Further Reading
Three additional essays stand out as good models for considering the rhetorical constructions of music documentaries. Film scholar William Rothman’s analysis of D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back makes a strong case for considering film as theory (1997). Rothman introduces the notion that Pennebaker and his subject, Bob Dylan, co-conspire in making a claim that truth resides in plain pictures—an argument similar to Susan Sontag’s disavowal of any definitive interpretations of an artwork (1966). To support his claim, Rothman considers framing, camera angles, dialogue, cuts, music, and other elements of cinema. Cultural studies scholar Deidre Pribram (1993) writes about Alek Keshishian’s Madonna: Truth or Dare as a postmodern feminist text. Considering the juxtaposition of space, film grain, and documentary style, the essay makes a thorough consideration of how the film constructs and collapses distinctions in order to refute the promise of the pop star’s authentic self. Pribram squares Baudrillard’s theories of sexuality with the ways in which the film structures Madonna’s appearances. Matt Stahl’s chapter (2013) on Ondi Timoner’s Dig! reveals ways in which the cinematic narrative of musicians can valorize neoliberal ideals. Stahl shows how the film naturalizes The Dandy Warhols’s successful alignment with capital, while pathologizing Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The result is a symbolic tale of neoliberal subjectivity. Stahl’s writing adds information about the production of the film that helps frame the privileges that the filmmaker and The Dandy Warhols had, contrasting it with the kind of social support that Newcombe lacked. Chronicling the production history adds to his argument that the film is polemic, though the cinematic style appears to simply document “truth” and let audiences make up their minds.
All three of these works would be good companions to this book.
Watching the Films
Watch the films. Many texts on film theory tend to reference many films in one chapter. But watching dozens of films is a lot to ask. I’ve structured the book so that you can watch five films and think deeply about each one. Repeated viewing is important. Watch them a few times. The first viewing is an orientation. The second allows you to think about how it manipulates you. In the third viewing, you may anticipate cuts and motion. On the fourth, you may notice a general editing strategy. Watch sections of them while reading the book. To echo an earlier sentiment in this introduction: there is an intriguing gap between film and print. In the case of this book, the gap appears only when you have both the film and this book in your mind.
A Note on Writing Style
The book draws heavily on interviews I conducted with the filmmakers. Those voices form a layer of present-tense dialogue that runs through each chapter (except the one on Shirley Clarke). Quotes from those interviews have no in-text citations. You may refer to the back of the book for information on where and when those interviews took place. I add ellipses (…) to elisions in the interview. The equivalent of a cut in film, the ellipsis shows that I’m stitching together segments of conversations. A second level of citation comes from preexisting interviews and a third from scholarly references.
The analysis of music and film occasionally necessitates (what I think to be useful) jargon. When discussion of film gets into technical terms from film, it is likely that the term is in the glossary.
1 WHERE IS THE MUSIC? WHAT IS THE MUSIC?
Albert Maysles, Gimme Shelter (1970)
Before I began any formal interviews with Albert Maysles for this book, he visited my university to speak about his films. Despite feeling eager for lunch, I waited as students spoke with him after his lecture. One asked Maysles if they could have their picture taken together. As a friend held up the student’s camera phone, Maysles smiled and playfully directed the shot. “Closer! Come closer.” He told the photographer how important it is to get the faces. I recounted this story to him a few years later in his living room. Maysles responded, “Robert Capa was asked to give advice to a photographer, and he said, ‘Get close. Get close.’”
But there is a more personal reason behind Maysles’s interest in faces. It begins with his father. His father had a trumpet that he didn’t play, tucked away in the closet. His mother said his father used to play music with his brothers but stopped after one of them died.
“Even though my father couldn’t perform, he did put on music—classical music of one sort or another. That’s how I learned my love for music. Because as the music was playing, I was looking at my father for a change of expression.” Maysles says he absorbed the love of music his father felt, in part by paying close attention to his face.
Throughout Albert Maysles’s music films, there are powerful shots of people listening: The Beatles amused at hearing “I Saw Her Standing There” from a transistor radio, Vladimir Horowitz and his conductor carefully listening to a recording of their performances of Mozart’s Concerto No. 23, and two enraptured audience members behind Seiji Ozawa as he conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Maysles’s cinematography brought a new intimacy to documentary film in the 1960s.
This focus on faces is only one small aspect of a larger filmmaking philosophy. Albert and his brother, David, were some of the most notable documentarians of their time, pioneers of what is known as direct cinema. So, in 1969 when the Rolling Stones hired Albert and David Maysles, they said they wanted to have “the best” filmmakers document their tour. But “the best” came with a modernist philosophy of cinema, one engaged in an investigation of truth, plural experience, and epistemology that extends back to the early twentieth century. Over my three interviews with Albert Maysles about Gimme Shelter, I came to understand how his childhood experiences of watching people listen merged with the musical interests of codirector and editor Charlotte Zwerin. Many commentators on the film focus on the murder of an audience member, Meredith Hunter. I began to question the preoccupation with blame. The difficulty of assigning responsibility for the violence was, in fact, due to a constructed edit that sustains several perspectives on what music is—experienced through the many faces portrayed in the film.
Gimme Shelter is a type of cinema that offers an experience of complexity to the media-entertainment apparatus. The Rolling Stones 1969 US tour culminated in a public outcry over the death at Altamont. News headlines and public discussion followed the event and the later screening of the film. People wondered: Were the Rolling Stones to blame for the violence? Was the idealism of the “Summer of Love” over? Were rock fans turning into angry mobs? Was the music itself dangerous?
If we are to answer any of these pointed questions, I argue, the answer itself might reduce the inherent complexity of the historical event, the social role of music, and the relationships among people. Gimme Shelter sustains the complexity. It offers an unpredictable perspective that shifts across the entire apparatus of the tour—onstage, backstage, a planning room, a press conference, a recording studio, hotel rooms, and within the sprawl of an outdoor festival. As the focus shifts, we are pushed to think about the relationships among these places. We are encouraged to contemplate truth and spectacle. We are invited into the struggle over the nature of the medium of film and the nature of music. By the end of the film, we can see music itself to be as complex as the entertainment apparatus. Music is revealed to be an expression; a material commodity bound to mass spectacle; a conventional cinematic device; a formal arrangement of rhythm, harmony, and melody; and an environmental sound within an ecology of sounds. There is no single read of the film, no message to be deciphered. The film is slippery and open to multiple meanings. I primarily approach this film as a music scholar, asking questions about how music relates to a historical moment and to a tradition of critical thought.
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