Richards sitting on the couch, they are very much in the space and time of the room—the historical present. A stack of papers is behind them. They are clearly listening to what we hear in the time of the film. Mouthing the words, Richards is singing along and moving his head to the rhythm of the song. They both face the left of the frame. Generally, that head angle draws our attention to the relationships of people to their surroundings. We ask: “What do they see?” In this case, their glances are to the left but their eyes are closed, yet we still ask, “What are they seeing?” or perhaps, “What are they hearing?” A zoom amplifies Richards’s head movements and lip sync. At the same time, it reduces what we are able to see in the room and attenuates the sense of real time in the room. In a well-timed pan, Maysles reduces the sense of the room even more by shifting to Richards’s boot. The real time—represented by the images of space—cedes to the musical time of the song as the close-up of the boot keeps time with the music.
In our interview Maysles recalls the shot. He says that he and David were together in the studio, watching them listen.
“As I was on Keith’s face, my brother whispered, ‘Take a look at his boots!’ Again, with my left eye, I could see this strange piece of boot. At the right moment with the music, I moved to it.”
The camera movement and the motion of the boot emphasize the beat of the song. The historical present of being in the room slips away. At this moment in the sequence, primary attention is on the song itself.
“Ricky [Leacock] has described what we do as giving the viewer the feeling of being there. It’s quite a gift, especially if the cameraman has a good eye.”
The strategy of “being there” may be one of direct cinema’s primary truth claims, but few question where “there” is. In this long take, “there” is the musical world of the song. That “strange piece of boot” reduces our vision and makes musical time primary. Perhaps there is some symbolic “meaning” we get out of the boot, but its principal service is to animate the beat of the song. The motion of the boot becomes a tool for listening. A shift of the camera then takes the frame back to Watts, listening as the drums enter. A slight expression of approval and a head nod keeps us listening, perhaps wondering: “What’s it like for Watts to listen to himself?”
In general, film rarely encourages reduced listening. Rather, sound assists narrative by posing questions: “Where did that sound come from?” or “What are the implications of that droning cello?” In music documentaries, however, the music is often the subject. The film promises a more intimate understanding of the music—for instance, attaching it to geography or time or associating it with the character of the music-makers. While these approaches to music documentaries draw on the causal and semantic, film can also encourage an audience to listen reductively. Chion argues that reduced listening requires fixing sound to a medium (1994: 30). When we can listen over and over to the details of the sound, we can catalogue layers of formal features.
Maysles is no stranger to reduced listening—perhaps that’s another reason he films people listening. I ask him about early experiences with music.
“I always loved Mozart,” he says. “My brother—who was five years younger—I remember when he was a kid, I remember him saying several times, ‘Oh, Albie’s playing Mozart again!’ [Laughs] I would listen to it over and over.”
What is more telling than his interest in Mozart is his experience with repetition, playing something again and discovering something new. With no visual reference, focused listening to recorded music can accustom someone to listening reductively.
A film editor with a sensitivity to reduced listening will attach images to sound in ways that encourage listening to sound critically. The image serves a similar function to vocabulary. The medium of film and audiotape offer an opportunity to reduce listening by matching an image, presenting motion, or cutting with a strategic rhythm. In a sense, the visual image underscores or highlights certain sounds. Redundancy of sound and image focuses our ears. In the next section, I’ll show how the “Love in Vain” sequence matches image to sound in a more thorough, analytical way.
The “Wild Horses” sequence demonstrates that music can be part of an image in many ways. Asking the patently useless question, “What is music?” is actually useful here. Throughout Gimme Shelter, music is a subject of the film. It is also used as a psychological index of both the musicians and of the crowd. It is also, at times, the primary aspect of the film. Cinema frames our experience of music, momentarily framing out a majority of what music might be so that we can understand a sliver of what it is through direct experience. The “Wild Horses” sequence invites us to experience our shifting relationship to music in film.
The Red Light Was My Mind: Psychological and Anempathetic Music in the “Love in Vain” Sequence
Most of those working with Robert Drew considered nondiegetic music to be suspect (Ruoff 1993: 226). Music can do as much to alter a “plain picture” as voice-over narration. And yet, music is found in direct cinema films, of course especially in the many music documentaries made by Drew Associates alumni. I was keenly interested in how Maysles thought of using nondiegetic music, since it seems like a violation of direct cinema principles.
“If music is so manipulative, were you careful in how you used it and what songs you decided to put in?” I ask.
Maysles explains, “The music comes from itself. It’s not over the picture, not officially. With so many films, ‘Now we’ll do the music. We have our material.’ I don’t like to do that unless somehow there’s a piece [of] music that isn’t foreign, doesn’t have a foreign feel to it, it’s sort of a perfect part of what’s going on. When would there be music when you weren’t there?”
“I’m thinking of Gimme Shelter.” I specify. “There are two travel sequences. They end up in the studio with them listening to it but it feels like nondiegetic overlay.”
He smiles and says, “I think it works.”
As I continue to look at the sequence and consider Maysles’s response, I think about what it means for the music to “work.” The key is in the radically different ways that music is included and the attention we give the segues between those incorporations of music. As a result, music occupies these spaces without being manipulative because we can witness music enter and exit these spaces. Music changes character in the “Love in Vain” sequence but it does so differently than it does in the “Wild Horses” sequence. The position of music shifts within one song. The reduced listening is made through the edit rather than the cinematography; the sequence encourages shifting from reduced listening toward causal listening. As a result, our trajectory as a listener-viewer is one of beginning with attentive listening and ending with detached acknowledgment of music as an object of mediation. For cinema, the implication of this particular shift is an awareness that music works on us. Rather than eliminating manipulative music, the sequence allows us to keep an eye on the music as it moves from a mental apprehension of formal play to an anempathetic sound object. The sequence starts onstage in New York with Jagger addressing the audience. “We’re gonna do a slow blues for you now, people.” The first note of the song—a low G on the guitar—accompanies a cut to a medium close-up of the audience lit in red. Their motion bobbing up and down is in sync with the music even though they are in slow motion—about a quarter of normal speed.
Slow Motion Separates from Real
The different camera speed puts us in a space for attending to musical detail by slowing action. That experience is cognitive and emotional. In general, the slow motion helps focus on action, separating an action from the flow of events in time. Slow motion can bring clarity to reading scenes. In narrative cinema, a fight sequence may slow certain motions to
