Zwerin frequented “Big Band and a Movie” events downtown, during which a live band preceded a movie screening (Finn 2003). She married notable jazz trombonist and music author Mike Zwerin. Until her death in 2004, she continued to make music documentaries. Her filmography includes documentaries on Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Toru Takemitsu, Vladimir Horowitz, and Tommy Flanagan as well as films on visual artists Willem de Kooning, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Isamu Noguchi. The music documentarian Bruce Ricker praises Zwerin for her editing work with early direct cinema as well as for her sensitivity to music:
1.1. Structure of “Wild Horses” sequence.
Charlotte’s a pioneer of cinema verite … She’s in the tradition of directors who come out of editing, like Hal Ashby and Robert Parrish. She once said that her major influences are David Maysles and jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan. She gathers all the material and shapes it into a piece of work that’s musical in nature. She’s got a keen eye and she’s a great arranger, like Gil Evans working with Miles Davis. Also, she’s a very good listener, the key to making a good documentary. (In Peary 2003)
As will become obvious in my analysis of the scene, Zwerin’s edit makes us aware of listening. The sequence I will discuss is in three parts: a travel sequence, banter within the studio, and the playback of the song “Wild Horses.” Each of these segments uses visual techniques to encourage us to listen to music (figure 1.1).
Travel to studio: Before we enter the studio, Zwerin uses music as it is typically placed in a transition sequence. Nondiegetically, the song “You Gotta Move” offers flow and a temporality that takes the place of the disrupted temporality of the images. What ends up being an establishing sequence is a series of six shots that brings the band from the Holiday Inn to the Muscle Shoals recording studio.
Zwerin edits with an eye for visual continuity across the cut. (For example, it appears that the band walks through the hotel by keeping their direction the same between the first two shots.) But the musical continuity is perhaps more important. The audio was recorded at the studio during a break from the tour, repurposed as nondiegetic music. “You Gotta Move” is the only audio to be heard—typical of travel sequences in narrative film. The second segment of the sequence positions music in a different relation to the images.
Inside studio: Diegetic music can function as nondiegetic, scoring the scene. Zwerin and the Maysles stumbled upon the richness of finding music in the environment in Salesman, a documentary about a Bible salesman that they had made just before Gimme Shelter. In our conversation, Maysles describes how the found music was particularly useful: “The opening scene of Salesman, the camera is on Paul having a tough time selling the Bible to the point where he must be really feeling pretty low. This child who was sitting on this woman’s lap gets up and goes to the piano and plays something that is just sort of dropping off the way … it’s kind of a musical rendition of Paul’s feeling and performance. You could have Leonard Bernstein working his orchestra and using some of his music and it couldn’t have been better. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. And being played by a child made it all stronger.”
Finding the music in the shot was also finding that music could be two things at once. Music was part of the action and it also represented the psychological state of the main subject of the film. It offered two senses of the real: first, an event of real life in which a child (perhaps inappropriately) signals the end of a social interaction and, second, a serendipitous exteriorization of human feeling for film.
Gimme Shelter capitalizes on the ability of music to give different senses of the real. The “Wild Horses” sequence is a key moment in the film, for it presents music as a thing to apprehend, part of the mise-en-scène, and then it brings the music forward. Music shifts from an element of cinema (in this case, conventional support for a travel sequence) to a subject of cinema (we are, in fact, watching a film about a rock band and their music).
“Wild Horses” plays: Once in the studio, the music swiftly becomes diegetic and then ends. Richards is profiled, close up. As he lights his cigarette, the music drops away and someone makes a semiaudible comment about the drums. Music has gone from a conventional overlay to a diegetic sound—from a conventional material of narrative cinema to a material object in the room caused by tape playback. This transdiegetic motion is brief, placing us in the studio with the sound as a part of mise-en-scène, the world seen in front of the camera.
What is more notable in this entire sequence is how the shots and the cuts then direct us from semantic listening (traveling) to causal meaning (music coming through speakers from magnetic tape) to reduced listening (an engagement with the music). Hearing people discuss the recording places the audience in the mindset of listening to details of the recording. Surely the engineer and the band members have been listening to the performance over and over on tape playback. Jagger belts out a comical, “Ye got tee mooove,” before swigging from a bottle of whiskey, perhaps reacting to hearing his own stylized voice so many times. As he swigs, the sound of tape rewinding (or fast-forwarding) brings us back to the source. The cause of the noise is the preparation to all to listen. With the high-fidelity recording occluding any diegetic sounds, a G chord comes directly out of the screen. On the sixteenth note before beat three, the film cuts to a frontal shot of Charlie Watts, eyes closed as if to say, “Listen.”
Direct address is a distinct and powerful space in cinema, usually reserved for an omniscient narrator. The so-called voice-of-God speaks to the audience, exists outside the time of the narrative, and displaces the images to a more distant place. There are implications to the music’s existence within this space. With all diegetic sound attenuated, the music is primary. Pans, zooms, faces, and gestures mostly support our attention to the music as we listen reductively.
At the end of a melody of guitar harmonics, Zwerin cuts to a close-up of Jagger listening. This take is long. In her essay on cinematic timing, Susan Feagin suggests that while rapid cutting can create feelings of excitement, the long take can open up an opportunity for thinking. She quotes the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch explaining why long takes are often rare: Most films, “don’t trust the audience, cutting to a new shot every six or seven seconds” (in Feagin 1999: 175). The average shot length in Gimme Shelter is 9.8 seconds. This particular shot of Jagger lasts twenty-nine seconds: on Jagger for twenty and then on Mick Taylor for the other nine. Taylor’s face is framed like a painting, darkness around his face. This long take does open up what Feagin calls “cognitive freedom” (1999: 179), but the images presented within the long take do direct our attention. The long take encourages us to listen by reducing the cuts and framing people listening. Put differently, the edit doesn’t distract from listening to the music itself and the shots of people listening suggest that we too should be listening. During the direct address of “Wild Horses,” Zwerin includes only three shots, the last one being a surprisingly long 128 seconds.
Once the last shot of the sequence starts, Zwerin hands off the structuring. Placing no cuts, she allows Maysles’s sequence shot to structure our experience. A sequence shot “cuts” within the frame with camera movement. The uncut single shot makes connections through pans, tilts, and zooms.
At this point, we don’t rely on sound for sense of real time. Instead, the visuals keep real time. Michel Chion suggests that generally images give us a sense of space and sound gives us the sense of time—temporal continuity or temporal rupture (1994: 13–14). But there are significant moments of just listening that include images of listening to the music in real time—again, inverting the traditional editing technique of using music to inform images. The cinematography draws our attention to elements of the music—not unlike how we may point, make a facial expression, or tap in the air when playing a recording of music for someone.
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