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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
“You can’t do research but you can make a documentary film.” This is essentially what I was told by the California Department of Corrections in 2004. I had been trying to gain access to an institution that was notorious for denying access to researchers. And yet, I had a deep curiosity about the contemporary musical practices of prisoners. Prison has an older history as a site of folkloric and ethnomusicological research, and I knew that prisoners were forming bands, securing and maintaining instruments, teaching each other to play, and writing songs. I wondered how their experiences of incarceration and music interrelated, how the experience of creating music behind bars differed from doing so on the outside, and how it fit into the relationships among prisoners and between inmates and the administration. I had been able to address these questions only by entering Soledad Prison (i.e., Soledad Correctional Training Facility) as a visitor. I couldn’t even bring a pen.
In 2003, the prison suffered a round of budget cuts. The department that approved research was hit hard, and when I approached the prison later that year I was told that it was unlikely that anyone could even look at a proposal. They told me I could, however, bring in a camera and make a film, for even as the evaluation of research requests ground to a halt, the media department remained well staffed. And, officially, a documentary film did not count as research. While I was glad I was able to find a way into the prison via my camera, I have come to disagree with their claim that film is not research.
Throughout this book, I hope to argue that filmmaking can be a process of understanding music and that a film can be a way of expressing that understanding. In fact, this practice has existed outside the discipline of ethnomusicology for decades. Documentary filmmakers have developed methods to question, problematize, and present arguments about music and its role in the world. This is the disciplinary territory of ethnomusicologists—those who study music and its relation to the social world. But, as many have pointed out, ethnomusicologists work in print. Film offers different ways of asking questions and thinking critically about music—through framing a shot, making an editing decision on where to cut a shot, placing music in relation to an image, or offering a sense of space and time. Each act of making a film can be part of a filmmaker’s discovery of music. With this understanding, in examining film’s role in ethnomusicological research, it is not enough to simply ask how film is different from print. It’s important to ask how filmmakers have developed their practices of making films about music. I began thinking about these practices when making films myself.
When I was granted permission to bring a camera into the prison, I decided that I should study documentary filmmaking. At UCLA, I found Marina Goldovskaya, a Russian-born cinematographer and director who taught film at the university. Many of her films ask questions about the complexity of life after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her films are more than just images of real life; the images pointed to important issues in their own carefully constructed ways. Studying with Goldovskaya opened me up to like-minded filmmakers. I was able to meet people like Les Blank, Ross McElwee, and Joe Berlinger. More importantly, I sat through screenings and discussions of films—discussions that seemed strange for someone coming from the world of ethnomusicology. They seemed technical, focusing on narrative, camera pans, and dissolves, for instance. It seemed the equivalent of reading a text and then discussing punctuation, verb tense, and font types—not part of an intellectual conversation.
Over the course of Goldovskaya’s class, I was able to produce a short film on music in a California prison that made it to a few festivals and community screenings. I also worked with her on a qualifying exam on music documentaries for my PhD. Our sustained conversation during this time began to close the gap between ethnomusicology and documentary film. As a result, I became an advocate for making scholarly films about music, further inspired by my UCLA professors Tim Rice and Helen Rees, who later studied with Goldovskaya. Soon ethnomusicology graduate students became fixtures in Goldovskaya’s class, and I took jobs with faculty members, helping them to produce their own films. I edited Ankica Petrovic’s John Filcich: Life in the Circle Dance (2008) and Tony Seeger’s The Mouse Ceremony (2015), which gave me practical experience at turning scholarship into film. Shooting Helen Rees’s short film on Bell Young and the guqin (seven-sting zither) gave me perspective on production. For me—and for some of the ethnomusicologists I knew—film became an increasingly viable scholarly medium, despite its relative absence from conferences and publications.
