American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
with the music). Hearing people discuss the recording places the audience in the mindset of listening to details of the recording. Surely the engineer and the band members have been listening to the performance over and over on tape playback. Jagger belts out a comical, “Ye got tee mooove,” before swigging from a bottle of whiskey, perhaps reacting to hearing his own stylized voice so many times. As he swigs, the sound of tape rewinding (or fast-forwarding) brings us back to the source. The cause of the noise is the preparation to all to listen. With the high-fidelity recording occluding any diegetic sounds, a G chord comes directly out of the screen. On the sixteenth note before beat three, the film cuts to a frontal shot of Charlie Watts, eyes closed as if to say, “Listen.”
Direct address is a distinct and powerful space in cinema, usually reserved for an omniscient narrator. The so-called voice-of-God speaks to the audience, exists outside the time of the narrative, and displaces the images to a more distant place. There are implications to the music’s existence within this space. With all diegetic sound attenuated, the music is primary. Pans, zooms, faces, and gestures mostly support our attention to the music as we listen reductively.
At the end of a melody of guitar harmonics, Zwerin cuts to a close-up of Jagger listening. This take is long. In her essay on cinematic timing, Susan Feagin suggests that while rapid cutting can create feelings of excitement, the long take can open up an opportunity for thinking. She quotes the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch explaining why long takes are often rare: Most films, “don’t trust the audience, cutting to a new shot every six or seven seconds” (in Feagin 1999: 175). The average shot length in Gimme Shelter is 9.8 seconds. This particular shot of Jagger lasts twenty-nine seconds: on Jagger for twenty and then on Mick Taylor for the other nine. Taylor’s face is framed like a painting, darkness around his face. This long take does open up what Feagin calls “cognitive freedom” (1999: 179), but the images presented within the long take do direct our attention. The long take encourages us to listen by reducing the cuts and framing people listening. Put differently, the edit doesn’t distract from listening to the music itself and the shots of people listening suggest that we too should be listening. During the direct address of “Wild Horses,” Zwerin includes only three shots, the last one being a surprisingly long 128 seconds.
Once the last shot of the sequence starts, Zwerin hands off the structuring. Placing no cuts, she allows Maysles’s sequence shot to structure our experience. A sequence shot “cuts” within the frame with camera movement. The uncut single shot makes connections through pans, tilts, and zooms.
At this point, we don’t rely on sound for sense of real time. Instead, the visuals keep real time. Michel Chion suggests that generally images give us a sense of space and sound gives us the sense of time—temporal continuity or temporal rupture (1994: 13–14). But there are significant moments of just listening that include images of listening to the music in real time—again, inverting the traditional editing technique of using music to inform images. The cinematography draws our attention to elements of the music—not unlike how we may point, make a facial expression, or tap in the air when playing a recording of music for someone.
As a whole, the final sequence shot opens up an opportunity to listen to the song. As Maysles’s camera moves from Taylor’s cherubic face to Richards sitting on the couch, they are very much in the space and time of the room—the historical present. A stack of papers is behind them. They are clearly listening to what we hear in the time of the film. Mouthing the words, Richards is singing along and moving his head to the rhythm of the song. They both face the left of the frame. Generally, that head angle draws our attention to the relationships of people to their surroundings. We ask: “What do they see?” In this case, their glances are to the left but their eyes are closed, yet we still ask, “What are they seeing?” or perhaps, “What are they hearing?” A zoom amplifies Richards’s head movements and lip sync. At the same time, it reduces what we are able to see in the room and attenuates the sense of real time in the room. In a well-timed pan, Maysles reduces the sense of the room even more by shifting to Richards’s boot. The real time—represented by the images of space—cedes to the musical time of the song as the close-up of the boot keeps time with the music.
In our interview Maysles recalls the shot. He says that he and David were together in the studio, watching them listen.
“As I was on Keith’s face, my brother whispered, ‘Take a look at his boots!’ Again, with my left eye, I could see this strange piece of boot. At the right moment with the music, I moved to it.”
The camera movement and the motion of the boot emphasize the beat of the song. The historical present of being in the room slips away. At this moment in the sequence, primary attention is on the song itself.
“Ricky [Leacock] has described what we do as giving the viewer the feeling of being there. It’s quite a gift, especially if the cameraman has a good eye.”
The strategy of “being there” may be one of direct cinema’s primary truth claims, but few question where “there” is. In this long take, “there” is the musical world of the song. That “strange piece of boot” reduces our vision and makes musical time primary. Perhaps there is some symbolic “meaning” we get out of the boot, but its principal service is to animate the beat of the song. The motion of the boot becomes a tool for listening. A shift of the camera then takes the frame back to Watts, listening as the drums enter. A slight expression of approval and a head nod keeps us listening, perhaps wondering: “What’s it like for Watts to listen to himself?”
In general, film rarely encourages reduced listening. Rather, sound assists narrative by posing questions: “Where did that sound come from?” or “What are the implications of that droning cello?” In music documentaries, however, the music is often the subject. The film promises a more intimate understanding of the music—for instance, attaching it to geography or time or associating it with the character of the music-makers. While these approaches to music documentaries draw on the causal and semantic, film can also encourage an audience to listen reductively. Chion argues that reduced listening requires fixing sound to a medium (1994: 30). When we can listen over and over to the details of the sound, we can catalogue layers of formal features.
Maysles is no stranger to reduced listening—perhaps that’s another reason he films people listening. I ask him about early experiences with music.
“I always loved Mozart,” he says. “My brother—who was five years younger—I remember when he was a kid, I remember him saying several times, ‘Oh, Albie’s playing Mozart again!’ [Laughs] I would listen to it over and over.”
What is more telling than his interest in Mozart is his experience with repetition, playing something again and discovering something new. With no visual reference, focused listening to recorded music can accustom someone to listening reductively.
A film editor with a sensitivity to reduced listening will attach images to sound in ways that encourage listening to sound critically. The image serves a similar function to vocabulary. The medium of film and audiotape offer an opportunity to reduce listening by matching an image, presenting motion, or cutting with a strategic rhythm. In a sense, the visual image underscores or highlights certain sounds. Redundancy of sound and image focuses our ears. In the next section, I’ll show how the “Love in Vain” sequence matches image to sound in a more thorough, analytical way.
The “Wild Horses” sequence demonstrates that music can be part of an image in many ways. Asking the patently useless question, “What is music?” is actually useful here. Throughout Gimme Shelter, music is a subject of the film. It is also used as a psychological index of both the musicians and of the crowd. It is also, at times, the primary aspect of the film. Cinema frames our experience of music, momentarily framing out a majority of what music might be so that we can understand a sliver of what it is through direct experience. The “Wild Horses” sequence invites us to experience our shifting relationship to music in film.
The Red Light Was My Mind: Psychological and Anempathetic Music in the “Love in Vain” Sequence
Most of those working with Robert Drew considered nondiegetic music to be suspect (Ruoff 1993: 226). Music can do as much to alter