The critical arguments of the film are oblique, but reading the film within the context of its production provides an example of how reflexive film techniques can dismantle representation. Ornette is born from the logics of capital, though, in the end, it undermines those logics.
Clarke was one of a few American filmmakers inspired by the European city symphony genre of the 1920s—Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) being a classic of the genre. The city symphony melds artistic form and social commentary. These films aimed to create “realistic tributes to urban excitement” (Barsam 1992: 290). Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957) used jazz to score the city’s rhythm but instead created kaleidoscopic images from the city itself. Shirley Clarke’s alternative vision is that of a cross artistic perspective, blending visual arts with music, while staying attuned to urban social issues. Clarke was part of a prolific independent group of filmmakers in Greenwich Village along with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. Clarke’s Skyscraper (1959) was one of the last of the poetic documentary films made as attention to documentary went to direct cinema in the 1960s (Lev 2006: 273).
In Ornette: Made in America, Clarke takes the opportunity to cinematically render Coleman’s musical theory of harmolodics. The interrelatedness of art forms is a particularly modernist notion that Clarke and Coleman share. Looking at the film as a cineharmolodic work offers a new way of understanding Coleman’s inscrutable philosophy and provides a model of a film that demonstrates musical processes in place of explaining them.
Chapter 4 continues the focus on cinematic extension of musical concepts through an investigation of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Depeche Mode: 101 (1988). Pennebaker—who, like Albert Maysles, was a pioneer of direct cinema—is well known for his films on Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and other “classic rock” acts. Depeche Mode: 101 strays from the genre with an account of the 1980s British electropop band’s massive US tour. In addition to the band, Pennebaker and Hegedus include a busload of young fans who follow Depeche Mode from New York to California. I argue that the film dramatizes various types of estrangement in post-Fordist America. Pennebaker and Hegedus have often spoken about creating documentary films that draw from theater. That strategy, brought to the massive stage design of Depeche Mode concerts, makes the film very close to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—a union of the arts. The film draws on dramatic narrative, music, dance, poetry (lyrics), and light design in a way that rejects the rockist stance of preceding “classic” rock bands.
While neither Hegedus nor Pennebaker is a musicologist, they make decisions about shooting and editing performance in ways that make sense of the music. The chapter goes into the details of Hegedus’s visual analysis, drawing attention to visual alignments with musical elements—for example, tonal space, rhythmic structures, and arrangement—as well as nonmusical elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk. I conclude the chapter by looking at how the final concert in the film presents a festival of the commodity in which people use art to find meaningful space within capitalism.
Chapter 5 shows another side of popular music’s relation to post-Fordism in its examination of Instrument (1999), a collaborative film about the post-hardcore band Fugazi. The Washington, DC, band is perhaps antithetical to Depeche Mode in its relationship to mass culture. And yet, the two films share certain features—both place emphasis on showing the labor of the bands and subvert the image of the charismatic rock star. Instrument, however, takes a distinct strategy. The band notoriously opted out of promotionalism, which makes this film particularly interesting, since most music documentaries are promotional in nature. Director Jem Cohen filmed the group for ten years and collaborated with the band while editing. In the chapter, I examine two consequences of the collaboration: the strategies taken to avoid promotional rockumentary style and the cinematic rendering of Fugazi’s musical ideas. Like Shirley Clarke’s Ornette, Instrument transposes music to cinema. A bulk of the chapter identifies these musical and cinematic techniques, many of which come from dub reggae and involve fragmentation, temporal play, and surprise. The effect of the techniques as rendered cinematically offers what I call a wide chronoscape—a range of perspectives on temporality.
In addition, Instrument obliquely offers a way of thinking about rock audiences that contrasts with Pennebaker and Hegedus’s construction of “festival.” The diversity of audience members never congeals through fandom. Rather, they remain a crowd. I investigate this representation of audience as a parallel to Paolo Virno’s notion of the post-Fordist “multitude,” the many who understand themselves to be many. The representation of the crowd and the independent operations of Fugazi offer a way of envisioning a world in flux and consider how music and cinema produce related ways of thinking and feeling.
Each of these five films can be read in different ways. I take the opportunity to show how these can be read as ethnomusicological documents—films about music’s relationship to social issues. I also offer ways of analyzing the films as critical cinema. What emerges are many ways of thinking about how film can contribute to ethnomusicological arguments through shots, cuts, composition, musical placement, sound, dramatic narrative, interviews, and other elements. My hope is that my analysis of these films can model analysis of other films. I also hope that this work demonstrates that questions about music can be explored in ways other than text and that there is something unique to cinematic investigations of music. I don’t think that cinema could ever replace print media, but I believe that it is a resource for those who are interested in the study of music.
Films about music necessarily encourage listening. Sound plays a great role in music documentaries. And yet, sound has been underrepresented in film studies. Bringing an ethnomusicologist’s perspective, I am keenly interested in music’s relationship to the rest of the film, how music’s meaning is tied to the image and the people represented, and the significance of aural experiences. In many cases, I solve analytical problems by suggesting terminology specific to a sound-heavy film analysis.
Finally, a note to those who hope to make ethnomusicological films: Let’s not limit film to what we know how to do in print. Too often, scholarly films resemble read conference papers. They may contain carefully crafted arguments with rich audiovisual examples, but cinema can do more. These five films are but a few examples of how an ethnomusicologist might take advantage of the medium. My analysis can reveal strategies of creating cinematic arguments.
The three driving questions of the book are as follows.
What does a critical cinema of music look like? To answer this question, I chose films that are examples of how cinema can pry open issues that lie within the entanglement of music and social practice. These films each examine issues in their own way. Taken together, they can point toward cinematic methods of addressing ethnomusicological theory—the nature of music, how musical practice is gendered, media representation of musicians, the commodification of music, and relationships of music to temporality.
What are some of the constraints? No film is the sole work of any director. Rather, they are products of relationships that are guided, protected, and championed by directors who attach their names to them. Independent cinema has operated on the outskirts of the industry. Filmmaking is still expensive, and considering the funding of each film reveals some of the other interests of producers. Relationships between filmmakers and the musicians also present challenges of access.
What are some of the useful cinematic techniques? Analysis and interviews revealed a great number of theoretical strategies that may be useful when examining other films or when producing new music documentaries. I describe a great many of these techniques in order to claim a distinctly cinematic possibility of doing ciné-ethnomusicology. Some techniques are part of the recognized vocabulary of cinematography and a glossary in the back may help when I use technical terms. I propose new terminology for unrecognized techniques and hope that
