American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
about joining the Drew Associates—a collection of filmmakers who would rethink the goals of documentary film: “Things turned around in 1956, where I met up with Bob Drew, [D. A.] Pennebaker, and [Richard] Leacock. It was introduced to us a new form of documentary filming where you film what was actually happening…. It was such an important advance. It also achieved a much greater sense of opportunity for people to connect with one another, people of different cultures.”
One of the goals was to let the cameras retreat out of the attention of the people being filmed.
As Maysles puts it, “Spontaneity. Not controlling what’s going on. Observing. Letting things happen with the shot. And patience so that when it does come along you’re right there to get it in all its fullness.”
Many of these early direct cinema films had little music. Hollywood films used music to manipulate. Direct cinema was to be a method free from manipulation, a space in which audiences could make up their own minds.
As much as direct cinema filmmakers distinguished themselves in opposition to classical Hollywood cinema for being manipulative, they also drew from narrative cinema. Their films were dramatic; they used music (albeit diegetic) to score mood; they presented close-ups of faces and found objects to offer psychological focus and symbolic representation. While direct cinema offers great latitude for interpretation, elements of the films still work to narrow meaning. For this chapter, I’ll propose that both direct cinema and classical Hollywood cinema are ideal practices. The films themselves—for our purposes, Gimme Shelter—employ elements of both practices. Consider direct cinema to be a well from which filmmakers draw rather than a corpus of works or a stylistic circumscription of a film.
Gimme Shelter illustrates how a film in the wake of idealized direct cinema drew from narrative techniques and, in so doing, opened up space for music to have a larger role in creating meaning. The space in-between is a space in which music can shift from one role to another, from scoring, to symbolizing, to being an aesthetic experience of sound in motion.
The Independent Brothers
Maysles left Drew Associates in 1962 to form Maysles Films with his brother David, who had been working in Hollywood as an assistant producer (Vogels 2005: 5). Albert shot images and David recorded sound until David’s death in 1987. As a pair, they extended the concept of “being there” to filming the lives of ordinary people, unusual people, artists, musicians, and celebrities. By and large, most attention to their filmmaking is centered on the image. But gathering sound was just as thoughtful. That was where David came in.
During our interview, Maysles recounts, “Well, he was interested in music—jazz and so forth.”
Interest alone didn’t make David a great sound recordist. He developed a method of recording sound that augmented the goal of being there.
Maysles continues, “Sound for me was just a good sound. Can you understand it? And I could tell if the sound of the music was appropriate, if it was as good as it could be. Apparently my brother really knew what he was doing. And we had good equipment.”
They modified their audio equipment to extend recording time, synced the camera without a wire, and were able to get close with minimal technological presence.
“We changed the size of the reels. Because there was enough space to make the reels double the size, adding just a couple inches to the reels but giving double the amount of sound.”
David used a handheld Sennheiser 804 shotgun condenser microphone, which picked up what was directly in front with great detail while attenuating sound from the sides. The result is an intimacy with the subject, the sense that we are just listening to them. It also makes us unable to hear other things. What we can’t hear is just as important as what we do hear.
“It was more direct,” Maysles says, “If you held it properly, you got the closest you could to the source of sound. So you know, even to this day right now, most soundmen have a good microphone that’s maybe not as close to my brother’s, but that it’s hanging overhead which I think is always a distraction to everybody.”
Minimizing the equipment and isolating sound in the environment allowed the Maysleses to connect with the people they filmed. They could both get close and develop close relationships.
“It’s like being just another person there…. We both had this feeling of empathy and people would trust us,” Maysles says.
Their films were not just windows into other people’s lives. They made critical investigations into their worlds. In general, the Maysleses’ films thwart definitive reads of the people on-screen, using details to call attention to the uniqueness of the images presented. Characteristics are not symbols to be read but rather proof of uniqueness, proof that our world is a complex and plural experience. Their films pull us into different ways of watching cinema—especially how we view people in cinema. Psychiatry in Russia (1955) used the camera to tell us about Freudian alternatives. I claim that his subsequent work with the Drew Associates offered experiences of alternative mindsets.
The Rolling Stones were part of the so-called British Invasion. In 1964 they trailed the Beatles across the Atlantic to reinvigorate popular music in the United States. Mick Jagger has said of the 1960s, “Suddenly popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important, perhaps the most important, art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before” (The Rolling Stones: n.d.). “Big” meant that you could produce a movie about your band. The Beatles had Hard Day’s Night (1964). Bob Dylan had Dont Look Back (1967). Both of these films were collaborations with notable directors—Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker, respectively. By 1969 the Rolling Stones had a large promotion budget and they wanted a film of their own (Booth 2012: 177). The Maysles brothers were getting critical acclaim yet little financial success with Salesman (1969), their film about a traveling Bible salesman. A film about the Rolling Stones had an easier target audience.
In our interview, Maysles recounts getting a phone call in 1969: “I got a call from Haskell Wexler. He’s a famous cinematographer, moviemaker from Hollywood. He said, ‘I’ve just been talking to the Stones. They’re about to go on tour around America. They’re going to be at the Plaza Hotel tomorrow. You might want to look them up.’ Neither my brother nor I knew anything about these guys, but I took Haskell’s word for it. We went to the Plaza Hotel, knocked on the door, got to talking with them. They said, ‘Well, tomorrow night, we’re performing in Baltimore. You want to come along?’ So we went along with them.”
“To shoot or just to go?” I ask.
“Just to go. I don’t think we shot anything there. Anyway, we thought, ‘Yeah. These guys are good.’”
“What impressed you about them?”
“We loved the music. And of course we felt we had good rapport with them. We were eager to get to know them better and to get to know their music and to record it. So, a couple days later, they’re performing at Madison Square Garden and there we are. I think it was two days of performances and then off to Muscle Shoals and then Altamont.”
What happened at Altamont completely altered the course of the film, turning it into much more than a simple concert film. To some viewers, it indicted the band in the melee, but in the end, the band allowed the film to screen. Interestingly, the Rolling Stones would not give a pass to Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (1972), which contains many unseemly shots of backstage parties. The Maysleses’ film has less backstage access yet brings out an intimacy with a complex rock and roll tour.
The intimacy found in much of direct cinema comes from filmmaker and fellow Drew Associate Richard Leacock. His philosophy of “being there” is a strategy of being present while shooting and conveying the feeling of presence for a film audience through the edit. Albert Maysles has his own spin on Leacock’s concept of “being there.” He’s also very good at making friends. In our interview, Maysles tells me about his process:
“Immediately upon meeting the person who is to be filmed—immediately—the person