Thanks to all of you.
AMERICAN MUSIC DOCUMENTARY
INTRODUCTION
“You can’t do research but you can make a documentary film.” This is essentially what I was told by the California Department of Corrections in 2004. I had been trying to gain access to an institution that was notorious for denying access to researchers. And yet, I had a deep curiosity about the contemporary musical practices of prisoners. Prison has an older history as a site of folkloric and ethnomusicological research, and I knew that prisoners were forming bands, securing and maintaining instruments, teaching each other to play, and writing songs. I wondered how their experiences of incarceration and music interrelated, how the experience of creating music behind bars differed from doing so on the outside, and how it fit into the relationships among prisoners and between inmates and the administration. I had been able to address these questions only by entering Soledad Prison (i.e., Soledad Correctional Training Facility) as a visitor. I couldn’t even bring a pen.
In 2003, the prison suffered a round of budget cuts. The department that approved research was hit hard, and when I approached the prison later that year I was told that it was unlikely that anyone could even look at a proposal. They told me I could, however, bring in a camera and make a film, for even as the evaluation of research requests ground to a halt, the media department remained well staffed. And, officially, a documentary film did not count as research. While I was glad I was able to find a way into the prison via my camera, I have come to disagree with their claim that film is not research.
Throughout this book, I hope to argue that filmmaking can be a process of understanding music and that a film can be a way of expressing that understanding. In fact, this practice has existed outside the discipline of ethnomusicology for decades. Documentary filmmakers have developed methods to question, problematize, and present arguments about music and its role in the world. This is the disciplinary territory of ethnomusicologists—those who study music and its relation to the social world. But, as many have pointed out, ethnomusicologists work in print. Film offers different ways of asking questions and thinking critically about music—through framing a shot, making an editing decision on where to cut a shot, placing music in relation to an image, or offering a sense of space and time. Each act of making a film can be part of a filmmaker’s discovery of music. With this understanding, in examining film’s role in ethnomusicological research, it is not enough to simply ask how film is different from print. It’s important to ask how filmmakers have developed their practices of making films about music. I began thinking about these practices when making films myself.
When I was granted permission to bring a camera into the prison, I decided that I should study documentary filmmaking. At UCLA, I found Marina Goldovskaya, a Russian-born cinematographer and director who taught film at the university. Many of her films ask questions about the complexity of life after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her films are more than just images of real life; the images pointed to important issues in their own carefully constructed ways. Studying with Goldovskaya opened me up to like-minded filmmakers. I was able to meet people like Les Blank, Ross McElwee, and Joe Berlinger. More importantly, I sat through screenings and discussions of films—discussions that seemed strange for someone coming from the world of ethnomusicology. They seemed technical, focusing on narrative, camera pans, and dissolves, for instance. It seemed the equivalent of reading a text and then discussing punctuation, verb tense, and font types—not part of an intellectual conversation.
Over the course of Goldovskaya’s class, I was able to produce a short film on music in a California prison that made it to a few festivals and community screenings. I also worked with her on a qualifying exam on music documentaries for my PhD. Our sustained conversation during this time began to close the gap between ethnomusicology and documentary film. As a result, I became an advocate for making scholarly films about music, further inspired by my UCLA professors Tim Rice and Helen Rees, who later studied with Goldovskaya. Soon ethnomusicology graduate students became fixtures in Goldovskaya’s class, and I took jobs with faculty members, helping them to produce their own films. I edited Ankica Petrovic’s John Filcich: Life in the Circle Dance (2008) and Tony Seeger’s The Mouse Ceremony (2015), which gave me practical experience at turning scholarship into film. Shooting Helen Rees’s short film on Bell Young and the guqin (seven-sting zither) gave me perspective on production. For me—and for some of the ethnomusicologists I knew—film became an increasingly viable scholarly medium, despite its relative absence from conferences and publications.
Once I began teaching at Georgetown University, I turned the work I had done with Goldovskaya into a class that I have taught for the last seven years. During that time, I embarked on a larger project—a feature-length documentary on music in three Louisiana prisons—that has screened dozens of times internationally. My perspective on this book comes from my relationship with filming music and learning how to watch films critically. It also comes from a series of interviews conducted with the filmmakers featured in these pages. Talking to them about their practice has helped me understand film in a more profound way. We discussed how the eye engages with the image, what audiences do during screening, visual metaphors of sound, the temporal disruption of a cut. The analytic discussions led me to think about how film can take on the concerns of ethnomusicology—learning about how to think about and experience music through film and uncover important questions about music.
Not all music documentaries do this. More often, films about music focus on telling a particular story about a musical era or performer. Films like Ken Burns’s Jazz (2001), James Spooner’s Afropunk (2003), Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (2007), Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (2012), and Freddy Camalier’s Muscle Shoals (2013), for instance, offer captivating stories, but they limit film to being an explanatory text: using sound to tug at emotions and still images—gently moving from side to side—to offer historical veracity. These filmmakers conduct exhaustive interviews, often choosing stars who might draw the interest of fans. Editors stitch together their words to tell a particular story about music. But my work in film has revealed other possibilities.
This is not a “how-to” book, though I will introduce cinematic strategies that have value for ethnomusicology, developed in filmmaking circles outside the discipline. I hope it may encourage someone to pick up a camera and start thinking about music through the lens, through the edit, and through engaging people with film.
Films about Music
As I brought film to my scholarly practice, I looked for the filmography of my discipline. The lack of films surprised me, especially when reading through the methodological history of ethnomusicology. There is a discrepancy between the technological promise of film and the production rate of ethnomusicological films. In 1974 the filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch speculated: “I must mention the importance that sync filming will have in the field of ethnomusicology” (2003: 42). Researchers do use video. But decades after Rouch’s prediction, films are still not understood as doing cinematic theory. Video is mostly just a part of method (collecting and analyzing) and presentation (showing a clip at a conference or grabbing a still for print). Anthropologists have created the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, and ethnomusicologists have used film toward analytical ends. Only a few ethnomusicologists have produced films as part of their scholarly work. A good example of ethnomusicological film is Gerhard Kubik’s 1962 film of music in Northern Mozambique. Kubik recorded Mangwilo xylophone musicians on silent film and then visually transcribed the timing of upswings and downswings frame by frame. Film helped Kubik’s particular research problem, allowing him to correlate motor skills with acoustic patterns. Jean Rouch’s Batteries Dogon: Éléments pour une étude des rythmes (1966) presents a series of Dogon musicians playing parts of a complex drumming pattern on rocks and logs, bringing them together at the end in a dance supported by polyrhythmic drumming. The film offers a rhythmic analysis of complex rhythmic patterns. Steve Feld’s A