Once I began teaching at Georgetown University, I turned the work I had done with Goldovskaya into a class that I have taught for the last seven years. During that time, I embarked on a larger project—a feature-length documentary on music in three Louisiana prisons—that has screened dozens of times internationally. My perspective on this book comes from my relationship with filming music and learning how to watch films critically. It also comes from a series of interviews conducted with the filmmakers featured in these pages. Talking to them about their practice has helped me understand film in a more profound way. We discussed how the eye engages with the image, what audiences do during screening, visual metaphors of sound, the temporal disruption of a cut. The analytic discussions led me to think about how film can take on the concerns of ethnomusicology—learning about how to think about and experience music through film and uncover important questions about music.
Not all music documentaries do this. More often, films about music focus on telling a particular story about a musical era or performer. Films like Ken Burns’s Jazz (2001), James Spooner’s Afropunk (2003), Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (2007), Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (2012), and Freddy Camalier’s Muscle Shoals (2013), for instance, offer captivating stories, but they limit film to being an explanatory text: using sound to tug at emotions and still images—gently moving from side to side—to offer historical veracity. These filmmakers conduct exhaustive interviews, often choosing stars who might draw the interest of fans. Editors stitch together their words to tell a particular story about music. But my work in film has revealed other possibilities.
This is not a “how-to” book, though I will introduce cinematic strategies that have value for ethnomusicology, developed in filmmaking circles outside the discipline. I hope it may encourage someone to pick up a camera and start thinking about music through the lens, through the edit, and through engaging people with film.
Films about Music
As I brought film to my scholarly practice, I looked for the filmography of my discipline. The lack of films surprised me, especially when reading through the methodological history of ethnomusicology. There is a discrepancy between the technological promise of film and the production rate of ethnomusicological films. In 1974 the filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch speculated: “I must mention the importance that sync filming will have in the field of ethnomusicology” (2003: 42). Researchers do use video. But decades after Rouch’s prediction, films are still not understood as doing cinematic theory. Video is mostly just a part of method (collecting and analyzing) and presentation (showing a clip at a conference or grabbing a still for print). Anthropologists have created the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, and ethnomusicologists have used film toward analytical ends. Only a few ethnomusicologists have produced films as part of their scholarly work. A good example of ethnomusicological film is Gerhard Kubik’s 1962 film of music in Northern Mozambique. Kubik recorded Mangwilo xylophone musicians on silent film and then visually transcribed the timing of upswings and downswings frame by frame. Film helped Kubik’s particular research problem, allowing him to correlate motor skills with acoustic patterns. Jean Rouch’s Batteries Dogon: Éléments pour une étude des rythmes (1966) presents a series of Dogon musicians playing parts of a complex drumming pattern on rocks and logs, bringing them together at the end in a dance supported by polyrhythmic drumming. The film offers a rhythmic analysis of complex rhythmic patterns. Steve Feld’s A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie (2009) follows a Ghanaian Por Por funeral procession and then shows the musicians looking at a photographic book about New Orleans jazz funerals. The film reveals not only the similarity of styles but also the diasporic meaning of the pan-African practices for the Por Por musicians. Hugo Zemp (1979; 1986; 1990c) and John Baily (2007; 2011) have also produced ethnomusicological films, identifying questions about musical change, diaspora, and musical meaning.
But most films by ethnomusicologists rely heavily on textual arguments constructed by voice-over narration and interview testimony from musicians. Tim Rice’s May It Fill Your Soul (2011), Zoe Sherinian’s This Is a Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum (2011), and Lee Bidgood’s Banjo Romantika (2015) offer expert description of musical traditions, accounting for change and reflexively including the filmmaker-ethnomusicologist in the films. All provide excellent visual and aural examples of musical traditions, taking advantage of film’s ability to offer text, sound, and image. That said, they all operate mostly in the perspicuous mode, favoring clarity over experience. Sensations are often explained rather than felt. Despite some efforts, ethnomusicology’s major use for film is the instructional film or video lecture—perhaps from the JVC Anthology of World Music and Dance collection, aimed at an undergraduate classroom.
