Considering film and print, anthropologist Peter Ian Crawford distinguishes authorial goals: “Whereas film predominantly, or at least ideally, exhibits sensuous capacities, the written text, especially that of academia, is characterized by its intelligibility. Referring to hermeneutics, one would say that film tends to communicate an understanding, whereas the written text procures some sort of explanation” (1992: 70). Crawford’s distinction harkens back to the notion of experiential filmic worlds that began with pioneer documentarian Dziga Vertov’s manifesto, “My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world” (Vertov in Barbash and Taylor 1997: 120). Understanding film involves a sensuous yet critical perspective that is not limited by intelligible explanation. Crawford understands these as distinct modes: “the perspicuous mode and the experiential mode respectively, indicating that the former tends to emphasize clarity whereas the latter conveys to the audience an understanding open to interpretation” (1992: 75).
Films that operate more in the experiential mode take advantage of the experience of both image and sound. In contrast, the perspicuous mode often attenuates the effect of provocative images. As Nathaniel Dorsky argues, “the syntax of the television-style documentary film, like that of the evening news, often turns the visual vitality of the world into mere wallpaper in support of spoken information” (2005: 29). Essay films map onto writing modes more clearly. The gaps between film and print become wider when writing about observational, experimental, realist, and reflexive films.
Given these differences between writing and cinema, I’ve chosen to write about the music alongside analysis of the films. Setting my writing about ethnomusicological issues—experiences of music, music and gender, entanglements with music and capital, music as a form of labor, and commodification of music, to name a few in this book—reveals how ethnomusicological writing might differ from ethnomusicological cinema. These two modes of understanding music complement each other. Reading a chapter and watching the film should reveal modal gaps and bridges across a terrain of provocative issues in music.
As for the relationship between cinema and music, I use two methods: analysis and interview. To put it simply, I examined the elements of film and music and I spoke to the filmmakers about their process of understanding music through making their films. A challenge in this approach is that the film shifts between the status of being primary (the thing to be studied) and secondary (the thing that studies). In other words, we can examine the films themselves as collections of data (for example, shots, cuts, sounds, text) or examine the films as offering an argument about its data (music and musical practice). Doing both allows for questioning the unique arguments about music that can be approached through film and answering by describing cinematic techniques in granular detail.
One caveat: The filmmakers interviewed should not be understood as the authorities on the meaning of their films, but they can be important informants on the filmmaking process—on the planning, shooting, and editing of the film. What the films accomplish isn’t always what the directors aim to accomplish. The directors make films. The films make arguments. In film studies, the turn from auteur theory has generally left the voice of the director out of scholarship—his or her worldview or creative vision was no longer considered to be the primary factor of film. The directors’ voices have moved to the trade press in the form of behind-the-scenes peeks into making films or words of wisdom about filmmaking. In a similar vein, all of the filmmakers featured in this book value the openness of their works. When speaking about Dont Look Back, Pennebaker has said that his film “belongs as much to anybody watching it as it does to me, and that’s its strength I think” (in Kubernik 2006: 14). While these films vary in their degree of openness, they are nonetheless meticulously constructed using what William Rothman terms “revelatory” versus “assertive” modes of argument (1997: 156) or what Bill Nichols calls “perspective” versus “commentary” forms of argument (1991: 118–25). Analysis of these films as ethnomusicological arguments presents my view, one rigorous reading of the film. This shared sentiment among all those I interviewed for the book helps qualify my interviews. My own exegesis on the films themselves can productively coexist with the testimony of the filmmakers about their process.
I hoped to learn from the filmmakers about their process of understanding music. To do so, I conducted interviews with the directors and, in some cases, the musicians. (See Appendix B, “Cited Interviews and Archival Research.”) The existing interviews with these directors—some of which I draw from—don’t offer many perspectives on music. Often, they focus on the band and notable stories about making the film or offer a general perspective on filmmaking. In ethnomusicology, the interview is a central research tool. For me, the interviews were an opportunity to discuss the directors’ films and how they came to understand the nature and role of music while planning, shooting, and editing their films. My interviews with the directors helped me learn more about their questions, their methods, and their developing understanding of their subjects.
Much of the practice of filmmaking rests on habits and developed reflexes. I could not simply ask about reasons for each shot and each cut. Jem Cohen likened shooting music to going into a trance. When I asked D. A. Pennebaker about certain shooting strategies, he responded, “There are no rules about that. You do what’s seems right. You’re just like [the musicians]. You’re just playing music.” So, just like ethnomusicology, much of my job was trying to understand ingrained practices of shooting and editing. Documentary film, more so than narrative film, is a messy practice. While filmmakers do plan, they also have to be responsive to changing situations. The material in the editing room is disorganized and editing becomes a way of thinking through the material. Similar to Pennebaker, Jill Godmilow stressed to me the pragmatic responsiveness that editing requires:
The secret of editing is that when you see it, you go, “Yeah, keep that!” That’s, in some way, the whole process, if it’s not scripted. There are documentaries that are made from scripts, and network television, stuff like that. But you find the film by throwing it all up in the air and seeing how it falls down. You go, “Oh, something happens there,” and “Let’s keep that,” and you solve other problems around it. It’s a lot of problem solving, but a lot of it, I think, has to do with recognition when you’re editing, of “That’s where that should be,” and “That’s how long it should be.”
Editing is an important place to investigate the theorizing of film, since it is in the editing room that many documentary filmmakers find their film—where they find their arguments about their subjects. This process should be familiar to ethnomusicologists’ own work—production is like fieldwork, and postproduction is like analysis.
Overview: The Films and the Chapters
The book is split up into five chapters. Each of the chapters focuses on one particular film, going in depth and providing some of the backstories for each. These five films are my examples of cinema that can be usefully interpreted as ethnomusicological documents, ones that parallel the concerns found in ethnomusicology but demonstrate their understanding cinematically. Each chapter extrapolates the implicit arguments of the film into the explicit theories of ethnomusicology. In a sense, the chapters are an act of translation from cinema to print. But I leave the method of translation transparent, explaining how the elements of cinema (for instance, shots, cuts, sound, sequence structure, lighting, and narrative) can produce an understanding of music and its relation to social issues. While the arguments in each chapter are independent from one another, they reveal a range of ways that cinema can understand music. Surveys of cinema often cite too many films to be useful to those not steeped in film history. Long lists of important films remain unwatched, while a general argument about film history or method stands. Deep focus on a small number of films accomplishes a couple of things. First, it allows room to discuss the usefulness of specific cinematic techniques, tying the technical aspects to the rhetorical value. Each film develops its own grammar of cinema that produces experiences among audiences. Second, focusing on a single