I will describe this in detail below and argue that it is one of the most memorable shots of the film because it encourages us to listen formally. We leave the sequence having listened to the music as sound in motion because of the copresence of the image—itself a combination of continuity editing and attentive cinematography. Before analyzing the sequence for how the film directs our listening, we should consider different modes of listening.
Modes of Listening
Michel Chion suggests that we shuttle between three primary listening modes in cinematic experience (1994: 25–34). Causal listening ferrets out the source of the sound. In this mode, sounds are indices for events and objects—the ticking of a clock, an explosion, for example. The sound of rewinding tape in the studio draws attention to the medium. Listening for the cause of the sound identifies the music as diegetic sound. The people in the room are clearly in the presence of the sound and the object producing that sound. Semantic listening renders sound into meaning. Listening to speech is a clear example of this. Much work in ethnomusicology attempts to draw connections between music and cultural meanings by positing that music is expressive culture, symbolizing nonmusical things.1 The details of the music often retreat as the representation of the song comes strongly into mind. As Chion points out, “semantic listening often ignores considerable differences in pronunciation (hence in sound) if they are not pertinent differences” (1994: 28). Reduced listening is akin to formal analysis—listening to the qualities of the sound itself. Chion borrows the term from the French composer Pierre Schaeffer (1994: 29). Schaeffer was a pioneer of musique concrète, a postwar musical effort of producing musical works from actual sounds collected on tape. Not surprisingly, Schaeffer was inspired by cinema—Jean Epstein’s work in particular. Attention to the details of the sound is an empirical endeavor, reducing the listening experience from its cause and its meaning. We may determine a pitch, a timbre, identify a rhythm or a repeated melodic figure. Much classic musicological analysis reduces sound to formal characteristics. Ethnomusicological studies often make use of formal analysis as part of a claim that musical style has a connection to social phenomena. Perhaps the clearest early articulation of this approach is John Blacking’s consideration of “humanly organized sound” and “soundly organized humanity” suggesting that there is interplay between aesthetic forms and social structures (1973).
As I will show next, the “Wild Horses” sequence moves between these three modes of listening.
Sign of Travel, Material Presence, Sound in Motion: The “Wild Horses” Sequence
Editor Charlotte Zwerin directs our ears as much as