As I built a filmography, I began to include films slightly outside the disciplinary circle. A few nonethnomusicologist filmmakers have produced important documents on disappearing traditions. Alan Lomax’s The Land Where the Blues Began (1979) and the majority of Les Blank’s and John Cohen’s films use the camera to contextualize music. Using varying degrees of narration, these films present less argument than documentation, preserving dying musical practices and showing how music is part of the daily lives of (mostly rural) people. Films made by ethnomusicologists and those just outside the discipline offer examples of translating concerns and methods from text to film—presenting the voices of voiceless musicians, giving visibility and audibility to underrepresented musical practices, and brokering meaning across cultural distances.
Looking over the body of scholarly and folkloric films, I began to wonder why ethnomusicology has never taken on a cinematic way of theorizing about music. Cinematography and musical placement offer such rich ways of experiencing music. One answer might be in the early definition of what ethnomusicology was. In his seminal book The Anthropology of Music, Alan Merriam hoped to bring disciplinary focus to a study of music that rigorously accounted for culture. His precursors were an eclectic bunch—explorers, composers, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and song hunters. As a call to order, Merriam proposed that ethnomusicology should be a discipline of “sciencing about music” (1964: 19–25). He clearly advocated for an empirical method (social science) of studying the humanities (performing arts). In so doing, he cut out the option of ethnomusicology using critical art in understanding music. Reconsidering Merriam’s disciplinary approach, what might one branch of the humanities (film) be able to reveal about another branch of the humanities (music)?
Two influential musical ethnographies contain pathways for answering this question. In his book on music in a Papua New Guinea rain forest, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Steven Feld concludes with two photos of Kaluli men in full ritual dress. The content of the photos is the same. A man is dressed in a costume of feathers used for a ceremony in which the man becomes a bird. The first photo freezes the man and his outfit, the medium depth of field blurring the forest behind him. The details of the outfit are easy to see—the symmetrical arrangement of feathers, the painted designs on his body, the drum he holds in his hands. The second photo is of the same outfit, yet it suffers from extreme motion blur, perhaps because the lack of light required a long exposure. The details are lost in the blur but the photograph captures the motion and, in fact, the figure resembles a bird as much as it does a man. Of this photograph, Feld states, “In a sense, then, the imaging code typically considered to be the least documentary and the most ‘artistic’ structures what is the most ethnographic of my photographs” (2012: 236). The image conveys the experience of the ceremony. Feld continues to suggest that images can bring analysis back to a meaningful whole—the multilayered and multimodal meaningful event that ethnomusicologists interrogate. Like the photograph, cinema can present a synthesis. But it can also provide analysis. For example, a close-up of an instrument encourages listening for that instrument. Including two people in a frame encourages a consideration of their relationship.
Feld’s blurred man-bird image has another significant contribution for thinking of how film can engage music. He suggests that the image is an expression of “co-aesthetic witnessing” (2012: 233–38). Choosing the blurred shot renders the Kaluli ritual in photography. In other words, the photo does what the ritual does: it softens the distinction between man and bird. To varying degrees, the filmmakers that I engage in this book approach music through coaesthetics—using the image to represent the elements of music. Shirley Clarke attempts to make a film based on Ornette Coleman’s musical theory of harmolodics. Chris Hegedus instinctively pairs circular camera motion with circular harmonic sequences in the music of Depeche Mode. Jem Cohen uses visual and narrative disruption to mirror the dub techniques that Fugazi uses. Co aesthetic witnessing has the potential to show musical elements from a cinematic perspective—an act that is theoretical (from the Greek theoros, meaning “spectator”)1 and ethnographic when anchored to the understandings of the people being filmed. A film can reveal aspects of music shown through musical and cinematic practices.
