American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
the music weakens. This festival is not festive (but it should be). We feel the struggle within an antagonistic sound ecology as we watch images of Jagger’s dancing clash with the images of violence. A masterful shot resonates with the juxtaposition of sound and action. In figure 1.5, note the two frontal shots of fans, each reacting to their world. They both move their heads to the music, but one smiles and one weeps. The musical arrangement becomes spare but not for musical purposes. Listening causally, we wonder why the whole band isn’t playing. Jagger addresses the crowd halfway in song: “Everybody gotta cool out.” Framing the two audience faces together plays with our urge to make this an idealist moment. We may wish to enter into one of these perspectives, but which one? Instead, we are left thinking of their relation and their differences. We also want to experience the music but wonder about the tumult of the crowd.
1.5. Man smiles while woman weeps, both moving their heads to the music.
Music at Altamont is clearly part of the scene. It tempts us to listen in different ways and thwarts our attempts at letting it. The band plays two more songs after struggling with the unruly crowd. During “Under My Thumb,” Meredith Hunter is stabbed. After forty-eight minutes since the last time we were in the editing room, we return to the umbrella to re-watch the stabbing with Jagger and David Maysles. Being brought back is both surprising and marks an end to the film. Not having the umbrella for the Altamont half of the film keeps us in the festival. Also, the editing room was where we learned of the stabbing. Now, catching up to the stabbing ourselves collapses the gap of time between the tour and the review of the footage. Inevitable questions rush in after watching this sequence and then being back in the editing room with the filmmakers and band. You might think, “Does music cause violence?” And again, you might wonder, “Who is to blame?” A consequence of respecting a pluralist film is that it makes room for unsavory arguments. The film met some controversy. Maysles has long defended those who cite the film as an instance of rock music’s dangerous potential, connecting the song “Sympathy for the Devil” with the violence.
The final image of Jagger, frozen with a slow zoom, passes the sense of scrutiny to the audience. The cartoonish invitation to look with simulated scrutiny at Jagger conflates our concern for blame with those of the band and the filmmakers. The complexity of the event stands firm. The real details of the media-entertainment apparatus are stronger than the ambiguity of a concert pseudoevent.
The film resists converting the tour into a pseudoevent by preserving the details of the people, the music, and the historical particulars. The images may connote the lemmings returning to their homes, walking through the desert after disaster. In her edit, Zwerin seems to use the lyrics in direct address: “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’ our very street today. Burns like a red coal carpet. Mad bull lost its way…. Rape, murder! It’s just a shot away.” The lyrics resonate with the feeling of precariousness, the loss of idealism (ignoring the optimistic, “love, sister, it’s just a kiss away”), to sustain this historic read of the film. It feels like an end to the film, a typical dénouement in tragic dramatic structure following the climactic moment of death. But hold off on that one reading …
Conclusion
What makes Gimme Shelter such a strong music film is that it allows the viewer/listener to experience and think about music in a variety of ways. Zwerin’s sensitivity to music contributes to the attention that we can give to the music itself. (The only other rival in Maysles’s work is Horowitz Plays Mozart, also edited by Zwerin.) My first-ever question to Albert Maysles in a formal interview was, “Making the films you did about music, did you learn something about music?”
He responded, “I have no education in music, no training, just as I had no training in filmmaking. But I’ve always had a love for music.”
I first took the statement as one of humility. Later, I realized that I had asked the wrong question. He made films about music that allow us to learn about music, not films that hold a particular frame on music. I think about this when remembering that Maysles says he learned to love music by watching his father listen to it. Maysles passes on that type of musical experience to his audience.
When Gimme Shelter draws to a close, I accept the suspension of complexity. What strikes me the most, however, is not the image or the threads of narrative. I hear the music differently. In the course of the ninety-minute film, music has been so many things: an instrument of entertainment, a symbol of youth culture, a sound that comes from magnetic tape, a formal arrangement of musical devices, an environmental sound in a melee, the center of a spectacle, a cinematic device, an indication of the band’s psychological state and an audience member’s psychological state. The film presents to us music in so many different states, often allowing it to change state as we watch and listen. As a film about music, Gimme Shelter reveals music to be multifarious. The song “Gimme Shelter,” now in direct address, detaches from the image and shows us that there is no such thing as plain music—it is always connected to our ideas of music and how we listen to it. Having been throughout the apparatus of a rock tour, we have leapt through space and time with an eye for what music is and where music is.
When speaking to Maysles about his work, it felt as if we were both discovering new things, that we were on common ground. Even as he sat with me during our final interview, jaundiced from pancreatic cancer, he lit up at discovery, never asserting authorial intent or mastery. He certainly had the right to. His last visit to Washington, DC, had been to accept the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. His cinema—structured by elements of both direct cinema and classical Hollywood cinema—provides a unique and profound view.
I’ll leave Maysles to explain in his own words: “So actually—and I like to say this—if the camera is really good, it’s better than being there. Because most people don’t see it quite as profoundly.”
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