“If music is so manipulative, were you careful in how you used it and what songs you decided to put in?” I ask.
Maysles explains, “The music comes from itself. It’s not over the picture, not officially. With so many films, ‘Now we’ll do the music. We have our material.’ I don’t like to do that unless somehow there’s a piece [of] music that isn’t foreign, doesn’t have a foreign feel to it, it’s sort of a perfect part of what’s going on. When would there be music when you weren’t there?”
“I’m thinking of Gimme Shelter.” I specify. “There are two travel sequences. They end up in the studio with them listening to it but it feels like nondiegetic overlay.”
He smiles and says, “I think it works.”
As I continue to look at the sequence and consider Maysles’s response, I think about what it means for the music to “work.” The key is in the radically different ways that music is included and the attention we give the segues between those incorporations of music. As a result, music occupies these spaces without being manipulative because we can witness music enter and exit these spaces. Music changes character in the “Love in Vain” sequence but it does so differently than it does in the “Wild Horses” sequence. The position of music shifts within one song. The reduced listening is made through the edit rather than the cinematography; the sequence encourages shifting from reduced listening toward causal listening. As a result, our trajectory as a listener-viewer is one of beginning with attentive listening and ending with detached acknowledgment of music as an object of mediation. For cinema, the implication of this particular shift is an awareness that music works on us. Rather than eliminating manipulative music, the sequence allows us to keep an eye on the music as it moves from a mental apprehension of formal play to an anempathetic sound object. The sequence starts onstage in New York with Jagger addressing the audience. “We’re gonna do a slow blues for you now, people.” The first note of the song—a low G on the guitar—accompanies a cut to a medium close-up of the audience lit in red. Their motion bobbing up and down is in sync with the music even though they are in slow motion—about a quarter of normal speed.
Slow Motion Separates from Real
The different camera speed puts us in a space for attending to musical detail by slowing action. That experience is cognitive and emotional. In general, the slow motion helps focus on action, separating an action from the flow of events in time. Slow motion can bring clarity to reading scenes. In narrative cinema, a fight sequence may slow certain motions to heighten our awareness of the drama or physicality of the fight. Sports broadcasts employ slow motion to analyze a critical play. There is an expense to this cognitive effect. Slow motion erodes a type of realism. But rather than apprehending that scene as unreal, we often read slow motion for its psychological realism. In cinema, slow motion makes a moment seem significant by simulating our own significant experiences. We often remember impactful events as if they happened in slow motion. The classic example is a car crash. Our memory of such an unexpected, traumatic event can replay in our minds in slow motion even though the instance of the crash was brief. In what seems like slow motion, we recall a surprising amount of detail. In narrative cinema, slow motion brings us into a significant moment in a character’s life by imitating a psychological state—attenuating the objective world and allowing us to study the details of the event. Zwerin’s cut of “Love in Vain” repurposes a slowed version of Jagger’s performance gestures to draw our attention to the music. Slow motion pushes us out of the real space of the concert. We then enter a psycho-musical space and tend to musical form. As if to say, “watch this,” the initial shot pans across the audience and reveals a man looking through the viewfinder of his still camera. As is typical of point-of-view shots, the question of what he sees is answered by the cut. Jagger in slow motion invites audience scrutiny.
Edit Encourages Reductive Listening through Gesture
Why gestures? Gesture draws attention to moments in time unlike language does. As David McNeill argues, a fundamental difference between words and gestures is that the latter “are themselves multidimensional and present meaning complexes without undergoing segmentation or linearization. Gestures are global and synthetic and never hierarchical” (1992: 19). Language requires time to combine words into a whole structure. (It took you real time to assemble these very words into an idea.) McNeill describes: “In language, parts (the words) are combined to create a whole (a sentence); the direction thus is from part to whole. In gestures, in contrast, the direction is from whole to part. The whole determines the meanings of the parts” (1992: 19). Anyone who has tried to talk about music as it is playing knows that the syntax gets in the way of the music. The phrases that work are short and tend to point: “Here it comes!” “Listen!” “Wait for it …” McNeill suggests that, when paired with language, a variety of gestures can combine to create meaningful idea units: “synchronized speech and gestures where the meanings complement one another” (27). Ethnomusicologist Matt Rahaim extends McNeill’s concept to music, suggesting that gesture can similarly combine with music, forming interdependent pairs in North Indian Hindustani singing (2012: 7). His examples include a grabbing and pulling gesture accompanying an abrupt increase of loudness as well as a downward series of loops accompanying a terraced descending melody. Rahaim suggests that these gestures are powerful in musical performance because other bodies offer sympathetic ways of knowing (10). We feel the motion as we hear the sound. And corroborating McNeill’s suggestion that gesture is less systematized than language or that it is semicultural, Rahaim finds that gesture is both idiosyncratic and inherited through learning and practice (134). There is no one-to-one mapping of gesture to musical idea, though it is possible to make connections between kinesthesis and musical expression.
Zwerin cuts Jagger’s motion to create idea units that are both heard and felt. Chion develops the useful term “synchresis” to describe the forging together of an aural and visual event (1994: 63). In his example, the image of a human head being smashed and the sound of a watermelon being smashed form one inseparable syncretic event. Musicological synchresis, then, can be a useful way of understanding how visual elements combine with musical events to create a series of audiovisual experiences of music.
While McNeill argues that gestures are noncombinatoric (1992: 21), film can recombine gesture into parts, visual instances that align with an integral whole of sound. Here, Jagger’s motions combine with musical events in a slow twelve-bar blues in twelve-eight time. Zwerin is directing our attention with plenty of musicological synchresis. Figure 1.2 shows connections between the music and the images of Jagger. The first shot of Jagger synchronizes his head movement with an alternation of V and I chords. As illustrated in the figure, a sagittal shot accompanies the V chord and a frontal shot accompanies the I. The direction of Jagger’s face mirrors the feeling of leaving and returning to the tonic. There are three occasions in which Zwerin places an image of Jagger raising either his shoulders or his body on a IV chord and lowering them on the I chord. In these cases, the shoulders iconically match the plagal cadence of a C major chord resolving to a G major chord.
In the twelfth bar, Jagger raises his hands to prepare a stroke for the next beat. Analyzing gesture and speech, McNeill identifies the preparation, stroke, and retraction. “The stroke of the gesture precedes or ends at, but at least does not follow, the phonological peak syllable of speech” (1992: 26). In a similar fashion, Zwerin places Jagger’s gestures in a way that the gesture lands on a musical event. On the first beat of the next chorus, Jagger’s hands drop along with a superimposition of him in close-up while the sound of the band joins. A prominent electric guitar slide coincides with the abrupt beginning of image superimposition. The sideways motion of the two overlaid images of Jagger also matches the semitone slide of the guitar. (Note the amount of time it took to read this textual description of about two seconds of film. Gesture can keep up with the temporality of music.) The superimpositions often occur with instruments becoming prominent in the mix, drawing attention to the arrangement. Slides of the guitar often accompany Jagger’s horizontal motion across the screen. Repetition