The second musical ethnography that helps frame how filmmaking might be used to study music is Tim Rice’s May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Rice came to Bulgarian music as an amateur dancer. As part of his phenomenological approach to understanding the music, he suggests that his understanding of the music expanded from the horizon of dancing. Rice suggests that dance is one of many “nodes of musical cognition and understanding,” that the body offers a meaningful experience of music in the same way that playing an instrument or speaking with musical terminology engages musical understanding (1994: 98–103). In this sense, understanding can take many forms—from moving the body without regard to tempo (an expressive understanding of the fact that music is playing) to playing virtuosic melodic ornaments on a Bulgarian bagpipe (an expressive understanding of melodic details particular to Bulgarian music). Rice’s contribution is that he describes these activities as types of nonverbal understanding. Extending Rice’s theory to cinema, I argue that filmmakers engage cinema as a way of understanding music. The process of shooting and editing can be expressive nodes of understanding. Shown to an audience, a film can present an understanding of music and of musical issues. Bringing back Feld, my central claim here is that the filmmakers I present in this book develop and express coaesthetic understandings of music through shooting, editing, and constructing a narrative—they engage filmmaking about music.
I wrote this book to analyze cinematic techniques and offer perspectives brought through interviews with filmmakers who use their practice to understand music. In Merriam’s terms, perhaps this is a work of sciencing about filmmaking about music. My goal, however, is not to establish a science about music films but to articulate how making films about musicians can contribute an ethnomusicological understanding about music. Interview, music analysis, and the stories of production build an investigation into how each film operates as a set of practices that understand music and its relation to social issues.
The filmmakers I interviewed for this book are not ethnomusicologists, so much so that they often felt unqualified to speak authoritatively about music. That, to me, is the great opportunity that these films offer. Films by people who are primarily filmmakers make more cinematic presentations of music—through narrative, montage, realism, symbolic representation, and temporality, for instance. While they may have felt unqualified to “speak” authoritatively, each is entirely qualified to create films about music. These films operate more in the experiential mode using techniques that differ from ethnomusicological texts. Their commonality, however, is in the acknowledgment that musical and social worlds are inseparable and that problems and questions should drive inquiry into music. Having chosen the types of films to address, I needed to sort out how to write about these films.
Existing Scholarship on Music Documentaries
Scholars have written about film in many different ways. Surveying this literature has given me a way of deciding how to write about the films I present 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” (1993: 181). For both Spivak and Benjamin, the task of the translator is discovery of new things that language cannot yet express. Translation can do more than bridge a gap; it can expose meaningful gaps—losses in translation. Spivak’s and Benjamin’s understandings of language translation are instructive when considering how each practice—writing, filmmaking, and musicmaking—relates to another in different ways.
Considering film and print, anthropologist Peter Ian Crawford distinguishes authorial goals: “Whereas film predominantly, or at least ideally, exhibits sensuous capacities, the written text, especially that of academia, is characterized by its intelligibility. Referring to hermeneutics, one would say that film tends to communicate an understanding, whereas the written text procures some sort of explanation” (1992: 70). Crawford’s distinction harkens back to the notion of experiential filmic worlds that began with pioneer documentarian Dziga Vertov’s manifesto, “My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world” (Vertov in Barbash and Taylor 1997: 120). Understanding film involves a sensuous yet critical perspective that is not limited by intelligible explanation. Crawford understands these as distinct modes: “the perspicuous mode and the experiential mode respectively, indicating that the former tends to emphasize clarity whereas the latter conveys to the audience an understanding open to interpretation” (1992: 75).
Films that operate more in the experiential mode take advantage of the experience of both image and sound. In contrast, the perspicuous mode often attenuates the effect of provocative images. As Nathaniel Dorsky argues, “the syntax of the television-style documentary film, like that of the evening news, often turns the visual vitality of the world into mere wallpaper in support of spoken information” (2005: 29). Essay films map onto writing modes more clearly. The gaps between film and print become wider when writing about observational, experimental, realist, and reflexive films.
Given these differences between writing and cinema, I’ve chosen to write about the music alongside analysis of the films. Setting my writing about ethnomusicological issues—experiences of music, music and gender, entanglements with music and capital, music as a form of labor, and commodification of music, to name a few in this book—reveals how ethnomusicological writing might differ from ethnomusicological cinema. These two modes of understanding music complement each other. Reading a chapter and watching the film should reveal modal gaps and bridges across a terrain of provocative issues in music.
