“What really makes me want to play music is when I really hear an individual thought pattern placed in an environment to make something actually come about that is not an obvious thing that everyone is doing.”
That’s Ornette Coleman, the extraordinary free jazz saxophonist and true innovator speaking about music in the documentary Ornette: Made in America (1984), but it applies just as well to the new form of documentary film that was born in the sixties, rising with the new wave of popular music cementing itself in American and world culture. The movies documenting the daily activities of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back (1967) or The Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter (1970) were not of the staid and tired talking head variety. They documented in the true sense: without narration, without captions, without context. A freer form was necessary to cover a new era of music that didn’t lend itself to the established norms of the interview film.
Don’t Look Back gave many people their first view of Bob Dylan and if they didn’t like him going in, chances are they didn’t like him coming out. Dylan, young and arrogant, taunts and cons his interviewers and curiosity seekers throughout. There should be no doubt that Dylan is playing a part. It’s a performance as deliberate and refined as Laurence Olivier performing Hamlet delivered with only a barely discernable wink to the camera. When Horace Freeland Judson, talking to Dylan for Time Magazine, sits and listens to a relentless attack on Time Magazine by Dylan, one can almost feel Judson suppressing the urge to come right out and call BS on Dylan for the whole charade. As Dylan tells him that, essentially, he wouldn’t understand Dylan or his music even if he tried, Judson looks down and away and the viewer can practically read his mind: “Does this Dylan character really think I’m swallowing this whole?” It’s great entertainment and that, in the end, is most likely what Dylan was going for.
That kind of unedited, uncommented on moment in the life of the musician set the tone for the music documentaries that followed. Some of them, like the Oscar winning Woodstock (1970), took the movie audience into the concert audience and made them a part of the action. We, the cinema audience, watch the organizers, the hippies and the musicians interact in a way that transforms it from a simple documentary to a brand new creation of cinematic music. The scenes of crowd control, announcements about bad acid and Jimi Hendrix reinventing the “Star Spangled Banner” as a solo guitar showpiece, creates its own musical flow, giving the cinematic audience a unique experience, one unlike the live concert and also unlike any documentary before it.
In the years following, the documenting of musicians on film would follow suit and even head back into a more conservative direction. The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), covering the punk scene in Los Angeles in 1979 and 1980, may be about music considered far edgier and rebellious than what came before it, but the style of the film is more firmly planted in the interview first, performance second methodology. We see band members, see their names, see them perform, see the name of the song they’re performing.
By the time Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition World Tour got the documentary treatment in Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), the form had become as standard as any other type of documentary filmmaking. So standard that subjects within the documentary comment on the artificiality of the act of documenting their performances. Warren Beatty, dating Madonna at the time of the filming, appears to believe that Madonna is playing for the camera, and she probably is, just as Dylan was in Don’t Look Back, only this time, someone called it out. Madonna calls attention to it as well, making one particular telling comment to a dissatisfied looking Beatty, telling him not to worry, the lighting’s okay. He tries to play it off as a joke, leaning back on the couch as if to catch the best possible light, but it’s clear he was caught off guard. Being called vain in a song is one thing, being called vain in front of a camera crew, is quite another.
Although the form circled back in on itself by the nineties, one movie, Gimme Shelter, still stands as one of the greatest examples, if not the greatest, period, of the musical documentary form. Watching it today, decades removed from the events it documented back in 1969, it remains as compelling and captivating as any documentary ever made. That it wasn’t even nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary only shows how some movies need more than a few months before their true greatness is evident.
Directors Charlotte Zwerin and Albert and David Maysles pull off the incredible feat of showing the mechanics of making the documentary itself without, one, making it seem gimmicky or, two, confusing the viewer. We see Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts watch themselves in the editing room as they screen footage that will end up in the final film and then watch that final footage ourselves. We see their reactions as they listen to an angry Hell’s Angel member call into a radio station to call Mick Jagger an idiot and blame him for duping the Angels. We watch with them as the concert at the Altamont Speedway slowly descends into a disjointed, chaotic mess. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane gets hit in the head and knocked out. The Grateful Dead decide it’s not worth their trouble to take the stage. Fights break out, one after another. Jagger has to continuously tell the crowd to cool it and is consistently ignored. Finally, someone pulls a gun and gets stabbed to death. That someone is Meredith Hunter, who pulls out a revolver and can be seen holding it over his head, then pointing it towards the stage before Angel Alan Passaro attacks him with a knife from behind, killing him. Upon seeing the footage, all a stunned Jagger can say is, “Wow. It’s so horrible.”
Documenting music can be a delicate balance. Show too much of the musical performance and it’s nothing more than a filmed concert. Show too many interviews, and it may as well be a standard talking head dinosaur. Glimpsing the charismatic stage performers in decidedly uncharismatic moments of arrogance, confrontation, or vain posing for the camera, allows the viewer a way in to understand the music through the performer in a deeper way. Or maybe it’s just entertaining to see these musicians try to act like no one’s around when they damn well know the world is watching. Either way, it’s a different kind of music, the kind that weds image and sound. The kind only the cinema can provide.
Greg Ferrara