We watch carefully because of the slowed motion. We feel the musical idea of sympathetic proprioception. We sense the feelings of other bodies, in this case, the musical events through Jagger’s body. What’s more, Zwerin uses superimposition and crossfades to deemphasize visual cuts that might compete with the musical events she shows us. Chion argues that while visual cuts are generally clear—we can easily count the number of cuts in a film—aural cuts are generally masked. We rely on sound for temporal continuity when viewing a discontinuous series of shots (1994: 40–41). Chion suggests that we have a better understanding of sound in film when looking for sound events, markers of significance within a representation of time: a dog barks, a door slams, thunder claps. Carry that analytic method to music on film and we may see music as a series of musical events that compete with visual cuts. Superimposition and crossfades draw less attention to visual disturbances and let us watch (and feel) the musical events.
1.2. Head position matching chord changes and shoulder motion matching plagal cadence.
Description of the Significant Transdiegetic Shift
The most radical moment in the “Love in Vain” sequence is a cut to Jagger looking right, motionless. The lyrics sound over the image, “The blue light was my baby …” Then, a red filter is taken off the image as the guitar shifts to a vi chord (the E minor substituting for the C major) on beat ten of the twelve-bar blues. It somehow fits the music. The image is the same, but the color is different. The E minor differs from the C major by only one note—the B, which moves to a C for the second half of the bar. The color gesture precedes the harmonic shift. The lyrics continue, “The red light was my mind.” At this point, the camera zooms out and pans around what appears to be the control room of a recording studio. We experience the shift of place after it happens. Our attentiveness to the music, heightened by the slow-motion musicological synchresis, holds although we are now in real space, in real time, in real light. Why isn’t anyone moving? As the camera continues to pan, Richards is revealed to be lying on the floor. A studio monitor beside him, he taps in time with the music. As you look at Richards and Jagger, you might suddenly think: “They’re actually hearing what I hear!” While the transition was smooth, the realization of being in another relation to the music is surprising.
The jarring effect that this transition has is partly due to a shift in temporality. Since the song started and the slow-motion images jettisoned objective realism, our sense of temporality is rooted in the rhythm of the song. Now, objective temporality returns, forcing itself upon us. The experience of music moving from a contemplative form to a sound object in a real space involves what some describe as transdiegetic sound (see Taylor 2007; Jørgensen 2007; Cecchi 2010). Robynn Stilwell calls this space the “fantastical gap,” suggesting that there is an unstable space between two ways in which sound relates to an image.
When we are talking about movement through the gap between diegetic and non-diegetic, that trajectory takes on grand narrative and experiential import. These moments do not take place randomly; they are important moments of revelation, of symbolism, and of emotional engagement within the film and without. The movies have taught us how to construct our phenomenological geography, and when we are set adrift, we are not only uneasy, we are open to being guided in any number of directions. It is the multiplicity of possibilities that make the gap both observable and fantastical—fantastical because it changes the state, not only of the filmic moment, but also of the observer’s relationship to it. (2007: 200)
Perhaps a term that describes the experience of motion rather than the ontological designation of transdiegetic space is “diegetic slide.” As the song shifts from the direct address to a sound emanating from a loudspeaker, we can review the footage and mark the cut in which the images shift. We can mark the moment that the red filter is removed. We can mark the moment when Richards nods his head or when the camera pans to the studio monitor. Our experience of temporality and space, however, is in motion throughout; and, as Stilwell observes, this marks a significant moment.
To me, the significance is one of music’s ability to be both an object and a mental image. The diegetic slide reveals the point of contact between these two different experiences of music. This is representative of what Vogels identifies as the pragmatic modernism that runs throughout the Maysleses’ work (2005: 83)—although Vogels does not consider the ways in which music contributes to that sensibility. Sensing music as two different things (in two different states) as well as the connection between those states demonstrates William James’s notion of pragmatic truth. James understands truth not to be the rationalist’s “idea” or the empiricist’s “thing.” Rather, truth encompasses the “conjunctive relations” between ideas and things (James 2000: 317–18).
What is true about music is not that it is reducible to pure harmony, illustrated by musicological synchresis, or not that it is a material sound that exists in relation to magnetic tape, loudspeakers, and amplifiers. What is true about music is that our experiences of it shift. Harry Berger investigates this phenomenon with his suggestion that our “stance” on music is inherently part of our apprehension of music. Berger’s phenomenological notion takes as inseparable a musical object and the conditions of our apprehension of it. “If intentionality refers to the engagement of the subject with her object, then stance is the affective, stylistic, or valual quality of that engagement. Stance is the manner in which the person grapples with a text, performance, practice, or item of expressive culture to bring it into experience” (2009: 21). Music has no concrete meaning. It is therefore open to our experiences; and, as Berger argues, our stance on music constitutes our apprehension of music.
Over one hundred years separate James’s and Berger’s observations, but, as Bruce Elder points out, an interest in experience is a strong current in American thought. This interest is evident in the great many modernist works that pose problems of whether representation is one of perception or of objective reality. “This is a very broad and important current in American arts and letters, and it helps account for the appeal that film had to American arts. For the contents of film equally seem to hover between the status of an object and the status of a mental image” (Elder 2001: 149).
There are levels of this vacillation between music as a thing and music as a mental image throughout Gimme Shelter, but they are most apparent in the two studio sequences. Music provides a strong blur between object and mental image. In the “Love in Vain” sequence, sound is a mental image during the slow-motion images of Jagger as the song plays non-diegetically (or perhaps semidiegetically). The vacillation produces what Elder defines as a “neutral monist conception of reality,” that is: there is no subject-object division; the material of experience is composed of the same “thing.” This reality removes the barrier between human consciousness and nature, a theme that goes back to the American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
Realism in Rolling Stones’ Music Prepares for Diegetic Sliding
Part of the reason that Zwerin’s music-placement strategies work is because of a type of musical realism in the Stones’ music itself. But what is realism in music? John D. Wells finds realism in the lyrics of Robert Johnson and the Rolling Stones, suggesting that, lyrically, the Stones have a debt to blues portrayals of basic human problems (1989: 161). Carl Dahlhaus notes that realism in music existed on the fringes of romantic music in the nineteenth century, developed from the emergence of expression in the eighteenth century (1985: 12, 23). As he points out, however, the idea that music represents reality is fraught with the problem of “a concept of reality which was itself open to question and undermined by epistemological doubt” (25). This more fundamental problem of realism is solved not by a better understanding of what reality is, but rather by what reality sounds like. Recorded music, like film, can be produced to sound like a live performance in a real space (what I call realist) or as a collection of disparate sounds in an ill-defined