As for the relationship between cinema and music, I use two methods: analysis and interview. To put it simply, I examined the elements of film and music and I spoke to the filmmakers about their process of understanding music through making their films. A challenge in this approach is that the film shifts between the status of being primary (the thing to be studied) and secondary (the thing that studies). In other words, we can examine the films themselves as collections of data (for example, shots, cuts, sounds, text) or examine the films as offering an argument about its data (music and musical practice). Doing both allows for questioning the unique arguments about music that can be approached through film and answering by describing cinematic techniques in granular detail.
One caveat: The filmmakers interviewed should not be understood as the authorities on the meaning of their films, but they can be important informants on the filmmaking process—on the planning, shooting, and editing of the film. What the films accomplish isn’t always what the directors aim to accomplish. The directors make films. The films make arguments. In film studies, the turn from auteur theory has generally left the voice of the director out of scholarship—his or her worldview or creative vision was no longer considered to be the primary factor of film. The directors’ voices have moved to the trade press in the form of behind-the-scenes peeks into making films or words of wisdom about filmmaking. In a similar vein, all of the filmmakers featured in this book value the openness of their works. When speaking about Dont Look Back, Pennebaker has said that his film “belongs as much to anybody watching it as it does to me, and that’s its strength I think” (in Kubernik 2006: 14). While these films vary in their degree of openness, they are nonetheless meticulously constructed using what William Rothman terms “revelatory” versus “assertive” modes of argument (1997: 156) or what Bill Nichols calls “perspective” versus “commentary” forms of argument (1991: 118–25). Analysis of these films as ethnomusicological arguments presents my view, one rigorous reading of the film. This shared sentiment among all those I interviewed for the book helps qualify my interviews. My own exegesis on the films themselves can productively coexist with the testimony of the filmmakers about their process.
I hoped to learn from the filmmakers about their process of understanding music. To do so, I conducted interviews with the directors and, in some cases, the musicians. (See Appendix B, “Cited Interviews and Archival Research.”) The existing interviews with these directors—some of which I draw from—don’t offer many perspectives on music. Often, they focus on the band and notable stories about making the film or offer a general perspective on filmmaking. In ethnomusicology, the interview is a central research tool. For me, the interviews were an opportunity to discuss the directors’ films and how they came to understand the nature and role of music while planning, shooting, and editing their films. My interviews with the directors helped me learn more about their questions, their methods, and their developing understanding of their subjects.
Much of the practice of filmmaking rests on habits and developed reflexes. I could not simply ask about reasons for each shot and each cut. Jem Cohen likened shooting music to going into a trance. When I asked D. A. Pennebaker about certain shooting strategies, he responded, “There are no rules about that. You do what’s seems right. You’re just like [the musicians]. You’re just playing music.” So, just like ethnomusicology, much of my job was trying to understand ingrained practices of shooting and editing. Documentary film, more so than narrative film, is a messy practice. While filmmakers do plan, they also have to be responsive to changing situations. The material in the editing room is disorganized and editing becomes a way of thinking through the material. Similar to Pennebaker, Jill Godmilow stressed to me the pragmatic responsiveness that editing requires:
The secret of editing is that when you see it, you go, “Yeah, keep that!” That’s, in some way, the whole process, if it’s not scripted. There are documentaries that are made from scripts, and network television, stuff like that. But you find the film by throwing it all up in the air and seeing how it falls down. You go, “Oh, something happens there,” and “Let’s keep that,” and you solve other problems around it. It’s a lot of problem solving, but a lot of it, I think, has to do with recognition when you’re editing, of “That’s where that should be,” and “That’s how long it should be.”
Editing is an important place to investigate the theorizing of film, since it is in the editing room that many documentary filmmakers find their film—where they find their arguments about their subjects. This process should be familiar to ethnomusicologists’ own work—production is like fieldwork, and postproduction is like analysis.
