The five films I have selected share certain qualities. They are all directed by independent filmmakers. Many of these films aim to disturb conventions, aware of how media and ideologies are linked. They all share certain features of modernism: sustaining multiple viewpoints, ambiguity, dense allusions, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. The films all address the inescapable limitations of our view, revealing a complexity of events instead of reducing them. They emphasize the process of perception and knowing. In this way, these films differ from most scholarly texts. They eschew sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentations of reality.
In addition, these films all involve what William Rothman calls “co-conspiracy,” aligned goals and arguments between filmmaker and musician subjects. The relationships between the filmed and the filmmaker contribute to a variety of interesting alignments between cinema and music, transpositions of musical phenomena to film. These films, to varying degrees, borrow musical strategies, rhetoric, and political critiques as well as extend musical practices into an audiovisual document of collaboration and inquiry.
Thus, there are three interwoven modes of writing that run through each chapter: the interviews with the directors as testimony of their processes of understanding through filmmaking, the description of the film as a way of focusing on important cinematic strategies, and my analysis of the films as ethnomusicological documents. Shifting between these three modes of inquiry into the films offers a variety of perspectives on these five exemplary films about music’s relationship to social and cultural phenomena.
Chapter 1 examines the film Gimme Shelter (1970) by Albert and David Maysles. The film documents the Rolling Stones on tour, culminating in the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival in which eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death on film.
The Maysles brothers are some of the most renowned figures in American documentary cinema and early pioneers of direct cinema, a method of filmmaking with the goal of liberating truth from the manipulative conventions of cinema and journalism. Rather than asserting a narrative to explain a situation, practitioners of direct cinema let the crisis itself direct the cameras and structure the film.3
Much has been written on this film, in part because of the centrality of Albert Maysles in American documentary cinema, in part because of the popularity of the Rolling Stones, and in part because of the documentation of the stabbing. Many view the film as representing the death of 1960s counterculture.
I am primarily interested in the ways in which the sound of the film contributes to meaning and the perspectives the film offers on music. I argue that the film reveals music as being many different things—a commodity, a means of congregation, and autonomous art. The film does not explain these different manifestations. Rather, it puts its listening and viewing audience in different relationships to sound.4
Chapter 2 situates Jill Godmilow’s Antonia: Portrait of the Woman (1974) within second-wave feminist filmmaking. Along with her contemporaries, Godmilow questioned the truth claims of direct cinema. Godmilow doesn’t hover with a camera until someone speaks. Instead, she draws a story out of pioneer female symphony conductor Antonia Brico. The interview has become such a stock technique of contemporary documentary. But for Godmilow, it was a radical way of presenting untold stories—ones that were so often buried under the noise of patriarchy. The film is structured around an interview with Brico that does more than create a textual narrative. The film offers feelings of Brico’s relationship to her story and—in moments—forces audiences to consider their relationship to Brico’s story. I bring together Laura Mulvey’s influential identification of the “male gaze” and Tim Rice’s theory of musical meaning to suggest that music and image can create certain musical vicarities, subject positions that emerge from our relationships to how music is meaningful in different situations.
Godmilow’s film also provides a powerful feminist critique of the orchestra. The film certainly resonated beyond female conductors. The orchestra represented a complex structure of patriarchy, especially for women who were beginning to articulate ways in which women face challenges entering the workplace. But as a film about gender and orchestras, Antonia is a carefully constructed analysis of the social nature of orchestral performance.5
Chapter 3 picks up on postrealism as introduced at the end of chapter 2 by examining Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America (1985). Clarke uses techniques that reveal meaning-making conventions of documentary that productively obscure a biographical narrative of Ornette Coleman, a jazz musician associated with free jazz. The film centers on the performance of Coleman’s orchestral work Skies of America during the opening of Caravan of Dreams, an avant-garde arts center in Fort Worth, Texas. Clarke passed away in 1997, so I draw primarily from her archive at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to present the backstory of her work-for-hire. The multiple agendas of producers and filmmaker provide a way of looking at the film as a site of struggle over the symbolic meaning of a musician in a neoliberal age. The film manages to reveal the ways in which Coleman is constructed as a representative of success in a free market economy, while also showing the racial inequity across Fort Worth’s neighborhoods. The critical arguments of the film are oblique, but reading the film within the context of its production provides an example of how reflexive film techniques can dismantle representation. Ornette is born from the logics of capital, though, in the end, it undermines those logics.
Clarke was one of a few American filmmakers inspired by the European city symphony genre of the 1920s—Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) being a classic of the genre. The city symphony melds artistic form and social commentary. These films aimed to create “realistic tributes to urban excitement” (Barsam 1992: 290). Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957) used jazz to score the city’s rhythm but instead created kaleidoscopic images from the city itself. Shirley Clarke’s alternative vision is that of a cross artistic perspective, blending visual arts with music, while staying attuned to urban social issues. Clarke was part of a prolific independent group of filmmakers in Greenwich Village along with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. Clarke’s Skyscraper (1959) was one of the last of the poetic documentary films made as attention to documentary went to direct cinema in the 1960s (Lev 2006: 273).
In Ornette: Made in America, Clarke takes the opportunity to cinematically render Coleman’s musical theory of harmolodics. The interrelatedness of art forms is a particularly modernist notion that Clarke and Coleman share. Looking at the film as a cineharmolodic work offers a new way of understanding Coleman’s inscrutable philosophy and provides a model of a film that demonstrates musical processes in place of explaining them.
Chapter 4 continues the focus on cinematic extension of musical concepts through an investigation of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Depeche Mode: 101 (1988). Pennebaker—who, like Albert Maysles, was a pioneer of direct cinema—is well known for his films on Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and other “classic rock” acts. Depeche Mode: 101 strays from the genre with an account of the 1980s British electropop band’s massive US tour. In addition to the band, Pennebaker and Hegedus include a busload of young fans who follow Depeche Mode from New York to California. I argue that the film dramatizes various types of estrangement in post-Fordist America. Pennebaker and Hegedus have often spoken about creating documentary films that draw from theater. That strategy, brought to the massive stage design of Depeche Mode concerts, makes the film very close to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—a union of the arts. The film draws on dramatic narrative, music, dance, poetry (lyrics), and light design in a way that rejects the rockist stance of preceding “classic” rock bands.
While neither Hegedus nor Pennebaker is a musicologist, they make decisions about shooting and editing performance in ways that make sense of the music. The chapter goes into the details of Hegedus’s