I think that Vogels is looking more than he is listening. The sequence of the band listening to the playback of “Wild Horses” moves music from the background to the foreground through Zwerin’s minimal edit and through Albert Maysles’s cinematography.
The “Wild Horses” sequence puts us there—not “there” as in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but “there” as in the social space of listening. The setting introduces a feeling of scrutiny just as seeing a microscope, telescope, or other tool of investigation might. The camera augments attentiveness to the music. The sequence ends with a shot that lasts more than two minutes, starting with a close-up of Jagger and then artfully panning between close shots of band members listening to the playback. I will describe this in detail below and argue that it is one of the most memorable shots of the film because it encourages us to listen formally. We leave the sequence having listened to the music as sound in motion because of the copresence of the image—itself a combination of continuity editing and attentive cinematography. Before analyzing the sequence for how the film directs our listening, we should consider different modes of listening.
Modes of Listening
Michel Chion suggests that we shuttle between three primary listening modes in cinematic experience (1994: 25–34). Causal listening ferrets out the source of the sound. In this mode, sounds are indices for events and objects—the ticking of a clock, an explosion, for example. The sound of rewinding tape in the studio draws attention to the medium. Listening for the cause of the sound identifies the music as diegetic sound. The people in the room are clearly in the presence of the sound and the object producing that sound. Semantic listening renders sound into meaning. Listening to speech is a clear example of this. Much work in ethnomusicology attempts to draw connections between music and cultural meanings by positing that music is expressive culture, symbolizing nonmusical things.1 The details of the music often retreat as the representation of the song comes strongly into mind. As Chion points out, “semantic listening often ignores considerable differences in pronunciation (hence in sound) if they are not pertinent differences” (1994: 28). Reduced listening is akin to formal analysis—listening to the qualities of the sound itself. Chion borrows the term from the French composer Pierre Schaeffer (1994: 29). Schaeffer was a pioneer of musique concrète, a postwar musical effort of producing musical works from actual sounds collected on tape. Not surprisingly, Schaeffer was inspired by cinema—Jean Epstein’s work in particular. Attention to the details of the sound is an empirical endeavor, reducing the listening experience from its cause and its meaning. We may determine a pitch, a timbre, identify a rhythm or a repeated melodic figure. Much classic musicological analysis reduces sound to formal characteristics. Ethnomusicological studies often make use of formal analysis as part of a claim that musical style has a connection to social phenomena. Perhaps the clearest early articulation of this approach is John Blacking’s consideration of “humanly organized sound” and “soundly organized humanity” suggesting that there is interplay between aesthetic forms and social structures (1973).
As I will show next, the “Wild Horses” sequence moves between these three modes of listening.
Sign of Travel, Material Presence, Sound in Motion: The “Wild Horses” Sequence
Editor Charlotte Zwerin directs our ears as much as she does our eyes. It’s no surprise that she had a longstanding interest in music. As a child growing up in Detroit, Zwerin frequented “Big Band and a Movie” events downtown, during which a live band preceded a movie screening (Finn 2003). She married notable jazz trombonist and music author Mike Zwerin. Until her death in 2004, she continued to make music documentaries. Her filmography includes documentaries on Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Toru Takemitsu, Vladimir Horowitz, and Tommy Flanagan as well as films on visual artists Willem de Kooning, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Isamu Noguchi. The music documentarian Bruce Ricker praises Zwerin for her editing work with early direct cinema as well as for her sensitivity to music:
1.1. Structure of “Wild Horses” sequence.
Charlotte’s a pioneer of cinema verite … She’s in the tradition of directors who come out of editing, like Hal Ashby and Robert Parrish. She once said that her major influences are David Maysles and jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan. She gathers all the material and shapes it into a piece of work that’s musical in nature. She’s got a keen eye and she’s a great arranger, like Gil Evans working with Miles Davis. Also, she’s a very good listener, the key to making a good documentary. (In Peary 2003)
As will become obvious in my analysis of the scene, Zwerin’s edit makes us aware of listening. The sequence I will discuss is in three parts: a travel sequence, banter within the studio, and the playback of the song “Wild Horses.” Each of these segments uses visual techniques to encourage us to listen to music (figure 1.1).
Travel to studio: Before we enter the studio, Zwerin uses music as it is typically placed in a transition sequence. Nondiegetically, the song “You Gotta Move” offers flow and a temporality that takes the place of the disrupted temporality of the images. What ends up being an establishing sequence is a series of six shots that brings the band from the Holiday Inn to the Muscle Shoals recording studio.
Zwerin edits with an eye for visual continuity across the cut. (For example, it appears that the band walks through the hotel by keeping their direction the same between the first two shots.) But the musical continuity is perhaps more important. The audio was recorded at the studio during a break from the tour, repurposed as nondiegetic music. “You Gotta Move” is the only audio to be heard—typical of travel sequences in narrative film. The second segment of the sequence positions music in a different relation to the images.
Inside studio: Diegetic music can function as nondiegetic, scoring the scene. Zwerin and the Maysles stumbled upon the richness of finding music in the environment in Salesman, a documentary about a Bible salesman that they had made just before Gimme Shelter. In our conversation, Maysles describes how the found music was particularly useful: “The opening scene of Salesman, the camera is on Paul having a tough time selling the Bible to the point where he must be really feeling pretty low. This child who was sitting on this woman’s lap gets up and goes to the piano and plays something that is just sort of dropping off the way … it’s kind of a musical rendition of Paul’s feeling and performance. You could have Leonard Bernstein working his orchestra and using some of his music and it couldn’t have been better. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. And being played by a child made it all stronger.”
Finding the music in the shot was also finding that music could be two things at once. Music was part of the action and it also represented the psychological state of the main subject of the film. It offered two senses of the real: first, an event of real life in which a child (perhaps inappropriately) signals the end of a social interaction and, second, a serendipitous exteriorization of human feeling for film.
Gimme Shelter capitalizes on the ability of music to give different senses of the real. The “Wild Horses” sequence is a key moment in the film, for it presents music as a thing to apprehend, part of the mise-en-scène, and then it brings the music forward. Music shifts from an element of cinema (in this case, conventional support for a travel sequence) to a subject of cinema (we are, in fact, watching a film about a rock band and their music).
“Wild Horses” plays: Once in the studio, the music swiftly becomes diegetic and then ends. Richards is profiled, close up. As he lights his cigarette, the music drops away and someone makes a semiaudible comment about the drums. Music has gone from a conventional overlay to a diegetic sound—from a conventional material of narrative cinema to a material object in the room caused by tape playback. This transdiegetic motion is brief, placing us in the studio with the sound as a part of mise-en-scène, the world seen in front of the camera.
What is more notable in this entire sequence is how the