American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
in this book. Tactics include writing about the history of documentary film, writing ethnography of the film industry,2 and outlining how film can achieve research goals. There are strengths and weaknesses in all of these approaches.
Books on the history of documentary film can offer ways of thinking about the development of the subgenre, fleshing out connections (Barnouw 1993; Ellis and McLane 2005; Nichols 1991). Decade by decade, goals change, technologies evolve, and films make an impact on practice. However critical these histories may be, they often lack the kind of in-depth analysis of any particular film. What’s more, there is no critical work on the history of music documentaries. There are important works on how sound came to film and how sound recording technologies affect meaning and form, but none are specific to documentary (Lastra 2000; Beck and Grajeda 2008).
Of greatest interest to me as a filmmaker is the scholarship on how film can be employed as a research medium. Anthropology, ethnomusicology’s sister discipline, has had a critical mass of scholars devoted to using film as a research tool. The edited volume Film as Ethnography by Peter Crawford and David Turton is an important source for situating film as a unique medium for ethnographic research and publication. In his article “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage” (1990), anthropologist George Marcus makes a case for film (and the related form of modernist ethnography) to be better suited for research topics that involve late twentieth-century social processes. Recent concerns of the social sciences include the relationship between the local and global, translocal interrelatedness, and the problem of describing homogenization and heterogeneity found in the world (1990: 5). Modernist approaches tend to be on the borders or in many places at once. Marcus argues:
In the late twentieth century world, cultural events/processes anywhere cannot be comprehended as primarily localized phenomena, or are only superficially so. In the full mapping of a cultural identity, its production, and variant representations, one must come to terms with multiple agencies in varying locales the connections among which are sometimes apparent, sometimes not, and a matter for ethnographic discovery and argument. In short, culture is increasingly deterritorialized, and is the product of parallel diverse and simultaneous worlds operating consciously and blindly with regard to each other…. The ethnographic grasp of many cultural phenomena and processes can no longer be contained by the conventions that fix place as the most distinctive dimension of culture…. I see the attempt to achieve the effect of simultaneity as a revision of the spatial-temporal plane on which ethnography has worked. (1990: 11–12)
Disciplinary questions lead to disciplinary methods. The anthropologist David MacDougall argues that film can provide an ethnographic alternative to writing—questions, field notes, ethnographic writing (1998: 61). He argues “that ethnographic films are a distinctive way of knowing, which favors an experiential, affective, embodied understanding of individuals, whereas text is more effective at explanation and generalizing about culture.” He suggests that theory can be created “through the very grain of the filmmaking” (1998: 76). Well situated in anthropology as a discipline, filmmaking has yet to be understood as a way of conducting theory in ethnomusicology, though there have been a number of attempts to bring film into the disciplinary fold—moving from filming to filmmaking.
By and large, ethnomusicologists use video cameras to “remember” their own observation, using video as a mnemonic prosthesis in service of the observer who once participated. Some film-savvy ethnomusicologists suggest that it isn’t enough to simply record and urge critical application of film (Simon 1989; Baily 1989; Feld 1976; Zemp 1988, 1990a). The ethnomusicologist Artur Simon suggests that film can be a starting point for ethnographic interpretation (1989: 48). John Baily champions film as a mode of inquiry and editing as data-analysis and discovery (1989: 3). Steve Feld and Carroll Williams, a visual anthropologist, argue that “film is neither a research method nor a technique—but an epistemology; it is a design for how to think about and hence create the working conditions for exploring the particular problem involved” (1975: 28, emphasis original). Feld and Williams urge researcher-filmmakers to develop deliberate new languages of film that address specific research questions.
One debate over the use of film for ethnomusicologists centers on a supposed scientific information/entertainment binary. German ethnomusicologist A. M. Dauer criticizes what he considers films about music that have been watered down in favor of aesthetic aims: “Our main purpose … is to produce informational content, not beautiful pictures” (1969: 227). Hugo Zemp offers a counterargument: “The problem is … to avoid the justified reputation of boredom which many didactic films have, to make them interesting and, why not, entertaining” (1990b: 68). Filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch suggests that most films in either camp fail: “Most of the time, then, what results is a hybrid product satisfying neither scientific rigors nor film aesthetics. Of course, some masterpieces or original works escape from this inevitable trap” (1995: 86). Understanding aesthetics and information to be incompatible undervalues the purpose of aesthetic attention in filmmaking. The filmmaker creates a filmic world that the filmgoer experiences. An effective film is not as much pretty as it is engaging.
As of this writing, the most recent call for ethnomusicological filmmaking is Barley Norton’s inquiry into ethnomusicology’s print-focused theorizing. He argues that the scientific/pretty pictures binary is a false one. In his words: “There is no reason why we should feel constrained to narrative filmmaking that professional filmmakers often do better than academics or to a rigid style of observational cinema” (2015). Tying research questions to medium, he suggests that film “is not well suited to the development of theories that involve generalizations based on thorough intertextual cross-referencing. Rather than forcing films to be come more like written theory, an alternative might be to consider new ways of working that engage with the sensorial, haptic, affective, performative and experiential potential of film” (2015).
While I sympathize with these disciplinary concerns, I find it more useful to cast a wider net to consider documentary films unrestricted by disciplinary boundaries. The works most useful for my inquiry are scholarly analyses of single films, ones that employ a variety of scholarship to unpack the ways in which a single music documentary constructs cinematic arguments.
Methodology: Writing about Filmmaking about Music
Ethnomusicologists spend most of their efforts on writing about music. I am complicating things a bit by writing about filmmaking about music. These interrelated layers of practice are at the core of my interest and are important to distinguish. If we don’t understand how cinema differs from music, then our inquiry collapses back to two modes of analysis: writing about film or about music. One perspective is to look at writing, filmmaking, and musicking as three interrelated expressive forms. Moving from one mode to another involves an act of translation. There are limits and advantages to translation.
The musicologist Charles Seeger suggests that there are differences in literary and musical modalities and that, when addressing music, writing can fall short of expressing what music might be expressing. Seeger warns music scholars of the tendency for “linguo-centrism”—a dominant reliance on language—when studying music (1961). Understood as two different systems of communication, music and speech have an inherent distance between them. That distance, according to Seeger, must be acknowledged when studying music through language. Seeger’s point should not be confused with the saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture; rather, his advice is to mind the gap.
The distance between expressive modes might be productive. Considering the act of translation, Walter Benjamin suggests that the goal of translation lays bare the important gap between two languages. He argues that “real translation is transparent, it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (2007: 79). In Benjamin’s mystical view, language is imperfect. But through translation we might witness “pure language.” Benjamin’s task of the translator is to overcome the boundedness of language by becoming aware of gaps of meaning between two different languages. Similarly, Gayatri Spivak suggests that the “task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying”