messy practice. While filmmakers do plan, they also have to be responsive to changing situations. The material in the editing room is disorganized and editing becomes a way of thinking through the material. Similar to Pennebaker, Jill Godmilow stressed to me the pragmatic responsiveness that editing requires:
The secret of editing is that when you see it, you go, “Yeah, keep that!” That’s, in some way, the whole process, if it’s not scripted. There are documentaries that are made from scripts, and network television, stuff like that. But you find the film by throwing it all up in the air and seeing how it falls down. You go, “Oh, something happens there,” and “Let’s keep that,” and you solve other problems around it. It’s a lot of problem solving, but a lot of it, I think, has to do with recognition when you’re editing, of “That’s where that should be,” and “That’s how long it should be.”
Editing is an important place to investigate the theorizing of film, since it is in the editing room that many documentary filmmakers find their film—where they find their arguments about their subjects. This process should be familiar to ethnomusicologists’ own work—production is like fieldwork, and postproduction is like analysis.
Overview: The Films and the Chapters
The book is split up into five chapters. Each of the chapters focuses on one particular film, going in depth and providing some of the backstories for each. These five films are my examples of cinema that can be usefully interpreted as ethnomusicological documents, ones that parallel the concerns found in ethnomusicology but demonstrate their understanding cinematically. Each chapter extrapolates the implicit arguments of the film into the explicit theories of ethnomusicology. In a sense, the chapters are an act of translation from cinema to print. But I leave the method of translation transparent, explaining how the elements of cinema (for instance, shots, cuts, sound, sequence structure, lighting, and narrative) can produce an understanding of music and its relation to social issues. While the arguments in each chapter are independent from one another, they reveal a range of ways that cinema can understand music. Surveys of cinema often cite too many films to be useful to those not steeped in film history. Long lists of important films remain unwatched, while a general argument about film history or method stands. Deep focus on a small number of films accomplishes a couple of things. First, it allows room to discuss the usefulness of specific cinematic techniques, tying the technical aspects to the rhetorical value. Each film develops its own grammar of cinema that produces experiences among audiences. Second, focusing on a single film provides a sustained conversation with the directors—and in some cases, with the musicians—about the particularities of the film.
The five films I have selected share certain qualities. They are all directed by independent filmmakers. Many of these films aim to disturb conventions, aware of how media and ideologies are linked. They all share certain features of modernism: sustaining multiple viewpoints, ambiguity, dense allusions, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. The films all address the inescapable limitations of our view, revealing a complexity of events instead of reducing them. They emphasize the process of perception and knowing. In this way, these films differ from most scholarly texts. They eschew sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentations of reality.
In addition, these films all involve what William Rothman calls “co-conspiracy,” aligned goals and arguments between filmmaker and musician subjects. The relationships between the filmed and the filmmaker contribute to a variety of interesting alignments between cinema and music, transpositions of musical phenomena to film. These films, to varying degrees, borrow musical strategies, rhetoric, and political critiques as well as extend musical practices into an audiovisual document of collaboration and inquiry.
Thus, there are three interwoven modes of writing that run through each chapter: the interviews with the directors as testimony of their processes of understanding through filmmaking, the description of the film as a way of focusing on important cinematic strategies, and my analysis of the films as ethnomusicological documents. Shifting between these three modes of inquiry into the films offers a variety of perspectives on these five exemplary films about music’s relationship to social and cultural phenomena.
Chapter 1 examines the film Gimme Shelter (1970) by Albert and David Maysles. The film documents the Rolling Stones on tour, culminating in the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival in which eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death on film.
The Maysles brothers are some of the most renowned figures in American documentary cinema and early pioneers of direct cinema, a method of filmmaking with the goal of liberating truth from the manipulative conventions of cinema and journalism. Rather than asserting a narrative to explain a situation, practitioners of direct cinema let the crisis itself direct the cameras and structure the film.3
Much has been written on this film, in part because of the centrality of Albert Maysles in American documentary cinema, in part because of the popularity of the Rolling Stones, and in part because of the documentation of the stabbing. Many view the film as representing the death of 1960s counterculture.
I am primarily interested in the ways in which the sound of the film contributes to meaning and the perspectives the film offers on music. I argue that the film reveals music as being many different things—a commodity, a means of congregation, and autonomous art. The film does not explain these different manifestations. Rather, it puts its listening and viewing audience in different relationships to sound.4
Chapter 2 situates Jill Godmilow’s Antonia: Portrait of the Woman (1974) within second-wave feminist filmmaking. Along with her contemporaries, Godmilow questioned the truth claims of direct cinema. Godmilow doesn’t hover with a camera until someone speaks. Instead, she draws a story out of pioneer female symphony conductor Antonia Brico. The interview has become such a stock technique of contemporary documentary. But for Godmilow, it was a radical way of presenting untold stories—ones that were so often buried under the noise of patriarchy. The film is structured around an interview with Brico that does more than create a textual narrative. The film offers feelings of Brico’s relationship to her story and—in moments—forces audiences to consider their relationship to Brico’s story. I bring together Laura Mulvey’s influential identification of the “male gaze” and Tim Rice’s theory of musical meaning to suggest that music and image can create certain musical vicarities, subject positions that emerge from our relationships to how music is meaningful in different situations.
Godmilow’s film also provides a powerful feminist critique of the orchestra. The film certainly resonated beyond female conductors. The orchestra represented a complex structure of patriarchy, especially for women who were beginning to articulate ways in which women face challenges entering the workplace. But as a film about gender and orchestras, Antonia is a carefully constructed analysis of the social nature of orchestral performance.5
Chapter 3 picks up on postrealism as introduced at the end of chapter 2 by examining Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America (1985). Clarke uses techniques that reveal meaning-making conventions of documentary that productively obscure a biographical narrative of Ornette Coleman, a jazz musician associated with free jazz. The film centers on the performance of Coleman’s orchestral work Skies of America during the opening of Caravan of Dreams, an avant-garde arts center in Fort Worth, Texas. Clarke passed away in 1997, so I draw primarily from her archive at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to present the backstory of her work-for-hire. The multiple agendas of producers and filmmaker provide a way of looking at the film as a site of struggle over the symbolic meaning of a musician in a neoliberal age. The film manages to reveal the ways in which Coleman is constructed as a representative of success in a free
