boundaries. The works most useful for my inquiry are scholarly analyses of single films, ones that employ a variety of scholarship to unpack the ways in which a single music documentary constructs cinematic arguments.
Methodology: Writing about Filmmaking about Music
Ethnomusicologists spend most of their efforts on writing about music. I am complicating things a bit by writing about filmmaking about music. These interrelated layers of practice are at the core of my interest and are important to distinguish. If we don’t understand how cinema differs from music, then our inquiry collapses back to two modes of analysis: writing about film or about music. One perspective is to look at writing, filmmaking, and musicking as three interrelated expressive forms. Moving from one mode to another involves an act of translation. There are limits and advantages to translation.
The musicologist Charles Seeger suggests that there are differences in literary and musical modalities and that, when addressing music, writing can fall short of expressing what music might be expressing. Seeger warns music scholars of the tendency for “linguo-centrism”—a dominant reliance on language—when studying music (1961). Understood as two different systems of communication, music and speech have an inherent distance between them. That distance, according to Seeger, must be acknowledged when studying music through language. Seeger’s point should not be confused with the saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture; rather, his advice is to mind the gap.
The distance between expressive modes might be productive. Considering the act of translation, Walter Benjamin suggests that the goal of translation lays bare the important gap between two languages. He argues that “real translation is transparent, it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (2007: 79). In Benjamin’s mystical view, language is imperfect. But through translation we might witness “pure language.” Benjamin’s task of the translator is to overcome the boundedness of language by becoming aware of gaps of meaning between two different languages. Similarly, Gayatri Spivak suggests that the “task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying” (1993: 181). For both Spivak and Benjamin, the task of the translator is discovery of new things that language cannot yet express. Translation can do more than bridge a gap; it can expose meaningful gaps—losses in translation. Spivak’s and Benjamin’s understandings of language translation are instructive when considering how each practice—writing, filmmaking, and musicmaking—relates to another in different ways.
Considering film and print, anthropologist Peter Ian Crawford distinguishes authorial goals: “Whereas film predominantly, or at least ideally, exhibits sensuous capacities, the written text, especially that of academia, is characterized by its intelligibility. Referring to hermeneutics, one would say that film tends to communicate an understanding, whereas the written text procures some sort of explanation” (1992: 70). Crawford’s distinction harkens back to the notion of experiential filmic worlds that began with pioneer documentarian Dziga Vertov’s manifesto, “My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world” (Vertov in Barbash and Taylor 1997: 120). Understanding film involves a sensuous yet critical perspective that is not limited by intelligible explanation. Crawford understands these as distinct modes: “the perspicuous mode and the experiential mode respectively, indicating that the former tends to emphasize clarity whereas the latter conveys to the audience an understanding open to interpretation” (1992: 75).
Films that operate more in the experiential mode take advantage of the experience of both image and sound. In contrast, the perspicuous mode often attenuates the effect of provocative images. As Nathaniel Dorsky argues, “the syntax of the television-style documentary film, like that of the evening news, often turns the visual vitality of the world into mere wallpaper in support of spoken information” (2005: 29). Essay films map onto writing modes more clearly. The gaps between film and print become wider when writing about observational, experimental, realist, and reflexive films.
Given these differences between writing and cinema, I’ve chosen to write about the music alongside analysis of the films. Setting my writing about ethnomusicological issues—experiences of music, music and gender, entanglements with music and capital, music as a form of labor, and commodification of music, to name a few in this book—reveals how ethnomusicological writing might differ from ethnomusicological cinema. These two modes of understanding music complement each other. Reading a chapter and watching the film should reveal modal gaps and bridges across a terrain of provocative issues in music.
As for the relationship between cinema and music, I use two methods: analysis and interview. To put it simply, I examined the elements of film and music and I spoke to the filmmakers about their process of understanding music through making their films. A challenge in this approach is that the film shifts between the status of being primary (the thing to be studied) and secondary (the thing that studies). In other words, we can examine the films themselves as collections of data (for example, shots, cuts, sounds, text) or examine the films as offering an argument about its data (music and musical practice). Doing both allows for questioning the unique arguments about music that can be approached through film and answering by describing cinematic techniques in granular detail.
One caveat: The filmmakers interviewed should not be understood as the authorities on the meaning of their films, but they can be important informants on the filmmaking process—on the planning, shooting, and editing of the film. What the films accomplish isn’t always what the directors aim to accomplish. The directors make films. The films make arguments. In film studies, the turn from auteur theory has generally left the voice of the director out of scholarship—his or her worldview or creative vision was no longer considered to be the primary factor of film. The directors’ voices have moved to the trade press in the form of behind-the-scenes peeks into making films or words of wisdom about filmmaking. In a similar vein, all of the filmmakers featured in this book value the openness of their works. When speaking about Dont Look Back, Pennebaker has said that his film “belongs as much to anybody watching it as it does to me, and that’s its strength I think” (in Kubernik 2006: 14). While these films vary in their degree of openness, they are nonetheless meticulously constructed using what William Rothman terms “revelatory” versus “assertive” modes of argument (1997: 156) or what Bill Nichols calls “perspective” versus “commentary” forms of argument (1991: 118–25). Analysis of these films as ethnomusicological arguments presents my view, one rigorous reading of the film. This shared sentiment among all those I interviewed for the book helps qualify my interviews. My own exegesis on the films themselves can productively coexist with the testimony of the filmmakers about their process.
I hoped to learn from the filmmakers about their process of understanding music. To do so, I conducted interviews with the directors and, in some cases, the musicians. (See Appendix B, “Cited Interviews and Archival Research.”) The existing interviews with these directors—some of which I draw from—don’t offer many perspectives on music. Often, they focus on the band and notable stories about making the film or offer a general perspective on filmmaking. In ethnomusicology, the interview is a central research tool. For me, the interviews were an opportunity to discuss the directors’ films and how they came to understand the nature and role of music while planning, shooting, and editing their films. My interviews with the directors helped me learn more about their questions, their methods, and their developing understanding of their subjects.
Much of the practice of filmmaking rests on habits and developed reflexes. I could not simply ask about reasons for each shot and each cut. Jem Cohen likened shooting music to going into a trance. When I asked D. A. Pennebaker about certain shooting strategies, he responded, “There are no rules about that. You do what’s seems right. You’re just like [the musicians]. You’re just playing music.” So, just like ethnomusicology, much of my job was trying to understand ingrained practices
