Following a (mostly) failed attempt at psychedelia with their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones looked to create a new type of album. Under Miller’s direction, their postpsychedelic sound of the next three albums was more akin to hyperrealism. On Let It Bleed (1969), street noise blends with an acoustic version of “Country Honk,” drum sounds have exceptionally high fidelity, and the sound of Jagger’s voice reverberates in a way that puts it in consistent real space. The music seems “real” because it is crafted to sound real. The sound gives a sense of real space and real time, just as music might sound in various real performance settings.
To achieve this, Miller allowed more time for production and insisted on bigger budgets to craft the albums, a developing trend of the era. Instead of intensive use of the studio resulting in psychedelic tapestries of fantastic sound like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) or the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), Miller used the studio to craft realistic spaces. The sound of Mick Jagger’s voice bouncing off the wall in “Love in Vain” is as important as the melody. Symbolically, the black vocal choirs, Hammond organ, and hand-held percussion bring imagery of black churches from the American South. As a percussionist himself, Miller brought the percussion forward and gave the drums a wide stereo clarity that is now standard in rock—as if the listener is sitting behind the kit. The realism in the music of the Rolling Stones fits well with its association to image. It’s for this reason, at any point in Gimme Shelter, the music can slide between diegetic and nondiegetic spaces.
The Anempathetic and the Interiorized Held Together through Song Continuity
In the “Love in Vain” sequence, the relationship between music and image fundamentally changes. The song provides continuity, while space, time, gesture, and the audiovisual relationship change. As described, the beginning of the sequence uses images to support the structure of the music. The highly edited slow-motion images direct deep listening. With the shift to real space, the same music becomes a sound in the space of the room. After the diegetic slide, the only visual augmentation of the music is tapping of feet and nodding of heads. This tapping, along with a pan to the studio monitor, works strongly to create a realist aural and visual space of the studio—we see the space and hear what it sounds like. A long steady pan from Jagger to Richards on the floor and then back to the others in the room establishes both time and space. This is not a sequence shot like the one in “Wild Horses,” but a slow reveal of bodies in a room listening to music in real time. Notably, the people in the room do not gesture to reveal the music (as in the “Wild Horses” sequence); rather, they themselves are revealed as simply being people in a room. The way they are framed prevents the viewer from accessing their interiority, which, in effect, creates a separation between the people on-screen and the music itself. Jagger is in profile. Richards is looking up. The other three people have their hands or a still camera blocking their faces. Left without a psychological perspective, a space opens between the subjects and the audience.
Pulled out of reduced listening, we experience something similar to an anempathetic music—for example, a typical use in narrative cinema would be the sound of carnival music playing while a character is going through emotional trauma, the music powerfully not matching the experience of the character. Another example is that of a pathological villain committing a horrific act while gentle or happy music plays. Anempathetic scoring symbolizes a character’s disconnectedness or alienation to the world. The Rolling Stones and their entourage are motionless. The nature of the music changes to being simply a sound emanating from a studio speaker. It is now associated with the mise-en-scène and no longer supported by the musicological synchresis. A jarring effect of realization in the diegetic slide, we return to our own perspective, since we are now denied any cues from the bodies on-screen. In this case, anempathy occurs when we are diverted from a mental image of musicological attention.
The sequence is an assertion of how music is only partially knowable by forcing a shift of what music is. The greater truth about music that emerges from this sequence is that music has the capacity to change states. That truth is more important than designating music as a particular idea or object. In other words, the diegetic sliding reminds us that music has the capacity to shift from symbolizing something (ideational) to being something in itself (material).
An Open Defense
Forty-seven minutes into the film we encounter the most startling cut in the film. The break establishes new ideas and perspectives, delivering the audience to the Altamont Speedway. Several cinematic elements establish the second act of the film—one that involves foreboding attention to the crowd and their relationship to music.
In the cut itself, the image forcefully shifts from the band bidding goodbye to the crowd at Madison Square Garden to an aerial shot over the California desert. The hard cut of sound (stage noise to helicopter noise) emphasizes the cut. The transition is an invisible wipe—the camera follows Jagger until the dark behind the amplifiers passes in front of the camera. Used in classical cinema, the wipe across the screen offers the feeling of turning the page of a book. In Gimme Shelter, this invisible wipe breaks the film almost perfectly in half. The aerial shot establishes a new place. But it also changes the feeling.
The transition brings us from a stable space (the concert stage) to an unstable one (the view from the helicopter). Zwerin cuts to a point-of-view aerial shot in the moment of plummet. The helicopter is speeding toward the ground and then veers up to reveal an extraordinarily long line of parked cars on the road. A sense of inevitability comes with the single road that leads toward the Altamont Speedway, with the rapid motion felt in the aerial shot and with the initial foreshadowing that death will happen here.
The only continuity between shots is the Rolling Stones audience. They were in front of the stage in New York. They now walk from their cars toward what will be an infamous concert in California. This string of people seen from above is walking into history. The crowd is a prominent feature of this film. Its roaring sound begins the film. The band is constantly engaged with the audience. A great many of the shots of musical performances are of the audience. At Altamont, the crowd was notably large—roughly half the population of San Francisco at the time.
Rendering a crowd in film is challenging. Cinema is better suited for presenting individuals and small groups of people. How do you make a film about three hundred thousand people? There are a few strategies. In one, you can make the crowd a character. I discuss this with Maysles.
I tell him that one of the ways I read Gimme Shelter is that there was a dysfunctional relationship between the fans and the artists. You see that in a few moments when they start jumping up onstage and swiping at Mick Jagger.
Maysles starts to smile. “Oh yeah!”
“The audience is almost a character in that film,” I say.
“Yes. Yes!” Maysles replies.
Cinema can draw attention to almost anything to make it a character—or at least a significant force. In early documentary film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) pits protagonist Nanook against his antagonist, the Canadian landscape. In Gimme Shelter the crowd is an entity itself, perhaps hydra-headed. There is a sense of lack of control developed in the film. The portrayal of the audience connects to the comment heard earlier in the planning room sequence when one person says of hippie crowds and music festivals, “It’s like lemmings to the sea.” Following the actual event of the festival, the press presented the crowds this way, as if the unthinking mass was the antagonist to the idealism of the 1960s, an ideal represented by the music itself.
In fact, the concert at Altamont was a disaster. Media reports honed in on this; but they did so primarily by describing the audience. The day after the festival, a headline in the Berkeley Tribe proclaimed, “Stones Concert Ends It—America Now Up for Grabs” (Vogels 2005). Reviewers described drug use and violence in great detail, while neglecting the music. The Chicago Tribune recounts the apocalyptic lead-up to the concert: “The hordes of youths swarmed onto the barren hills beside a motorcycle racetrack for the concert”