American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
example, tonal space, rhythmic structures, and arrangement—as well as nonmusical elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk. I conclude the chapter by looking at how the final concert in the film presents a festival of the commodity in which people use art to find meaningful space within capitalism.
Chapter 5 shows another side of popular music’s relation to post-Fordism in its examination of Instrument (1999), a collaborative film about the post-hardcore band Fugazi. The Washington, DC, band is perhaps antithetical to Depeche Mode in its relationship to mass culture. And yet, the two films share certain features—both place emphasis on showing the labor of the bands and subvert the image of the charismatic rock star. Instrument, however, takes a distinct strategy. The band notoriously opted out of promotionalism, which makes this film particularly interesting, since most music documentaries are promotional in nature. Director Jem Cohen filmed the group for ten years and collaborated with the band while editing. In the chapter, I examine two consequences of the collaboration: the strategies taken to avoid promotional rockumentary style and the cinematic rendering of Fugazi’s musical ideas. Like Shirley Clarke’s Ornette, Instrument transposes music to cinema. A bulk of the chapter identifies these musical and cinematic techniques, many of which come from dub reggae and involve fragmentation, temporal play, and surprise. The effect of the techniques as rendered cinematically offers what I call a wide chronoscape—a range of perspectives on temporality.
In addition, Instrument obliquely offers a way of thinking about rock audiences that contrasts with Pennebaker and Hegedus’s construction of “festival.” The diversity of audience members never congeals through fandom. Rather, they remain a crowd. I investigate this representation of audience as a parallel to Paolo Virno’s notion of the post-Fordist “multitude,” the many who understand themselves to be many. The representation of the crowd and the independent operations of Fugazi offer a way of envisioning a world in flux and consider how music and cinema produce related ways of thinking and feeling.
Each of these five films can be read in different ways. I take the opportunity to show how these can be read as ethnomusicological documents—films about music’s relationship to social issues. I also offer ways of analyzing the films as critical cinema. What emerges are many ways of thinking about how film can contribute to ethnomusicological arguments through shots, cuts, composition, musical placement, sound, dramatic narrative, interviews, and other elements. My hope is that my analysis of these films can model analysis of other films. I also hope that this work demonstrates that questions about music can be explored in ways other than text and that there is something unique to cinematic investigations of music. I don’t think that cinema could ever replace print media, but I believe that it is a resource for those who are interested in the study of music.
Films about music necessarily encourage listening. Sound plays a great role in music documentaries. And yet, sound has been underrepresented in film studies. Bringing an ethnomusicologist’s perspective, I am keenly interested in music’s relationship to the rest of the film, how music’s meaning is tied to the image and the people represented, and the significance of aural experiences. In many cases, I solve analytical problems by suggesting terminology specific to a sound-heavy film analysis.
Finally, a note to those who hope to make ethnomusicological films: Let’s not limit film to what we know how to do in print. Too often, scholarly films resemble read conference papers. They may contain carefully crafted arguments with rich audiovisual examples, but cinema can do more. These five films are but a few examples of how an ethnomusicologist might take advantage of the medium. My analysis can reveal strategies of creating cinematic arguments.
The three driving questions of the book are as follows.
What does a critical cinema of music look like? To answer this question, I chose films that are examples of how cinema can pry open issues that lie within the entanglement of music and social practice. These films each examine issues in their own way. Taken together, they can point toward cinematic methods of addressing ethnomusicological theory—the nature of music, how musical practice is gendered, media representation of musicians, the commodification of music, and relationships of music to temporality.
What are some of the constraints? No film is the sole work of any director. Rather, they are products of relationships that are guided, protected, and championed by directors who attach their names to them. Independent cinema has operated on the outskirts of the industry. Filmmaking is still expensive, and considering the funding of each film reveals some of the other interests of producers. Relationships between filmmakers and the musicians also present challenges of access.
What are some of the useful cinematic techniques? Analysis and interviews revealed a great number of theoretical strategies that may be useful when examining other films or when producing new music documentaries. I describe a great many of these techniques in order to claim a distinctly cinematic possibility of doing ciné-ethnomusicology. Some techniques are part of the recognized vocabulary of cinematography and a glossary in the back may help when I use technical terms. I propose new terminology for unrecognized techniques and hope that this contributes to cinema studies and to ethnomusicology.
Further Reading
Three additional essays stand out as good models for considering the rhetorical constructions of music documentaries. Film scholar William Rothman’s analysis of D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back makes a strong case for considering film as theory (1997). Rothman introduces the notion that Pennebaker and his subject, Bob Dylan, co-conspire in making a claim that truth resides in plain pictures—an argument similar to Susan Sontag’s disavowal of any definitive interpretations of an artwork (1966). To support his claim, Rothman considers framing, camera angles, dialogue, cuts, music, and other elements of cinema. Cultural studies scholar Deidre Pribram (1993) writes about Alek Keshishian’s Madonna: Truth or Dare as a postmodern feminist text. Considering the juxtaposition of space, film grain, and documentary style, the essay makes a thorough consideration of how the film constructs and collapses distinctions in order to refute the promise of the pop star’s authentic self. Pribram squares Baudrillard’s theories of sexuality with the ways in which the film structures Madonna’s appearances. Matt Stahl’s chapter (2013) on Ondi Timoner’s Dig! reveals ways in which the cinematic narrative of musicians can valorize neoliberal ideals. Stahl shows how the film naturalizes The Dandy Warhols’s successful alignment with capital, while pathologizing Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The result is a symbolic tale of neoliberal subjectivity. Stahl’s writing adds information about the production of the film that helps frame the privileges that the filmmaker and The Dandy Warhols had, contrasting it with the kind of social support that Newcombe lacked. Chronicling the production history adds to his argument that the film is polemic, though the cinematic style appears to simply document “truth” and let audiences make up their minds.
All three of these works would be good companions to this book.
Watching the Films
Watch the films. Many texts on film theory tend to reference many films in one chapter. But watching dozens of films is a lot to ask. I’ve structured the book so that you can watch five films and think deeply about each one. Repeated viewing is important. Watch them a few times. The first viewing is an orientation. The second allows you to think about how it manipulates you. In the third viewing, you may anticipate cuts and motion. On the fourth, you may notice a general editing strategy. Watch sections of them while reading the book. To echo an earlier sentiment in this introduction: there is an intriguing gap between film and print. In the case of this book, the gap appears only when you have both the film and this book in your mind.
A Note on Writing Style
The book draws heavily on interviews I conducted with the filmmakers. Those voices form a layer of present-tense dialogue that runs through each chapter (except the one on Shirley Clarke). Quotes from those interviews have no in-text citations. You may refer to the back of the book for information on where and when those interviews took place. I add ellipses (…) to elisions in the interview. The equivalent of a cut in film, the ellipsis shows that I’m stitching