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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 had brought back from Russia for his first film were moving images that he could edit together with added narration, but he also came home a filmmaker. He reminisces about joining the Drew Associates—a collection of filmmakers who would rethink the goals of documentary film: “Things turned around in 1956, where I met up with Bob Drew, [D. A.] Pennebaker, and [Richard] Leacock. It was introduced to us a new form of documentary filming where you film what was actually happening…. It was such an important advance. It also achieved a much greater sense of opportunity for people to connect with one another, people of different cultures.”

One of the goals was to let the cameras retreat out of the attention of the people being filmed.

As Maysles puts it, “Spontaneity. Not controlling what’s going on. Observing. Letting things happen with the shot. And patience so that when it does come along you’re right there to get it in all its fullness.”

Many of these early direct cinema films had little music. Hollywood films used music to manipulate. Direct cinema was to be a method free from manipulation, a space in which audiences could make up their own minds.

As much as direct cinema filmmakers distinguished themselves in opposition to classical Hollywood cinema for being manipulative, they also drew from narrative cinema. Their films were dramatic; they used music (albeit diegetic) to score mood; they presented close-ups of faces and found objects to offer psychological focus and symbolic representation. While direct cinema offers great latitude for interpretation, elements of the films still work to narrow meaning. For this chapter, I’ll propose that both direct cinema and classical Hollywood cinema are ideal practices. The films themselves—for our purposes, Gimme Shelter—employ elements of both practices. Consider direct cinema to be a well from which filmmakers draw rather than a corpus of works or a stylistic circumscription of a film.

Gimme Shelter illustrates how a film in the wake of idealized direct cinema drew from narrative techniques and, in so doing, opened up space for music to have a larger role in creating meaning. The space in-between is a space in which music can shift from one role to another, from scoring, to symbolizing, to being an aesthetic experience of sound in motion.

The Independent Brothers

Maysles left Drew Associates in 1962 to form Maysles Films with his brother David, who had been working in Hollywood as an assistant producer (Vogels 2005: 5). Albert shot images and David recorded sound until David’s death in 1987. As a pair, they extended the concept of “being there” to filming the lives of ordinary people, unusual people, artists, musicians, and celebrities. By and large, most attention to their filmmaking is centered on the image. But gathering sound was just as thoughtful. That was where David came in.

During our interview, Maysles recounts, “Well, he was interested in music—jazz and so forth.”

Interest alone didn’t make David a great sound recordist. He developed a method of recording sound that augmented the goal of being there.

Maysles continues, “Sound for me was just a good sound. Can you understand it? And I could tell if the sound of the music was appropriate, if it was as good as it could be. Apparently my brother really knew what he was doing. And we had good equipment.”

They modified their audio equipment to extend recording time, synced the camera without a wire, and were able to get close with minimal technological presence.

“We changed the size of the reels. Because there was enough space to make the reels double the size, adding just a couple inches to the reels but giving double the amount of sound.”

David used a handheld Sennheiser 804 shotgun condenser microphone, which picked up what was directly in front with great detail while attenuating sound from the sides. The result is an intimacy with the subject, the sense that we are just listening to them. It also makes us unable to hear other things. What we can’t hear is just as important as what we do hear.

“It was more direct,” Maysles says, “If you held it properly, you got the closest you could to the source of sound. So you know, even to this day right now, most soundmen have a good microphone that’s maybe not as close to my brother’s, but that it’s hanging overhead which I think is always a distraction to everybody.”

Minimizing the equipment and isolating sound in the environment allowed the Maysleses to connect with the people they filmed. They could both get close and develop close relationships.

“It’s like being just another person there…. We both had this feeling of empathy and people would trust us,” Maysles says.

Their films were not just windows into other people’s lives. They made critical investigations into their worlds. In general, the Maysleses’ films thwart definitive reads of the people on-screen, using details to call attention to the uniqueness of the images presented. Characteristics are not symbols to be read but rather proof of uniqueness, proof that our world is a complex and plural experience. Their films pull us into different ways of watching cinema—especially how we view people in cinema. Psychiatry in Russia (1955) used the camera to tell us about Freudian alternatives. I claim that his subsequent work with the Drew Associates offered experiences of alternative mindsets.

The Rolling Stones were part of the so-called British Invasion. In 1964 they trailed the Beatles across the Atlantic to reinvigorate popular music in the United States. Mick Jagger has said of the 1960s, “Suddenly popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important, perhaps the most important, art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before” (The Rolling Stones: n.d.). “Big” meant that you could produce a movie about your band. The Beatles had Hard Day’s Night (1964). Bob Dylan had Dont Look Back (1967). Both of these films were collaborations with notable directors—Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker, respectively. By 1969 the Rolling Stones had a large promotion budget and they wanted a film of their own (Booth 2012: 177). The Maysles brothers were getting critical acclaim yet little financial success with Salesman (1969), their film about a traveling Bible salesman. A film about the Rolling Stones had an easier target audience.

In our interview, Maysles recounts getting a phone call in 1969: “I got a call from Haskell Wexler. He’s a famous cinematographer, moviemaker from Hollywood. He said, ‘I’ve just been talking to the Stones. They’re about to go on tour around America. They’re going to be at the Plaza Hotel tomorrow. You might want to look them up.’ Neither my brother nor I knew anything about these guys, but I took Haskell’s word for it. We went to the Plaza Hotel, knocked on the door, got to talking with them. They said, ‘Well, tomorrow night, we’re performing in Baltimore. You want to come along?’ So we went along with them.”

“To shoot or just to go?” I ask.

“Just to go. I don’t think we shot anything there. Anyway, we thought, ‘Yeah. These guys are good.’”

“What impressed you about them?”

“We loved the music. And of course we felt we had good rapport with them. We were eager to get to know them better and to get to know their music and to record it. So, a couple days later, they’re performing at Madison Square Garden and there we are. I think it was two days of performances and then off to Muscle Shoals and then Altamont.”

What happened at Altamont completely altered the course of the film, turning it into much more than a simple concert film. To some viewers, it indicted the band in the melee, but in the end, the band allowed the film to screen. Interestingly, the Rolling Stones would not give a pass to Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (1972), which contains many unseemly shots of backstage parties. The Maysleses’ film has less backstage access yet brings out an intimacy with a complex rock and roll tour.

The intimacy found in much of direct cinema comes from filmmaker and fellow Drew Associate Richard Leacock. His philosophy of “being there” is a strategy of being present while shooting and conveying the feeling of presence for a film audience through the edit. Albert Maysles has his own spin on Leacock’s concept of “being there.” He’s also very good at making friends. In our interview, Maysles tells me about his process:

“Immediately upon meeting the person who is to be filmed—immediately—the person catches something in the cameraperson’s eyes that conveys the possibilities of love. If you have that kind of relationship and have that kind of heart-to-heart feeling yourself as a photographer, then it reaches the subject and you get the same in return.”

His cinematography capitalizes on cinema’s ability to pass the relationships he develops through shooting on to his audiences with the film.

“I’m interested in the humanization process, how people make friendships,… but at the same time, extending that privilege to anyone who sees the film. They see and hear exactly what I’m getting.”

From internationally acclaimed actor Marlon Brando to Bible salesman Paul Brennan, Maysles’s trust made through friendship is palpable.

Not so with Mick Jagger.

“Mick Jagger was a little difficult,” says Maysles. “He doesn’t get that close to people.”

