American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
kind of heart-to-heart feeling yourself as a photographer, then it reaches the subject and you get the same in return.”
His cinematography capitalizes on cinema’s ability to pass the relationships he develops through shooting on to his audiences with the film.
“I’m interested in the humanization process, how people make friendships,… but at the same time, extending that privilege to anyone who sees the film. They see and hear exactly what I’m getting.”
From internationally acclaimed actor Marlon Brando to Bible salesman Paul Brennan, Maysles’s trust made through friendship is palpable.
Not so with Mick Jagger.
“Mick Jagger was a little difficult,” says Maysles. “He doesn’t get that close to people.”
Jagger’s distance from the Maysleses gives Gimme Shelter distinction. Instead of developing an intimacy with characters, the film pulls us into the image-making apparatus of large-scale rock and roll. “Being there” is being in the studio, at the concert, in a production meeting, on the stage, at a photo shoot, a hotel room, and so on. As a critical way into the mediated apparatus, the film intervenes by creating a sense of spontaneity, an understanding of complexity, and an engagement with struggle. The interplay of these comes through a structure of the film that is unpredictable but encourages us to think about connections.
Alternative Structuring
The structure of Gimme Shelter embodies the philosopher William James’s interest in making truth through engaging in spontaneity and employing an unconventional structure. Many films—even documentary—follow a standard five-part dramatic arc. An exposition establishes time, place, characters, and conflict. Rising action introduces complications for the protagonist leading to a climax. The climax brings the drama to its highest point of conflict and suspense. Falling action leads toward the end, resolving the conflict. During the dénouement, the characters return to their normal lives, often changed from the conflict. Maysles has often looked for alternative structural models.
He says, “Too many people making a documentary film figure, ‘Well, if it doesn’t have a conflict, if it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, then who’s going to watch it for any length of time?’”
For Gimme Shelter, they borrowed from literature. Specifically, they borrowed Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in which a true story of a murder is told from multiple perspectives out of chronological order. The book is a nonfiction novel. After making the film With Love from Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966), the Maysleses and Zwerin looked to make films the way Capote wrote books. In the film, Capote states his desire to make art from factual material. There is a kinship between direct cinema and the nonfiction novel. Salesman was one of the first films for which the editor—in this case Charlotte Zwerin—was recognized as a coauthor of the film, and Gimme Shelter makes that acknowledgment of the editor-as-author through the transparency of filming the editing process. Zwerin’s editing strategy offers a sense of unpredictability that culminates in a sense of complexity.
Her privileging of spontaneity begins structurally when members of the Rolling Stones begin to review the film in the editing room. Zwerin invited the band to come view the material and told them that they might be filmed then. Dialogic editing has its antecedents in documentary. Robert Flaherty watched his dailies with “Nanook” (Allakariallak) in the early 1920s, while shooting Nanook of the North (1922). Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin famously end their 1961 cinéma vérité opus, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) watching and discussing the film with their subjects. In general, on-screen discussion of the cinematic experience reveals the limitations of cinematic truth.
Structurally, Zwerin uses the band reviewing the material as an umbrella—a place, time, and activity that connects all the various parts of the film. Documentary scholar Bill Nichols notes that documentaries are historical documents (1991: ix–xi). In this case, there are two layers of historicity: the event of the festival, including the lead-up to and the death of Meredith Hunter, and the moment of reflection or debriefing. This umbrella continually returns us to spontaneity and complexity. As a central place, out of time with the tour, we learn to expect to jump from anywhere to anywhere within the film. In the film, David Maysles is a step away from addressing the audience directly by explaining the edit to drummer Charlie Watts.
Watts says, “It’s really hard to see this together, isn’t it?”
“It’ll take time,” responds David.
“What?”
“Eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks? You think you can do it that quick?”
And then David speaks simultaneously to Watts and to the audience: “This gives us freedom. All you guys watching it. We may only be on you for a minute, then go to almost anything.”
David’s statement prepares us for jumping from the ribs of the umbrella to any other part.
Cuts, to either film or audiotape, can have varying degrees of continuity as we pass over the cut. By nature, cuts are violent. They elide time through physical separation and splicing. (Computer video editing still relies on the metaphor of continuous strips ready for blade cuts or trimming.) We then move through levels of the image-making apparatus, from the film editing to the event planning to the stage to wandering through the crowds at Altamont.
The next two sections of this chapter analyze scenes from the film to show how the edit places music in productively slippery relations to the image. As we watch the band listening to their own music, music becomes different things. Witnessing the shift from music being one thing to an other gives us the experience of music as an idea and music as its own phenomenon. Editing music in film can transform music into an idea. Music can represent an emotion, establish a sense of continuity through discontinuous images, or referentially tie us to something that we culturally associate with the song. Gimme Shelter strategically presents music in many different forms, connecting ideas and material. As distinct from language or visual imagery, music has a temporality that flows in time. It is more efficient at getting us to experience truth as continuous and discontinuous change. The Maysleses’ use of music in Gimme Shelter shows truth to be something that is in constant motion, conditional, complex, and partial.
The Many Ways of Listening to “Wild Horses”
As Maysles and I discuss the difficulty of getting close to Mick Jagger, we begin to talk about the many close-up shots of another one of the band members—drummer Charlie Watts. Maysles recalls a moment of getting close with his camera.
“It was a wonderful moment when they were listening to the playback of ‘Wild Horses,’” he says.
Maysles explains, “Lots of times you get your best material when you’re not filming a performance onstage but the subjects are listening to the playback in the sound studio. You can get right up close on their hands and on their faces. You feel the music coming even more from them than when they are actually performing.”
Generally, we think of audio as the support for an image. Sound lends realism to the visual, but what if it was the image’s role to support the sound? I am aware of how students listen with their eyes when I teach. When playing music, students instinctively watch me for cues. Gestures, facial expressions, tapping a beat, pointing, and looking all help to accent music. A camera can frame this act of visual listening.
Al Maysles’s cinematography and Charlotte Zwerin’s editing encourage us to view and, more importantly, listen to this sequence in a particular way. In Jonathan Vogels’s analysis of these studio sequences, he suggests that they develop the band’s character(s) as laconic image-makers.
Whether in the studio, hotel room, or backstage, the film also reveals the group to be surprisingly distanced from their own music. In passive roles as listeners and observers, they are generally transfixed by their own performances, listening intently, sometimes mouthing the words, or dancing a little. Only briefly, in a