Overview: The Films and the Chapters
The book is split up into five chapters. Each of the chapters focuses on one particular film, going in depth and providing some of the backstories for each. These five films are my examples of cinema that can be usefully interpreted as ethnomusicological documents, ones that parallel the concerns found in ethnomusicology but demonstrate their understanding cinematically. Each chapter extrapolates the implicit arguments of the film into the explicit theories of ethnomusicology. In a sense, the chapters are an act of translation from cinema to print. But I leave the method of translation transparent, explaining how the elements of cinema (for instance, shots, cuts, sound, sequence structure, lighting, and narrative) can produce an understanding of music and its relation to social issues. While the arguments in each chapter are independent from one another, they reveal a range of ways that cinema can understand music. Surveys of cinema often cite too many films to be useful to those not steeped in film history. Long lists of important films remain unwatched, while a general argument about film history or method stands. Deep focus on a small number of films accomplishes a couple of things. First, it allows room to discuss the usefulness of specific cinematic techniques, tying the technical aspects to the rhetorical value. Each film develops its own grammar of cinema that produces experiences among audiences. Second, focusing on a single film provides a sustained conversation with the directors—and in some cases, with the musicians—about the particularities of the film.
The five films I have selected share certain qualities. They are all directed by independent filmmakers. Many of these films aim to disturb conventions, aware of how media and ideologies are linked. They all share certain features of modernism: sustaining multiple viewpoints, ambiguity, dense allusions, fragmentation, and juxtaposition. The films all address the inescapable limitations of our view, revealing a complexity of events instead of reducing them. They emphasize the process of perception and knowing. In this way, these films differ from most scholarly texts. They eschew sequential, developmental, cause-and-effect presentations of reality.
In addition, these films all involve what William Rothman calls “co-conspiracy,” aligned goals and arguments between filmmaker and musician subjects. The relationships between the filmed and the filmmaker contribute to a variety of interesting alignments between cinema and music, transpositions of musical phenomena to film. These films, to varying degrees, borrow musical strategies, rhetoric, and political critiques as well as extend musical practices into an audiovisual document of collaboration and inquiry.
Thus, there are three interwoven modes of writing that run through each chapter: the interviews with the directors as testimony of their processes of understanding through filmmaking, the description of the film as a way of focusing on important cinematic strategies, and my analysis of the films as ethnomusicological documents. Shifting between these three modes of inquiry into the films offers a variety of perspectives on these five exemplary films about music’s relationship to social and cultural phenomena.
Chapter 1 examines the film Gimme Shelter (1970) by Albert and David Maysles. The film documents the Rolling Stones on tour, culminating in the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival in which eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death on film.
The Maysles brothers are some of the most renowned figures in American documentary cinema and early pioneers of direct cinema, a method of filmmaking with the goal of liberating truth from the manipulative conventions of cinema and journalism. Rather than asserting a narrative to explain a situation, practitioners of direct cinema let the crisis itself direct the cameras and structure the film.3
Much has been written on this film, in part because of the centrality of Albert Maysles in American documentary cinema, in part because of the popularity of the Rolling Stones, and in part because of the documentation of the stabbing. Many view the film as representing the death of 1960s counterculture.
I am primarily interested in the ways in which the sound of the film contributes to meaning and the perspectives the film offers on music. I argue that the film reveals music as being many different things—a commodity, a means of congregation, and autonomous art. The film does not explain these different manifestations. Rather, it puts its listening and viewing audience in different relationships to sound.4
Chapter 2 situates Jill Godmilow’s Antonia: Portrait of the Woman (1974) within second-wave feminist filmmaking. Along with her contemporaries, Godmilow questioned the truth claims of direct cinema. Godmilow doesn’t hover with a camera until someone speaks. Instead, she draws a story out of pioneer female symphony conductor Antonia Brico. The interview has become such a stock technique of contemporary documentary. But for Godmilow, it was a radical way of presenting untold stories—ones that were so often buried under the noise of patriarchy. The film is structured around an interview with Brico that does more than create a textual narrative. The film offers feelings of Brico’s relationship to her story and—in moments—forces audiences to consider their relationship to Brico’s story. I bring together Laura Mulvey’s influential identification of the “male gaze” and Tim Rice’s theory of musical meaning to suggest that music and image can create certain musical vicarities, subject positions that emerge from our relationships to how music is meaningful in different situations.
Godmilow’s film also provides a powerful feminist critique of the orchestra. The film certainly resonated beyond female conductors. The orchestra represented a complex structure of patriarchy, especially for women who were beginning to articulate ways in which women face challenges entering the workplace. But as a film about gender and orchestras, Antonia is a carefully constructed analysis of the social nature of orchestral performance.5
Chapter 3 picks up on postrealism as introduced at the end of chapter 2 by examining Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America (1985). Clarke uses techniques that reveal meaning-making conventions of documentary that productively obscure a biographical narrative of Ornette Coleman, a jazz musician associated with free jazz. The film centers on the performance of Coleman’s orchestral work Skies of America during the opening of Caravan of Dreams, an avant-garde arts center in Fort Worth, Texas. Clarke passed away in 1997, so I draw primarily from her archive at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to present the backstory of her work-for-hire. The multiple agendas of producers and filmmaker provide a way of looking at the film as a site of struggle over the symbolic meaning of a musician in a neoliberal age. The film manages to reveal the ways in which Coleman is constructed as a representative of success in a free market economy, while also showing the racial inequity across Fort Worth’s neighborhoods. The critical arguments of the film are oblique, but reading the film within the context of its production provides an example of how reflexive film techniques can dismantle representation. Ornette is born from the logics of capital, though, in the end, it undermines those logics.
Clarke was one of a few American filmmakers inspired by the European city symphony genre of the 1920s—Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) being a classic of the genre. The city symphony melds artistic form and social commentary. These films aimed to create “realistic tributes to urban excitement” (Barsam 1992: 290). Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957) used jazz to score the city’s rhythm but instead created kaleidoscopic images from the city itself. Shirley Clarke’s alternative vision is that of a cross artistic perspective, blending visual arts with music, while staying attuned to urban social issues. Clarke was part of a prolific independent group of filmmakers in Greenwich Village along with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. Clarke’s Skyscraper (1959) was one of the last of the poetic documentary films made as attention to documentary went to direct cinema in the 1960s (Lev 2006: 273).
In Ornette: Made in America, Clarke takes the opportunity to cinematically render Coleman’s musical theory of harmolodics. The interrelatedness of art forms is a particularly modernist notion that Clarke and Coleman share. Looking at the film as a cineharmolodic work offers a new way of understanding Coleman’s inscrutable philosophy and provides a model of a film that demonstrates musical processes in place of explaining them.
Chapter 4 continues the focus on cinematic extension of musical concepts through an investigation of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Depeche Mode: 101 (1988). Pennebaker—who, like Albert Maysles, was a pioneer of direct cinema—is well known for his films on Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and other “classic rock” acts. Depeche Mode: 101 strays from the genre with an account of the 1980s British electropop band’s massive US tour. In addition to the band, Pennebaker and Hegedus include a busload of young fans who follow Depeche Mode from New York to California. I argue that the film dramatizes various types of estrangement in post-Fordist America. Pennebaker and Hegedus have often spoken about creating documentary films that draw from theater. That strategy, brought to the massive stage design of Depeche Mode concerts, makes the film very close to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—a union of the arts. The film draws on dramatic narrative, music, dance, poetry (lyrics), and light design in a way that rejects the rockist stance of preceding “classic” rock bands.
While neither Hegedus nor Pennebaker is a musicologist, they make decisions about shooting and editing performance in ways that make sense of the music. The chapter goes into the details of Hegedus’s visual analysis, drawing attention to visual alignments with musical elements—for 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 together segments of conversations. A second level of citation comes from preexisting interviews and a third from scholarly references.
The analysis of music and film occasionally necessitates (what I think to be useful) jargon. When discussion of film gets into technical terms from film, it is likely that the term is in the glossary.
