American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
all, they’re just negroes you know,” as a young black man drops change into her bucket.
The most confounding shot occurs after conflict begins to threaten the show. Cut to a sagittal close-up of a woman looking screen left, supposedly at the aftermath of violence. “They’re not going to play music until we get a doctor,” she says. She tries again, this time in a soft voice that we can hear but certainly is too soft to be audible to anyone nearby, “Somebody help.” Cinematically, however, it calls us to empathize with her concern. A bit louder: “Somebody’s hurt.” Then she leans back as a zoom-out reveals the crowd looking at her. Most editors would cut here before her concern shifts; but Zwerin keeps the shift, following her through a smile and an offhand frivolous melody on a flute. As a playful punctuation, Zwerin cuts to a clown face looking directly at the camera. The flute trill/melody continues through a cut to a bubble floating across the crowd. Over those two shots, deep concern for human life shifts to haphazard play.
Maysles delivers faces, and Zwerin ensures that we don’t linger in one person’s experience of the event. As noted in the beginning of the chapter, Maysles gets close to faces when he shoots. Not only does he get close, but he also favors frontal shots that encourage empathetic responses. He explains how he has done that through so many of his shots: “I’m intent on conveying the experience of the subjects to the audience, doing it so closely that the audience feels that they are right there…. In a way, you’re that person and that’s quite a gift. The audience feels that they’re experiencing what the Stones are experiencing, what the Beatles are experiencing, what’s the experience of Vladimir Horowitz, Rostropovich, or an ordinary person.”
The film confounds our desire to read the situation. Surely things have gone wrong and we look to the faces to communicate some kind of answer, reassurance, or—cinematically—emotion.
Sounding the Plural Mass
As we have seen, music can move underneath, in front or back, and become part of the scene. In the Altamont section of the film it is mostly part of the environment, within a set of relations. There is no nondiegetic music until the very end. The music occasionally seems to move to ex pressing a sentiment of celebration, but its interruption and the layering of crowd sounds keep it part of a sound ecology. To achieve this, Zwerin lets us listen to the sound of the crowd at the beginning of the Altamont section.
For ten minutes, there is no music. The visual collage is accompanied by location sound. It is the longest stretch without music in the film. As an experiment, I watched the footage while playing other music separately to see if the images can congeal to the mood of the music. When listening to “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair),” which plays over the crowd images in Monterey Pop, many of the shots support a feeling of celebration and togetherness. Other shots don’t fit. The empathetic clashes with the anempathetic.
Without music, the realism of the event is more prominent than if a soundtrack were to ground our feelings or thoughts. Jeff Smith has a term for music’s use in organizing our reading of images. What he calls “polarization” is “an audiovisual interaction in which the affective meaning of the music moves the content of the image toward the specific character of that music” (1999: 160). This is not the same as being emotionally moved as if we were the character, music heightening our empathetic response (Smith calls this “affective congruence”). Rather, polarization uses music to shift our view. Using another metaphor, music acts like a visual filter that lets through the parts of image that relate to the sentiment of the music. Smith suggests that this is a cognitive experience. We watch to read the scene, to connect the ideas of how emotion relates to the scene. So for the first ten minutes of being at Altamont, we have no pole, no filter. By forgoing any scoring during this section, the location sound pulls us into a realist yet disorganized space. There are no emotional poles to organize the images. The images retain a fullness and a complexity. In addition, the sound of Altamont is established. It’s noisy there. Voices rise over the din of the mass.
The music becomes part of an environmental sound, played by bands on a relatively small riser at Altamont. But understanding music as being part of an ecology is more useful—not an ecology as in a system but as a sound we hear in relation to others. The sounds of music, motorcycle engines, and crowd noise intermingle. We must struggle to hear music as an emotional pole, synthesizing the plurality of the mass. At first, it’s tempting to let the music become a direct address.
1.4. Dancing man becomes concerned.
As music begins to play, there is a moment when it overwhelms the image. As with the “Wild Horses” and “Love in Vain” sequences, the image supports the musical play, enticing us into reduced listening. Narratively, we might think: “Finally, the concert has begun. Music has won!” A shot of colored balloons drifting in the sky matches the sound of music starting. But it is an ironic move. We know that death looms ahead. We cannot transcend the dysfunctional environment with music. Flying Burrito Brothers begin to play “Six Days on the Road.” The crowd throws Frisbees and blows bubbles into the air as they dance. Overwhelmingly, they dance. A frontal close-up of a blond man smiling encourages us to smile as well. An older couple kisses as they sing, “Well it seems like a month since I kissed my baby goodbye.” Cut to puppies kissing. The cinematic mood is playful. A moment of foreshadowing presents in a wide shot of a shirtless man crowd surfing the seated audience. Wait. Did he kick someone? The camera zooms out. There are so many people here. The zoom is a reveal. Our moment of good-natured festivity begins to draws to a close. A glimpse of the back of a Hells Angels jacket precedes the end of the song. The music cross-fades with the alarmed crowd sounds as the Hells Angels beat audience members with pool cues. A voice over the microphone begs, “Please stop hurting each other,” after which a menacing voice from the crowd growls, “Take him off to the other side.” The signal that the mood has changed is most evident in the frontal shots of an audience member (figure 1.4). The dancer is now alarmed. A camera behind him augments attention to what he is seeing. We sense his reaction.
As Jefferson Airplane plays “The Other Side of This Life,” the crowd sound moves behind the music. In competition, the music never achieves the place of direct address. The long buildup fails musically. As the images show us the escalating violence, the crowd sound comes back to the front, diffusing the musical effect. As we move from reductive listening to causal listening, music is again part of an ecology of sound. A zoom to a man dancing on high scaffolding accompanies an attenuation of the crowd sound. His relationship to others (and to the thought of his potential plummet) is framed out. The music regains its lone forward position and Zwerin offers us several cuts to people dancing and taking in the music. Two shots disrupt: One is of Hells Angel Sonny Barger lighting a cigarette in indifference. The other is of concert organizer Michael Lang looking out of the frame to his right. His noticeable lack of movement reminds us not to dive into the song with abandon. And then, “Easy,” says Grace Slick over the continued rhythm of the band. “Easy … Easy … Easy …” Song turns to plea. As a scuffle ensues, the song falls apart. Some members continue playing. Microphones collapse on the drum set. Listening returns to its causal mode.
A nearly four-minute stretch separates the beginning of the violent end of Jefferson Airplane’s music and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” The crowd sound is on equal status with the attempt at music, each struggling for our attention. The noise of the crowd wins. The instruments offer guitar feedback and a few disconnected beats of the drum. Sounds of pool cues hitting people punctuate the cacophony of the crowd. Grace Slick’s microphone address is futile: “You gotta keep your bodies off each other unless you intend love.” Cut to the Grateful Dead discussing the unfortunate events followed by the noise of the crowd waiting. And then the motorcycles overwhelm the crowd—both visually and aurally. Finally, the Rolling Stones arrive onstage.
The crowd sound changes character at this point (so much so that I wonder if it is sound brought from the Madison Square Gardens show). Whistles and applause organize the mass into audience. Jagger addresses them: “There’s so