American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert

       1 WHERE IS THE MUSIC? WHAT IS THE MUSIC?

      Albert Maysles, Gimme Shelter (1970)

      Before I began any formal interviews with Albert Maysles for this book, he visited my university to speak about his films. Despite feeling eager for lunch, I waited as students spoke with him after his lecture. One asked Maysles if they could have their picture taken together. As a friend held up the student’s camera phone, Maysles smiled and playfully directed the shot. “Closer! Come closer.” He told the photographer how important it is to get the faces. I recounted this story to him a few years later in his living room. Maysles responded, “Robert Capa was asked to give advice to a photographer, and he said, ‘Get close. Get close.’”

      But there is a more personal reason behind Maysles’s interest in faces. It begins with his father. His father had a trumpet that he didn’t play, tucked away in the closet. His mother said his father used to play music with his brothers but stopped after one of them died.

      “Even though my father couldn’t perform, he did put on music—classical music of one sort or another. That’s how I learned my love for music. Because as the music was playing, I was looking at my father for a change of expression.” Maysles says he absorbed the love of music his father felt, in part by paying close attention to his face.

      Throughout Albert Maysles’s music films, there are powerful shots of people listening: The Beatles amused at hearing “I Saw Her Standing There” from a transistor radio, Vladimir Horowitz and his conductor carefully listening to a recording of their performances of Mozart’s Concerto No. 23, and two enraptured audience members behind Seiji Ozawa as he conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Maysles’s cinematography brought a new intimacy to documentary film in the 1960s.

      This focus on faces is only one small aspect of a larger filmmaking philosophy. Albert and his brother, David, were some of the most notable documentarians of their time, pioneers of what is known as direct cinema. So, in 1969 when the Rolling Stones hired Albert and David Maysles, they said they wanted to have “the best” filmmakers document their tour. But “the best” came with a modernist philosophy of cinema, one engaged in an investigation of truth, plural experience, and epistemology that extends back to the early twentieth century. Over my three interviews with Albert Maysles about Gimme Shelter, I came to understand how his childhood experiences of watching people listen merged with the musical interests of codirector and editor Charlotte Zwerin. Many commentators on the film focus on the murder of an audience member, Meredith Hunter. I began to question the preoccupation with blame. The difficulty of assigning responsibility for the violence was, in fact, due to a constructed edit that sustains several perspectives on what music is—experienced through the many faces portrayed in the film.

      Gimme Shelter is a type of cinema that offers an experience of complexity to the media-entertainment apparatus. The Rolling Stones 1969 US tour culminated in a public outcry over the death at Altamont. News headlines and public discussion followed the event and the later screening of the film. People wondered: Were the Rolling Stones to blame for the violence? Was the idealism of the “Summer of Love” over? Were rock fans turning into angry mobs? Was the music itself dangerous?

      If we are to answer any of these pointed questions, I argue, the answer itself might reduce the inherent complexity of the historical event, the social role of music, and the relationships among people. Gimme Shelter sustains the complexity. It offers an unpredictable perspective that shifts across the entire apparatus of the tour—onstage, backstage, a planning room, a press conference, a recording studio, hotel rooms, and within the sprawl of an outdoor festival. As the focus shifts, we are pushed to think about the relationships among these places. We are encouraged to contemplate truth and spectacle. We are invited into the struggle over the nature of the medium of film and the nature of music. By the end of the film, we can see music itself to be as complex as the entertainment apparatus. Music is revealed to be an expression; a material commodity bound to mass spectacle; a conventional cinematic device; a formal arrangement of rhythm, harmony, and melody; and an environmental sound within an ecology of sounds. There is no single read of the film, no message to be deciphered. The film is slippery and open to multiple meanings. I primarily approach this film as a music scholar, asking questions about how music relates to a historical moment and to a tradition of critical thought.

      Like his film, Albert Maysles often responds elliptically to questions. The more I spoke with him and read his other interviews, the more I found his opacity to be less an evasive tactic than an invitation for thought. Refusing to be definitive, he graciously opened conversations with others and reengaged with his work. Albert Maysles did not simply create pretty pictures of the Rolling Stones. He engaged them with an approach that was rooted in his staunch philosophy of American documentary filmmaking—one that eschewed the manipulation of Hollywood continuity editing. Much has been written about the gap between the truth claims of direct cinema dogma and manipulation inherent in any film (Bordwell and Thompson 1997: 409–15; Hall 1991; Winston 1993: 44–45; Stahl 2013: 67–74). In Maysles’s films, continuity editing mixes with direct cinema features, for instance, the lack of a voice-of-God narrator, the shaky camera, and the rough editing. I’m less interested in whether or not the Maysleses were radical or imitative of Hollywood narrative practices. In this chapter, I’d like to investigate how the Maysleses and editor Charlotte Zwerin used a diverse set of cinematic techniques to make a rhetorical claim about music—that music can be a commodity, a social glue, and an artwork at the same time.

       Reconfiguring Documentary Makes Room for Music

      Before he picked up a camera, Albert Maysles was on an academic path. He had earned a master’s degree in psychology from Boston University and, as a graduate student, taught introductory courses there for three years. He began to veer from this path in 1955, speeding through the Russian countryside on a motorcycle with a Keystone 16mm wind-up camera and a few hundred feet of film. The Cold War was in full swing. Maysles wanted to meet the faceless people who were our supposed enemies.

      A few months earlier in New York, Life Magazine had denied him a photo assignment on Russian psychiatry. On his way back to Boston, he had chanced a visit to the CBS offices. In a stroke of luck, the head of the news department agreed to loan him equipment. As Maysles explains in an interview elsewhere, he had experience with still photography but had never shot film.

      “The guy said, ‘I understand that you’re going back to Boston, then coming back through on your way to Helsinki and then Russia. So when you stop off in New York on your way out, shoot a little bit on this roll of film, we’ll process it and take a look at it and give you a critique.’ That was my total filmic training” (in Dixon 2007: 59).

      The result of Maysles’s trip to the Soviet Union was the fourteen-minute film Psychiatry in Russia (1955) that examined mental health care in three Soviet cities. It was televised by The Dave Garroway Show on NBC TV and WGBH public television in 1956. The film revealed non-Freudian psychiatric practices. That was interesting—for a psychologist during the Cold War. But Maysles also demonstrated another important concept in his first film: Russians are people. The report of differences of psychiatric treatment is accompanied by images of Russians smiling, interacting with each other, staring into the camera, and lovingly treating the mentally ill. Yet his inability to record sound limited the degree to which he could portray people. In our interview Maysles acknowledges this limitation:

      “I knew that sound was important. But because I didn’t have any, I just sort of put that yearning aside and did whatever I could to familiarize ourselves with Russian people. So that does come across whether it’s a still photograph or a silent movie but not as strong as it might if it was made with talking and music.”

      What Maysles