Jagger’s distance from the Maysleses gives Gimme Shelter distinction. Instead of developing an intimacy with characters, the film pulls us into the image-making apparatus of large-scale rock and roll. “Being there” is being in the studio, at the concert, in a production meeting, on the stage, at a photo shoot, a hotel room, and so on. As a critical way into the mediated apparatus, the film intervenes by creating a sense of spontaneity, an understanding of complexity, and an engagement with struggle. The interplay of these comes through a structure of the film that is unpredictable but encourages us to think about connections.

Alternative Structuring

The structure of Gimme Shelter embodies the philosopher William James’s interest in making truth through engaging in spontaneity and employing an unconventional structure. Many films—even documentary—follow a standard five-part dramatic arc. An exposition establishes time, place, characters, and conflict. Rising action introduces complications for the protagonist leading to a climax. The climax brings the drama to its highest point of conflict and suspense. Falling action leads toward the end, resolving the conflict. During the dénouement, the characters return to their normal lives, often changed from the conflict. Maysles has often looked for alternative structural models.

He says, “Too many people making a documentary film figure, ‘Well, if it doesn’t have a conflict, if it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, then who’s going to watch it for any length of time?’”

For Gimme Shelter, they borrowed from literature. Specifically, they borrowed Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in which a true story of a murder is told from multiple perspectives out of chronological order. The book is a nonfiction novel. After making the film With Love from Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966), the Maysleses and Zwerin looked to make films the way Capote wrote books. In the film, Capote states his desire to make art from factual material. There is a kinship between direct cinema and the nonfiction novel. Salesman was one of the first films for which the editor—in this case Charlotte Zwerin—was recognized as a coauthor of the film, and Gimme Shelter makes that acknowledgment of the editor-as-author through the transparency of filming the editing process. Zwerin’s editing strategy offers a sense of unpredictability that culminates in a sense of complexity.

Her privileging of spontaneity begins structurally when members of the Rolling Stones begin to review the film in the editing room. Zwerin invited the band to come view the material and told them that they might be filmed then. Dialogic editing has its antecedents in documentary. Robert Flaherty watched his dailies with “Nanook” (Allakariallak) in the early 1920s, while shooting Nanook of the North (1922). Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin famously end their 1961 cinéma vérité opus, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) watching and discussing the film with their subjects. In general, on-screen discussion of the cinematic experience reveals the limitations of cinematic truth.

Structurally, Zwerin uses the band reviewing the material as an umbrella—a place, time, and activity that connects all the various parts of the film. Documentary scholar Bill Nichols notes that documentaries are historical documents (1991: ix–xi). In this case, there are two layers of historicity: the event of the festival, including the lead-up to and the death of Meredith Hunter, and the moment of reflection or debriefing. This umbrella continually returns us to spontaneity and complexity. As a central place, out of time with the tour, we learn to expect to jump from anywhere to anywhere within the film. In the film, David Maysles is a step away from addressing the audience directly by explaining the edit to drummer Charlie Watts.

Watts says, “It’s really hard to see this together, isn’t it?”

“It’ll take time,” responds David.

“What?”

“Eight weeks.”

“Eight weeks? You think you can do it that quick?”

And then David speaks simultaneously to Watts and to the audience: “This gives us freedom. All you guys watching it. We may only be on you for a minute, then go to almost anything.”

David’s statement prepares us for jumping from the ribs of the umbrella to any other part.

Cuts, to either film or audiotape, can have varying degrees of continuity as we pass over the cut. By nature, cuts are violent. They elide time through physical separation and splicing. (Computer video editing still relies on the metaphor of continuous strips ready for blade cuts or trimming.) We then move through levels of the image-making apparatus, from the film editing to the event planning to the stage to wandering through the crowds at Altamont.

The next two sections of this chapter analyze scenes from the film to show how the edit places music in productively slippery relations to the image. As we watch the band listening to their own music, music becomes different things. Witnessing the shift from music being one thing to an other gives us the experience of music as an idea and music as its own phenomenon. Editing music in film can transform music into an idea. Music can represent an emotion, establish a sense of continuity through discontinuous images, or referentially tie us to something that we culturally associate with the song. Gimme Shelter strategically presents music in many different forms, connecting ideas and material. As distinct from language or visual imagery, music has a temporality that flows in time. It is more efficient at getting us to experience truth as continuous and discontinuous change. The Maysleses’ use of music in Gimme Shelter shows truth to be something that is in constant motion, conditional, complex, and partial.

The Many Ways of Listening to “Wild Horses”

As Maysles and I discuss the difficulty of getting close to Mick Jagger, we begin to talk about the many close-up shots of another one of the band members—drummer Charlie Watts. Maysles recalls a moment of getting close with his camera.

“It was a wonderful moment when they were listening to the playback of ‘Wild Horses,’” he says.

Maysles explains, “Lots of times you get your best material when you’re not filming a performance onstage but the subjects are listening to the playback in the sound studio. You can get right up close on their hands and on their faces. You feel the music coming even more from them than when they are actually performing.”

Generally, we think of audio as the support for an image. Sound lends realism to the visual, but what if it was the image’s role to support the sound? I am aware of how students listen with their eyes when I teach. When playing music, students instinctively watch me for cues. Gestures, facial expressions, tapping a beat, pointing, and looking all help to accent music. A camera can frame this act of visual listening.

Al Maysles’s cinematography and Charlotte Zwerin’s editing encourage us to view and, more importantly, listen to this sequence in a particular way. In Jonathan Vogels’s analysis of these studio sequences, he suggests that they develop the band’s character(s) as laconic image-makers.

Whether in the studio, hotel room, or backstage, the film also reveals the group to be surprisingly distanced from their own music. In passive roles as listeners and observers, they are generally transfixed by their own performances, listening intently, sometimes mouthing the words, or dancing a little. Only briefly, in a scene at the Muscle Shoals Recording Studio in Alabama does Jagger suggest how to edit a song; grinning foolishly, he punctuates his direction with a swig from a liquor bottle. (2005: 87)

I think that Vogels is looking more than he is listening. The sequence of the band listening to the playback of “Wild Horses” moves music from the background to the foreground through Zwerin’s minimal edit and through Albert Maysles’s cinematography.

The “Wild Horses” sequence puts us there—not “there” as in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but “there” as in the social space of listening. The setting introduces a feeling of scrutiny just as seeing a microscope, telescope, or other tool of investigation might. The camera augments attentiveness to the music. The sequence ends with a shot that lasts more than two minutes, starting with a close-up of Jagger and then artfully panning between close shots of band members listening to the playback. I will describe this in detail below and argue that it is one of the most memorable shots of the film because it encourages us to listen formally. We leave the sequence having listened to the music as sound in motion because of the copresence of the image—itself a combination of continuity editing and attentive cinematography. Before analyzing the sequence for how the film directs our listening, we should consider different modes of listening.

Modes of Listening

Michel Chion suggests that we shuttle between three primary listening modes in cinematic experience (1994: 25–34). Causal listening ferrets out the source of the sound. In this mode, sounds are indices for events and objects—the ticking of a clock, an explosion, for example. The sound of rewinding tape in the studio draws attention to the medium. Listening for the cause of the sound identifies the music as diegetic sound. The people in the room are clearly in the presence of the sound and the object producing that sound. Semantic listening renders sound into meaning. Listening to speech is a clear example of this. Much work in ethnomusicology attempts to draw connections between music and cultural meanings by positing that music is expressive culture, symbolizing nonmusical things.¹ The details of the music often retreat as the representation of the song comes strongly into mind. As Chion points out, “semantic listening often ignores considerable differences in pronunciation (hence in sound) if they are not pertinent differences” (1994: 28). Reduced listening is akin to formal analysis—listening to the qualities of the sound itself. Chion borrows the term from the French composer Pierre Schaeffer (1994: 29). Schaeffer was a pioneer of musique concrète, a postwar musical effort of producing musical works from actual sounds collected on tape. Not surprisingly, Schaeffer was inspired by cinema—Jean Epstein’s work in particular. Attention to the details of the sound is an empirical endeavor, reducing the listening experience from its cause and its meaning. We may determine a pitch, a timbre, identify a rhythm or a repeated melodic figure. Much classic musicological analysis reduces sound to formal characteristics. Ethnomusicological studies often make use of formal analysis as part of a claim that musical style has a connection to social phenomena. Perhaps the clearest early articulation of this approach is John Blacking’s consideration of “humanly organized sound” and “soundly organized humanity” suggesting that there is interplay between aesthetic forms and social structures (1973).

As I will show next, the “Wild Horses” sequence moves between these three modes of listening.

Sign of Travel, Material Presence, Sound in Motion: The “Wild Horses” Sequence

Editor Charlotte Zwerin directs our ears as much as she does our eyes. It’s no surprise that she had a longstanding interest in music. As a child growing up in Detroit, Zwerin frequented “Big Band and a Movie” events downtown, during which a live band preceded a movie screening (Finn 2003). She married notable jazz trombonist and music author Mike Zwerin. Until her death in 2004, she continued to make music documentaries. Her filmography includes documentaries on Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Toru Takemitsu, Vladimir Horowitz, and Tommy Flanagan as well as films on visual artists Willem de Kooning, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Isamu Noguchi. The music documentarian Bruce Ricker praises Zwerin for her editing work with early direct cinema as well as for her sensitivity to music:

1.1. Structure of “Wild Horses” sequence.

Charlotte’s a pioneer of cinema verite … She’s in the tradition of directors who come out of editing, like Hal Ashby and Robert Parrish. She once said that her major influences are David Maysles and jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan. She gathers all the material and shapes it into a piece of work that’s musical in nature. She’s got a keen eye and she’s a great arranger, like Gil Evans working with Miles Davis. Also, she’s a very good listener, the key to making a good documentary. (In Peary 2003)

As will become obvious in my analysis of the scene, Zwerin’s edit makes us aware of listening. The sequence I will discuss is in three parts: a travel sequence, banter within the studio, and the playback of the song “Wild Horses.” Each of these segments uses visual techniques to encourage us to listen to music (figure 1.1).

Travel to studio: Before we enter the studio, Zwerin uses music as it is typically placed in a transition sequence. Nondiegetically, the song “You Gotta Move” offers flow and a temporality that takes the place of the disrupted temporality of the images. What ends up being an establishing sequence is a series of six shots that brings the band from the Holiday Inn to the Muscle Shoals recording studio.

Zwerin edits with an eye for visual continuity across the cut. (For example, it appears that the band walks through the hotel by keeping their direction the same between the first two shots.) But the musical continuity is perhaps more important. The audio was recorded at the studio during a break from the tour, repurposed as nondiegetic music. “You Gotta Move” is the only audio to be heard—typical of travel sequences in narrative film. The second segment of the sequence positions music in a different relation to the images.

Inside studio: Diegetic music can function as nondiegetic, scoring the scene. Zwerin and the Maysles stumbled upon the richness of finding music in the environment in Salesman, a documentary about a Bible salesman that they had made just before Gimme Shelter. In our conversation, Maysles describes how the found music was particularly useful: “The opening scene of Salesman, the camera is on Paul having a tough time selling the Bible to the point where he must be really feeling pretty low. This child who was sitting on this woman’s lap gets up and goes to the piano and plays something that is just sort of dropping off the way … it’s kind of a musical rendition of Paul’s feeling and performance. You could have Leonard Bernstein working his orchestra and using some of his music and it couldn’t have been better. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. And being played by a child made it all stronger.”

Finding the music in the shot was also finding that music could be two things at once. Music was part of the action and it also represented the psychological state of the main subject of the film. It offered two senses of the real: first, an event of real life in which a child (perhaps inappropriately) signals the end of a social interaction and, second, a serendipitous exteriorization of human feeling for film.

Gimme Shelter capitalizes on the ability of music to give different senses of the real. The “Wild Horses” sequence is a key moment in the film, for it presents music as a thing to apprehend, part of the mise-en-scène, and then it brings the music forward. Music shifts from an element of cinema (in this case, conventional support for a travel sequence) to a subject of cinema (we are, in fact, watching a film about a rock band and their music).

“Wild Horses” plays: Once in the studio, the music swiftly becomes diegetic and then ends. Richards is profiled, close up. As he lights his cigarette, the music drops away and someone makes a semiaudible comment about the drums. Music has gone from a conventional overlay to a diegetic sound—from a conventional material of narrative cinema to a material object in the room caused by tape playback. This transdiegetic motion is brief, placing us in the studio with the sound as a part of mise-en-scène, the world seen in front of the camera.

What is more notable in this entire sequence is how the shots and the cuts then direct us from semantic listening (traveling) to causal meaning (music coming through speakers from magnetic tape) to reduced listening (an engagement with the music). Hearing people discuss the recording places the audience in the mindset of listening to details of the recording. Surely the engineer and the band members have been listening to the performance over and over on tape playback. Jagger belts out a comical, “Ye got tee mooove,” before swigging from a bottle of whiskey, perhaps reacting to hearing his own stylized voice so many times. As he swigs, the sound of tape rewinding (or fast-forwarding) brings us back to the source. The cause of the noise is the preparation to all to listen. With the high-fidelity recording occluding any diegetic sounds, a G chord comes directly out of the screen. On the sixteenth note before beat three, the film cuts to a frontal shot of Charlie Watts, eyes closed as if to say, “Listen.”

Direct address is a distinct and powerful space in cinema, usually reserved for an omniscient narrator. The so-called voice-of-God speaks to the audience, exists outside the time of the narrative, and displaces the images to a more distant place. There are implications to the music’s existence within this space. With all diegetic sound attenuated, the music is primary. Pans, zooms, faces, and gestures mostly support our attention to the music as we listen reductively.

At the end of a melody of guitar harmonics, Zwerin cuts to a close-up of Jagger listening. This take is long. In her essay on cinematic timing, Susan Feagin suggests that while rapid cutting can create feelings of excitement, the long take can open up an opportunity for thinking. She quotes the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch explaining why long takes are often rare: Most films, “don’t trust the audience, cutting to a new shot every six or seven seconds” (in Feagin 1999: 175). The average shot length in Gimme Shelter is 9.8 seconds. This particular shot of Jagger lasts twenty-nine seconds: on Jagger for twenty and then on Mick Taylor for the other nine. Taylor’s face is framed like a painting, darkness around his face. This long take does open up what Feagin calls “cognitive freedom” (1999: 179), but the images presented within the long take do direct our attention. The long take encourages us to listen by reducing the cuts and framing people listening. Put differently, the edit doesn’t distract from listening to the music itself and the shots of people listening suggest that we too should be listening. During the direct address of “Wild Horses,” Zwerin includes only three shots, the last one being a surprisingly long 128 seconds.

Once the last shot of the sequence starts, Zwerin hands off the structuring. Placing no cuts, she allows Maysles’s sequence shot to structure our experience. A sequence shot “cuts” within the frame with camera movement. The uncut single shot makes connections through pans, tilts, and zooms.

At this point, we don’t rely on sound for sense of real time. Instead, the visuals keep real time. Michel Chion suggests that generally images give us a sense of space and sound gives us the sense of time—temporal continuity or temporal rupture (1994: 13–14). But there are significant moments of just listening that include images of listening to the music in real time—again, inverting the traditional editing technique of using music to inform images. The cinematography draws our attention to elements of the music—not unlike how we may point, make a facial expression, or tap in the air when playing a recording of music for someone.

As a whole, the final sequence shot opens up an opportunity to listen to the song. As Maysles’s camera moves from Taylor’s cherubic face to Richards sitting on the couch, they are very much in the space and time of the room—the historical present. A stack of papers is behind them. They are clearly listening to what we hear in the time of the film. Mouthing the words, Richards is singing along and moving his head to the rhythm of the song. They both face the left of the frame. Generally, that head angle draws our attention to the relationships of people to their surroundings. We ask: “What do they see?” In this case, their glances are to the left but their eyes are closed, yet we still ask, “What are they seeing?” or perhaps, “What are they hearing?” A zoom amplifies Richards’s head movements and lip sync. At the same time, it reduces what we are able to see in the room and attenuates the sense of real time in the room. In a well-timed pan, Maysles reduces the sense of the room even more by shifting to Richards’s boot. The real time—represented by the images of space—cedes to the musical time of the song as the close-up of the boot keeps time with the music.

In our interview Maysles recalls the shot. He says that he and David were together in the studio, watching them listen.

“As I was on Keith’s face, my brother whispered, ‘Take a look at his boots!’ Again, with my left eye, I could see this strange piece of boot. At the right moment with the music, I moved to it.”

The camera movement and the motion of the boot emphasize the beat of the song. The historical present of being in the room slips away. At this moment in the sequence, primary attention is on the song itself.

“Ricky [Leacock] has described what we do as giving the viewer the feeling of being there. It’s quite a gift, especially if the cameraman has a good eye.”

The strategy of “being there” may be one of direct cinema’s primary truth claims, but few question where “there” is. In this long take, “there” is the musical world of the song. That “strange piece of boot” reduces our vision and makes musical time primary. Perhaps there is some symbolic “meaning” we get out of the boot, but its principal service is to animate the beat of the song. The motion of the boot becomes a tool for listening. A shift of the camera then takes the frame back to Watts, listening as the drums enter. A slight expression of approval and a head nod keeps us listening, perhaps wondering: “What’s it like for Watts to listen to himself?”

In general, film rarely encourages reduced listening. Rather, sound assists narrative by posing questions: “Where did that sound come from?” or “What are the implications of that droning cello?” In music documentaries, however, the music is often the subject. The film promises a more intimate understanding of the music—for instance, attaching it to geography or time or associating it with the character of the music-makers. While these approaches to music documentaries draw on the causal and semantic, film can also encourage an audience to listen reductively. Chion argues that reduced listening requires fixing sound to a medium (1994: 30). When we can listen over and over to the details of the sound, we can catalogue layers of formal features.

Maysles is no stranger to reduced listening—perhaps that’s another reason he films people listening. I ask him about early experiences with music.

“I always loved Mozart,” he says. “My brother—who was five years younger—I remember when he was a kid, I remember him saying several times, ‘Oh, Albie’s playing Mozart again!’ [Laughs] I would listen to it over and over.”

What is more telling than his interest in Mozart is his experience with repetition, playing something again and discovering something new. With no visual reference, focused listening to recorded music can accustom someone to listening reductively.

A film editor with a sensitivity to reduced listening will attach images to sound in ways that encourage listening to sound critically. The image serves a similar function to vocabulary. The medium of film and audiotape offer an opportunity to reduce listening by matching an image, presenting motion, or cutting with a strategic rhythm. In a sense, the visual image underscores or highlights certain sounds. Redundancy of sound and image focuses our ears. In the next section, I’ll show how the “Love in Vain” sequence matches image to sound in a more thorough, analytical way.

The “Wild Horses” sequence demonstrates that music can be part of an image in many ways. Asking the patently useless question, “What is music?” is actually useful here. Throughout Gimme Shelter, music is a subject of the film. It is also used as a psychological index of both the musicians and of the crowd. It is also, at times, the primary aspect of the film. Cinema frames our experience of music, momentarily framing out a majority of what music might be so that we can understand a sliver of what it is through direct experience. The “Wild Horses” sequence invites us to experience our shifting relationship to music in film.

The Red Light Was My Mind: Psychological and Anempathetic Music in the “Love in Vain” Sequence

Most of those working with Robert Drew considered nondiegetic music to be suspect (Ruoff 1993: 226). Music can do as much to alter a “plain picture” as voice-over narration. And yet, music is found in direct cinema films, of course especially in the many music documentaries made by Drew Associates alumni. I was keenly interested in how Maysles thought of using nondiegetic music, since it seems like a violation of direct cinema principles.

“If music is so manipulative, were you careful in how you used it and what songs you decided to put in?” I ask.

Maysles explains, “The music comes from itself. It’s not over the picture, not officially. With so many films, ‘Now we’ll do the music. We have our material.’ I don’t like to do that unless somehow there’s a piece [of] music that isn’t foreign, doesn’t have a foreign feel to it, it’s sort of a perfect part of what’s going on. When would there be music when you weren’t there?”

“I’m thinking of Gimme Shelter.” I specify. “There are two travel sequences. They end up in the studio with them listening to it but it feels like nondiegetic overlay.”

He smiles and says, “I think it works.”

As I continue to look at the sequence and consider Maysles’s response, I think about what it means for the music to “work.” The key is in the radically different ways that music is included and the attention we give the segues between those incorporations of music. As a result, music occupies these spaces without being manipulative because we can witness music enter and exit these spaces. Music changes character in the “Love in Vain” sequence but it does so differently than it does in the “Wild Horses” sequence. The position of music shifts within one song. The reduced listening is made through the edit rather than the cinematography; the sequence encourages shifting from reduced listening toward causal listening. As a result, our trajectory as a listener-viewer is one of beginning with attentive listening and ending with detached acknowledgment of music as an object of mediation. For cinema, the implication of this particular shift is an awareness that music works on us. Rather than eliminating manipulative music, the sequence allows us to keep an eye on the music as it moves from a mental apprehension of formal play to an anempathetic sound object. The sequence starts onstage in New York with Jagger addressing the audience. “We’re gonna do a slow blues for you now, people.” The first note of the song—a low G on the guitar—accompanies a cut to a medium close-up of the audience lit in red. Their motion bobbing up and down is in sync with the music even though they are in slow motion—about a quarter of normal speed.

Slow Motion Separates from Real

The different camera speed puts us in a space for attending to musical detail by slowing action. That experience is cognitive and emotional. In general, the slow motion helps focus on action, separating an action from the flow of events in time. Slow motion can bring clarity to reading scenes. In narrative cinema, a fight sequence may slow certain motions to heighten our awareness of the drama or physicality of the fight. Sports broadcasts employ slow motion to analyze a critical play. There is an expense to this cognitive effect. Slow motion erodes a type of realism. But rather than apprehending that scene as unreal, we often read slow motion for its psychological realism. In cinema, slow motion makes a moment seem significant by simulating our own significant experiences. We often remember impactful events as if they happened in slow motion. The classic example is a car crash. Our memory of such an unexpected, traumatic event can replay in our minds in slow motion even though the instance of the crash was brief. In what seems like slow motion, we recall a surprising amount of detail. In narrative cinema, slow motion brings us into a significant moment in a character’s life by imitating a psychological state—attenuating the objective world and allowing us to study the details of the event. Zwerin’s cut of “Love in Vain” repurposes a slowed version of Jagger’s performance gestures to draw our attention to the music. Slow motion pushes us out of the real space of the concert. We then enter a psycho-musical space and tend to musical form. As if to say, “watch this,” the initial shot pans across the audience and reveals a man looking through the viewfinder of his still camera. As is typical of point-of-view shots, the question of what he sees is answered by the cut. Jagger in slow motion invites audience scrutiny.

Edit Encourages Reductive Listening through Gesture

Why gestures? Gesture draws attention to moments in time unlike language does. As David McNeill argues, a fundamental difference between words and gestures is that the latter “are themselves multidimensional and present meaning complexes without undergoing segmentation or linearization. Gestures are global and synthetic and never hierarchical” (1992: 19). Language requires time to combine words into a whole structure. (It took you real time to assemble these very words into an idea.) McNeill describes: “In language, parts (the words) are combined to create a whole (a sentence); the direction thus is from part to whole. In gestures, in contrast, the direction is from whole to part. The whole determines the meanings of the parts” (1992: 19). Anyone who has tried to talk about music as it is playing knows that the syntax gets in the way of the music. The phrases that work are short and tend to point: “Here it comes!” “Listen!” “Wait for it …” McNeill suggests that, when paired with language, a variety of gestures can combine to create meaningful idea units: “synchronized speech and gestures where the meanings complement one another” (27). Ethnomusicologist Matt Rahaim extends McNeill’s concept to music, suggesting that gesture can similarly combine with music, forming interdependent pairs in North Indian Hindustani singing (2012: 7). His examples include a grabbing and pulling gesture accompanying an abrupt increase of loudness as well as a downward series of loops accompanying a terraced descending melody. Rahaim suggests that these gestures are powerful in musical performance because other bodies offer sympathetic ways of knowing (10). We feel the motion as we hear the sound. And corroborating McNeill’s suggestion that gesture is less systematized than language or that it is semicultural, Rahaim finds that gesture is both idiosyncratic and inherited through learning and practice (134). There is no one-to-one mapping of gesture to musical idea, though it is possible to make connections between kinesthesis and musical expression.

Zwerin cuts Jagger’s motion to create idea units that are both heard and felt. Chion develops the useful term “synchresis” to describe the forging together of an aural and visual event (1994: 63). In his example, the image of a human head being smashed and the sound of a watermelon being smashed form one inseparable syncretic event. Musicological synchresis, then, can be a useful way of understanding how visual elements combine with musical events to create a series of audiovisual experiences of music.

While McNeill argues that gestures are noncombinatoric (1992: 21), film can recombine gesture into parts, visual instances that align with an integral whole of sound. Here, Jagger’s motions combine with musical events in a slow twelve-bar blues in twelve-eight time. Zwerin is directing our attention with plenty of musicological synchresis. Figure 1.2 shows connections between the music and the images of Jagger. The first shot of Jagger synchronizes his head movement with an alternation of V and I chords. As illustrated in the figure, a sagittal shot accompanies the V chord and a frontal shot accompanies the I. The direction of Jagger’s face mirrors the feeling of leaving and returning to the tonic. There are three occasions in which Zwerin places an image of Jagger raising either his shoulders or his body on a IV chord and lowering them on the I chord. In these cases, the shoulders iconically match the plagal cadence of a C major chord resolving to a G major chord.

In the twelfth bar, Jagger raises his hands to prepare a stroke for the next beat. Analyzing gesture and speech, McNeill identifies the preparation, stroke, and retraction. “The stroke of the gesture precedes or ends at, but at least does not follow, the phonological peak syllable of speech” (1992: 26). In a similar fashion, Zwerin places Jagger’s gestures in a way that the gesture lands on a musical event. On the first beat of the next chorus, Jagger’s hands drop along with a superimposition of him in close-up while the sound of the band joins. A prominent electric guitar slide coincides with the abrupt beginning of image superimposition. The sideways motion of the two overlaid images of Jagger also matches the semitone slide of the guitar. (Note the amount of time it took to read this textual description of about two seconds of film. Gesture can keep up with the temporality of music.) The superimpositions often occur with instruments becoming prominent in the mix, drawing attention to the arrangement. Slides of the guitar often accompany Jagger’s horizontal motion across the screen. Repetition syncs with Jagger’s spinning body. Another plagal cadence accompanies the rising and falling of a slow-motion jump. Claps sync perfectly with the snare backbeat. Watching, you may simply relish Jagger’s moves, but Zwerin has offered us an opportunity for a more precise reduced listening to harmony, arrangement, repetition, and musical form.

We watch carefully because of the slowed motion. We feel the musical idea of sympathetic proprioception. We sense the feelings of other bodies, in this case, the musical events through Jagger’s body. What’s more, Zwerin uses superimposition and crossfades to deemphasize visual cuts that might compete with the musical events she shows us. Chion argues that while visual cuts are generally clear—we can easily count the number of cuts in a film—aural cuts are generally masked. We rely on sound for temporal continuity when viewing a discontinuous series of shots (1994: 40–41). Chion suggests that we have a better understanding of sound in film when looking for sound events, markers of significance within a representation of time: a dog barks, a door slams, thunder claps. Carry that analytic method to music on film and we may see music as a series of musical events that compete with visual cuts. Superimposition and crossfades draw less attention to visual disturbances and let us watch (and feel) the musical events.

1.2. Head position matching chord changes and shoulder motion matching plagal cadence.

Description of the Significant Transdiegetic Shift

The most radical moment in the “Love in Vain” sequence is a cut to Jagger looking right, motionless. The lyrics sound over the image, “The blue light was my baby …” Then, a red filter is taken off the image as the guitar shifts to a vi chord (the E minor substituting for the C major) on beat ten of the twelve-bar blues. It somehow fits the music. The image is the same, but the color is different. The E minor differs from the C major by only one note—the B, which moves to a C for the second half of the bar. The color gesture precedes the harmonic shift. The lyrics continue, “The red light was my mind.” At this point, the camera zooms out and pans around what appears to be the control room of a recording studio. We experience the shift of place after it happens. Our attentiveness to the music, heightened by the slow-motion musicological synchresis, holds although we are now in real space, in real time, in real light. Why isn’t anyone moving? As the camera continues to pan, Richards is revealed to be lying on the floor. A studio monitor beside him, he taps in time with the music. As you look at Richards and Jagger, you might suddenly think: “They’re actually hearing what I hear!” While the transition was smooth, the realization of being in another relation to the music is surprising.

The jarring effect that this transition has is partly due to a shift in temporality. Since the song started and the slow-motion images jettisoned objective realism, our sense of temporality is rooted in the rhythm of the song. Now, objective temporality returns, forcing itself upon us. The experience of music moving from a contemplative form to a sound object in a real space involves what some describe as transdiegetic sound (see Taylor 2007; Jørgensen 2007; Cecchi 2010). Robynn Stilwell calls this space the “fantastical gap,” suggesting that there is an unstable space between two ways in which sound relates to an image.

When we are talking about movement through the gap between diegetic and non-diegetic, that trajectory takes on grand narrative and experiential import. These moments do not take place randomly; they are important moments of revelation, of symbolism, and of emotional engagement within the film and without. The movies have taught us how to construct our phenomenological geography, and when we are set adrift, we are not only uneasy, we are open to being guided in any number of directions. It is the multiplicity of possibilities that make the gap both observable and fantastical—fantastical because it changes the state, not only of the filmic moment, but also of the observer’s relationship to it. (2007: 200)

Perhaps a term that describes the experience of motion rather than the ontological designation of transdiegetic space is “diegetic slide.” As the song shifts from the direct address to a sound emanating from a loudspeaker, we can review the footage and mark the cut in which the images shift. We can mark the moment that the red filter is removed. We can mark the moment when Richards nods his head or when the camera pans to the studio monitor. Our experience of temporality and space, however, is in motion throughout; and, as Stilwell observes, this marks a significant moment.

To me, the significance is one of music’s ability to be both an object and a mental image. The diegetic slide reveals the point of contact between these two different experiences of music. This is representative of what Vogels identifies as the pragmatic modernism that runs throughout the Maysleses’ work (2005: 83)—although Vogels does not consider the ways in which music contributes to that sensibility. Sensing music as two different things (in two different states) as well as the connection between those states demonstrates William James’s notion of pragmatic truth. James understands truth not to be the rationalist’s “idea” or the empiricist’s “thing.” Rather, truth encompasses the “conjunctive relations” between ideas and things (James 2000: 317–18).

What is true about music is not that it is reducible to pure harmony, illustrated by musicological synchresis, or not that it is a material sound that exists in relation to magnetic tape, loudspeakers, and amplifiers. What is true about music is that our experiences of it shift. Harry Berger investigates this phenomenon with his suggestion that our “stance” on music is inherently part of our apprehension of music. Berger’s phenomenological notion takes as inseparable a musical object and the conditions of our apprehension of it. “If intentionality refers to the engagement of the subject with her object, then stance is the affective, stylistic, or valual quality of that engagement. Stance is the manner in which the person grapples with a text, performance, practice, or item of expressive culture to bring it into experience” (2009: 21). Music has no concrete meaning. It is therefore open to our experiences; and, as Berger argues, our stance on music constitutes our apprehension of music.

Over one hundred years separate James’s and Berger’s observations, but, as Bruce Elder points out, an interest in experience is a strong current in American thought. This interest is evident in the great many modernist works that pose problems of whether representation is one of perception or of objective reality. “This is a very broad and important current in American arts and letters, and it helps account for the appeal that film had to American arts. For the contents of film equally seem to hover between the status of an object and the status of a mental image” (Elder 2001: 149).

There are levels of this vacillation between music as a thing and music as a mental image throughout Gimme Shelter, but they are most apparent in the two studio sequences. Music provides a strong blur between object and mental image. In the “Love in Vain” sequence, sound is a mental image during the slow-motion images of Jagger as the song plays non-diegetically (or perhaps semidiegetically). The vacillation produces what Elder defines as a “neutral monist conception of reality,” that is: there is no subject-object division; the material of experience is composed of the same “thing.” This reality removes the barrier between human consciousness and nature, a theme that goes back to the American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

Realism in Rolling Stones’ Music Prepares for Diegetic Sliding

Part of the reason that Zwerin’s music-placement strategies work is because of a type of musical realism in the Stones’ music itself. But what is realism in music? John D. Wells finds realism in the lyrics of Robert Johnson and the Rolling Stones, suggesting that, lyrically, the Stones have a debt to blues portrayals of basic human problems (1989: 161). Carl Dahlhaus notes that realism in music existed on the fringes of romantic music in the nineteenth century, developed from the emergence of expression in the eighteenth century (1985: 12, 23). As he points out, however, the idea that music represents reality is fraught with the problem of “a concept of reality which was itself open to question and undermined by epistemological doubt” (25). This more fundamental problem of realism is solved not by a better understanding of what reality is, but rather by what reality sounds like. Recorded music, like film, can be produced to sound like a live performance in a real space (what I call realist) or as a collection of disparate sounds in an ill-defined space (formalist). The realism in the music of Gimme Shelter that makes it particularly useful for diegetic sliding is a contribution of American record producer Jimmy Miller.

Following a (mostly) failed attempt at psychedelia with their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones looked to create a new type of album. Under Miller’s direction, their postpsychedelic sound of the next three albums was more akin to hyperrealism. On Let It Bleed (1969), street noise blends with an acoustic version of “Country Honk,” drum sounds have exceptionally high fidelity, and the sound of Jagger’s voice reverberates in a way that puts it in consistent real space. The music seems “real” because it is crafted to sound real. The sound gives a sense of real space and real time, just as music might sound in various real performance settings.

To achieve this, Miller allowed more time for production and insisted on bigger budgets to craft the albums, a developing trend of the era. Instead of intensive use of the studio resulting in psychedelic tapestries of fantastic sound like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) or the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), Miller used the studio to craft realistic spaces. The sound of Mick Jagger’s voice bouncing off the wall in “Love in Vain” is as important as the melody. Symbolically, the black vocal choirs, Hammond organ, and hand-held percussion bring imagery of black churches from the American South. As a percussionist himself, Miller brought the percussion forward and gave the drums a wide stereo clarity that is now standard in rock—as if the listener is sitting behind the kit. The realism in the music of the Rolling Stones fits well with its association to image. It’s for this reason, at any point in Gimme Shelter, the music can slide between diegetic and nondiegetic spaces.

The Anempathetic and the Interiorized Held Together through Song Continuity

In the “Love in Vain” sequence, the relationship between music and image fundamentally changes. The song provides continuity, while space, time, gesture, and the audiovisual relationship change. As described, the beginning of the sequence uses images to support the structure of the music. The highly edited slow-motion images direct deep listening. With the shift to real space, the same music becomes a sound in the space of the room. After the diegetic slide, the only visual augmentation of the music is tapping of feet and nodding of heads. This tapping, along with a pan to the studio monitor, works strongly to create a realist aural and visual space of the studio—we see the space and hear what it sounds like. A long steady pan from Jagger to Richards on the floor and then back to the others in the room establishes both time and space. This is not a sequence shot like the one in “Wild Horses,” but a slow reveal of bodies in a room listening to music in real time. Notably, the people in the room do not gesture to reveal the music (as in the “Wild Horses” sequence); rather, they themselves are revealed as simply being people in a room. The way they are framed prevents the viewer from accessing their interiority, which, in effect, creates a separation between the people on-screen and the music itself. Jagger is in profile. Richards is looking up. The other three people have their hands or a still camera blocking their faces. Left without a psychological perspective, a space opens between the subjects and the audience.

Pulled out of reduced listening, we experience something similar to an anempathetic music—for example, a typical use in narrative cinema would be the sound of carnival music playing while a character is going through emotional trauma, the music powerfully not matching the experience of the character. Another example is that of a pathological villain committing a horrific act while gentle or happy music plays. Anempathetic scoring symbolizes a character’s disconnectedness or alienation to the world. The Rolling Stones and their entourage are motionless. The nature of the music changes to being simply a sound emanating from a studio speaker. It is now associated with the mise-en-scène and no longer supported by the musicological synchresis. A jarring effect of realization in the diegetic slide, we return to our own perspective, since we are now denied any cues from the bodies on-screen. In this case, anempathy occurs when we are diverted from a mental image of musicological attention.

The sequence is an assertion of how music is only partially knowable by forcing a shift of what music is. The greater truth about music that emerges from this sequence is that music has the capacity to change states. That truth is more important than designating music as a particular idea or object. In other words, the diegetic sliding reminds us that music has the capacity to shift from symbolizing something (ideational) to being something in itself (material).

An Open Defense

Forty-seven minutes into the film we encounter the most startling cut in the film. The break establishes new ideas and perspectives, delivering the audience to the Altamont Speedway. Several cinematic elements establish the second act of the film—one that involves foreboding attention to the crowd and their relationship to music.

In the cut itself, the image forcefully shifts from the band bidding goodbye to the crowd at Madison Square Garden to an aerial shot over the California desert. The hard cut of sound (stage noise to helicopter noise) emphasizes the cut. The transition is an invisible wipe—the camera follows Jagger until the dark behind the amplifiers passes in front of the camera. Used in classical cinema, the wipe across the screen offers the feeling of turning the page of a book. In Gimme Shelter, this invisible wipe breaks the film almost perfectly in half. The aerial shot establishes a new place. But it also changes the feeling.

The transition brings us from a stable space (the concert stage) to an unstable one (the view from the helicopter). Zwerin cuts to a point-of-view aerial shot in the moment of plummet. The helicopter is speeding toward the ground and then veers up to reveal an extraordinarily long line of parked cars on the road. A sense of inevitability comes with the single road that leads toward the Altamont Speedway, with the rapid motion felt in the aerial shot and with the initial foreshadowing that death will happen here.

The only continuity between shots is the Rolling Stones audience. They were in front of the stage in New York. They now walk from their cars toward what will be an infamous concert in California. This string of people seen from above is walking into history. The crowd is a prominent feature of this film. Its roaring sound begins the film. The band is constantly engaged with the audience. A great many of the shots of musical performances are of the audience. At Altamont, the crowd was notably large—roughly half the population of San Francisco at the time.

Rendering a crowd in film is challenging. Cinema is better suited for presenting individuals and small groups of people. How do you make a film about three hundred thousand people? There are a few strategies. In one, you can make the crowd a character. I discuss this with Maysles.

I tell him that one of the ways I read Gimme Shelter is that there was a dysfunctional relationship between the fans and the artists. You see that in a few moments when they start jumping up onstage and swiping at Mick Jagger.

Maysles starts to smile. “Oh yeah!”

“The audience is almost a character in that film,” I say.

“Yes. Yes!” Maysles replies.

Cinema can draw attention to almost anything to make it a character—or at least a significant force. In early documentary film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) pits protagonist Nanook against his antagonist, the Canadian landscape. In Gimme Shelter the crowd is an entity itself, perhaps hydra-headed. There is a sense of lack of control developed in the film. The portrayal of the audience connects to the comment heard earlier in the planning room sequence when one person says of hippie crowds and music festivals, “It’s like lemmings to the sea.” Following the actual event of the festival, the press presented the crowds this way, as if the unthinking mass was the antagonist to the idealism of the 1960s, an ideal represented by the music itself.

In fact, the concert at Altamont was a disaster. Media reports honed in on this; but they did so primarily by describing the audience. The day after the festival, a headline in the Berkeley Tribe proclaimed, “Stones Concert Ends It—America Now Up for Grabs” (Vogels 2005). Reviewers described drug use and violence in great detail, while neglecting the music. The Chicago Tribune recounts the apocalyptic lead-up to the concert: “The hordes of youths swarmed onto the barren hills beside a motorcycle racetrack for the concert” (“300,000 Jam” 1969). Represented in the film, the crowd is a hydra-headed beast roaring in the beginning of the film, breaking onto the stage toward the end of the Madison Square Garden concert and then moved to violence at Altamont, culminating in the murder. The order of songs has a deliberate narrative function. Rearranged from the order in which it was actually performed (see Galbraith 2014), the music dramatically scores the sentiment from the playful “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to the menacing “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Jagger addresses the crowd throughout the film. This is not uncommon for a stage performer, but we sense a dangerous eroticism. “Ah think I’ve busted a button on my trousers,” he teases from the stage at Madison Square Garden. “I hope they don’t fall down…. You don’t want my trousers to fall down, now do ya?” We previously watched an extended close-up of Tina Turner nearly performing fellatio on her microphone. (Interestingly, we never see the audience during her nearly two-minute performance.)

1.3. Unbeknownst to Jagger, a hand from the crowd reaches toward him.

This eroticism seems to create in the audience a frenzied desire to get physically close to the performers. Narratively, the audience begins to reach for Jagger toward the end of the Madison Square Gardens concert during the song “Honky Tonk Women” (see figure 1.3 for an example of the imagery that foreshadows the breach of the stage). At this point in the film, the crowd as a character seems to be moving toward violence because we, the viewers, are already aware of the death of Meredith Hunter, thus we feel the vulnerability through the sexualized performances. Several songs into the New York show, bouncers grab the fans who rush the stage. Shots over Jagger’s shoulder offer his point of view. When he turns toward the back of the stage, facing the camera, Maysles lingers as his face becomes expressionless. In that moment, Jagger’s relationship to his audience is revealed to be part of the performance.

When the band arrives at Altamont, they wade through the crowd, no longer separated by a stage and guards. Unexpectedly, someone punches Jagger in the face. “Somebody punched Mick!” says a disembodied voice. It stands in for our own voice of disbelief.

Yet, part of this story about how a rock crowd turned murderous is based less on what the filmmakers are doing and more on the attitude that viewers bring to the film, an attitude that hinges on pied-piper notions of rock’s subversive influence.

In fact, I’ll argue that far from reinforcing ideas about the subversive influence of rock and its intoxicating effect on its audience, the filmmakers complicate the media’s oversimplified story. I’ll explore their perspective grounded in the shots and cuts of audience that reveals a plural audience, without a message, without a unified goal, attitude, or style. Entertaining this aspect of the late 1960s rock audience requires that we abandon the standard narrative of Altamont representing the death of 1960s idealism, so aptly contained in the headline from above: “Stones Concert Ends It—America Now Up for Grabs.” Let us first consider what this audience was.

Who Was Listening?

The audience was big. In the Rolling Stones 1969 tour, the size of rock concerts grew to the size of major sporting events. Christgau called the tour “history’s first mythic rock & roll tour” (1992: 247). The Beatles had played the first stadium in 1965. Fifty-five thousand screaming fans—mostly young girls—filled Shea Stadium in Queens, but fans were not allowed on the field. The band played in the outfield. Madison Square Garden and the Altamont Speedway were not just larger venues, they were spaces in which audiences could come to the threshold of the stage.

The audience was listening. The crowds that Maysles shot were, as Barry Faulk argues, a new rock audience made up of counterculture listeners (2010: 100). Whereas the audiences that met the Beatles five years earlier sat, stood, and screamed, the 1969 rock audiences were more interactive. At this point in rock history, the genre had folded in folk music audiences and progressive jazz audiences, both rife with listeners. What’s more, rock had displaced jazz as the soundtrack to college. College degrees floated through these new crowds.

The audience was plural. In his essay contextualizing Jefferson Airplane, ethnomusicologist Patrick Burke untangles the complexity of 1968 San Francisco counterculture by separating the cultural radicals from the political radicals. He then shows the ways in which white counterculture borrowed heavily from black Civil Rights–era political groups (2010: 66). He argues that “we should view the 1960s not as a romantic epoch during which a unified counterculture fought an unfeeling power structure, but rather as a complex moment in which various cultural and political factions came together and pulled apart in ever-changing ways. Moreover, we need to examine music as an expressive form with the potential to evoke multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, rather than regarding it merely as a vessel for unambiguous political messages” (65). Burke’s call to examination parallels the way that music and mass audience manifest in Gimme Shelter. Diverse shots of the audience foil any ability to idealize the crowd. As a strategy, the montages reveal the plural nature of the crowd. Now, let us examine how the film presents them as a plural mass.

Showing the Plural Mass

The confounding sense of so many of these shots is palpable. This emerges as Maysles and I discuss shooting the crowd. As we talk, we move from the crowd representing fanaticism to reveling in the details of the crowd.

I first ask, “Was that something you were curious about—that type of fanaticism?”

He answers, “Yeah. In as much as that was the thing that was going on. You see [it] in the faces of the audience. I was so lucky. One depends on being able to be at the right place in filming a concert…. Thank God I was able to get the audiences close up, near the stage. I remember that young woman had tears coming down.”

The rest of the conversation went like this:

HARBERT: “That’s an unbelievable shot.”

MAYSLES: “Ah!”

HARBERT: “Did you shoot that?”

MAYSLES: “Yeah.”

HARBERT: “She’s still moving along and bobbing her head as she cries. The people outside of her also smiling and bobbing their heads. They’re oblivious. But it’s not …”

Maysles interrupts excitedly: “The guy who’s looking up like this. And then, way off in the distance, this woman with a very attractive body nude coming down the aisle. Then that very much overweight woman, fighting her way …

I finish his sentence: “… with stuff in her hair!”

MAYSLES: “Yeah!”

It’s perhaps unusual for scholarship to operate through a series of “ahs” and “yeahs,” but for me, this is a good way of valuing these shots. Bafflement and inscrutability contribute to an acknowledged pluralism. Essentializing this crowd does violence to its members. The Maysleses and Zwerin provide a Jamesian flow between details, often striking, revealing the complexity. (After all, William James did coin the phrase “stream of consciousness.”) Even though we started on an idea—fanaticism—the images are productively irreducible.

Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1967), Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970), and Mel Stuart’s Wattstax (1973) all show greater degrees of unity among the crowds, erasures of difference supposedly brought about by the unifying nature of musical performance. Conversely, Gimme Shelter bears all the disorder of a mass event. The crowd shots offer plenty to confound any sense of unity. Consider this series of shots:

Young family with toddler

Close-up of a young man chugging a large, unlabeled brown bottle, cigarette in hand

Man, possibly on drugs, spinning

Sober couple spreading out a picnic blanket

Some shots themselves reveal an incongruity: A couple lies kissing on the lawn; zoom out to reveal that the man is holding a Doberman Pinscher on a choke chain.

A woman collects money for the Black Panther defense fund amid a less-than-enthusiastic crowd, cutting with her saying, “After all, they’re just negroes you know,” as a young black man drops change into her bucket.

The most confounding shot occurs after conflict begins to threaten the show. Cut to a sagittal close-up of a woman looking screen left, supposedly at the aftermath of violence. “They’re not going to play music until we get a doctor,” she says. She tries again, this time in a soft voice that we can hear but certainly is too soft to be audible to anyone nearby, “Somebody help.” Cinematically, however, it calls us to empathize with her concern. A bit louder: “Somebody’s hurt.” Then she leans back as a zoom-out reveals the crowd looking at her. Most editors would cut here before her concern shifts; but Zwerin keeps the shift, following her through a smile and an offhand frivolous melody on a flute. As a playful punctuation, Zwerin cuts to a clown face looking directly at the camera. The flute trill/melody continues through a cut to a bubble floating across the crowd. Over those two shots, deep concern for human life shifts to haphazard play.

Maysles delivers faces, and Zwerin ensures that we don’t linger in one person’s experience of the event. As noted in the beginning of the chapter, Maysles gets close to faces when he shoots. Not only does he get close, but he also favors frontal shots that encourage empathetic responses. He explains how he has done that through so many of his shots: “I’m intent on conveying the experience of the subjects to the audience, doing it so closely that the audience feels that they are right there…. In a way, you’re that person and that’s quite a gift. The audience feels that they’re experiencing what the Stones are experiencing, what the Beatles are experiencing, what’s the experience of Vladimir Horowitz, Rostropovich, or an ordinary person.”

The film confounds our desire to read the situation. Surely things have gone wrong and we look to the faces to communicate some kind of answer, reassurance, or—cinematically—emotion.

Sounding the Plural Mass

As we have seen, music can move underneath, in front or back, and become part of the scene. In the Altamont section of the film it is mostly part of the environment, within a set of relations. There is no nondiegetic music until the very end. The music occasionally seems to move to ex pressing a sentiment of celebration, but its interruption and the layering of crowd sounds keep it part of a sound ecology. To achieve this, Zwerin lets us listen to the sound of the crowd at the beginning of the Altamont section.

For ten minutes, there is no music. The visual collage is accompanied by location sound. It is the longest stretch without music in the film. As an experiment, I watched the footage while playing other music separately to see if the images can congeal to the mood of the music. When listening to “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair),” which plays over the crowd images in Monterey Pop, many of the shots support a feeling of celebration and togetherness. Other shots don’t fit. The empathetic clashes with the anempathetic.

Without music, the realism of the event is more prominent than if a soundtrack were to ground our feelings or thoughts. Jeff Smith has a term for music’s use in organizing our reading of images. What he calls “polarization” is “an audiovisual interaction in which the affective meaning of the music moves the content of the image toward the specific character of that music” (1999: 160). This is not the same as being emotionally moved as if we were the character, music heightening our empathetic response (Smith calls this “affective congruence”). Rather, polarization uses music to shift our view. Using another metaphor, music acts like a visual filter that lets through the parts of image that relate to the sentiment of the music. Smith suggests that this is a cognitive experience. We watch to read the scene, to connect the ideas of how emotion relates to the scene. So for the first ten minutes of being at Altamont, we have no pole, no filter. By forgoing any scoring during this section, the location sound pulls us into a realist yet disorganized space. There are no emotional poles to organize the images. The images retain a fullness and a complexity. In addition, the sound of Altamont is established. It’s noisy there. Voices rise over the din of the mass.

The music becomes part of an environmental sound, played by bands on a relatively small riser at Altamont. But understanding music as being part of an ecology is more useful—not an ecology as in a system but as a sound we hear in relation to others. The sounds of music, motorcycle engines, and crowd noise intermingle. We must struggle to hear music as an emotional pole, synthesizing the plurality of the mass. At first, it’s tempting to let the music become a direct address.

1.4. Dancing man becomes concerned.

As music begins to play, there is a moment when it overwhelms the image. As with the “Wild Horses” and “Love in Vain” sequences, the image supports the musical play, enticing us into reduced listening. Narratively, we might think: “Finally, the concert has begun. Music has won!” A shot of colored balloons drifting in the sky matches the sound of music starting. But it is an ironic move. We know that death looms ahead. We cannot transcend the dysfunctional environment with music. Flying Burrito Brothers begin to play “Six Days on the Road.” The crowd throws Frisbees and blows bubbles into the air as they dance. Overwhelmingly, they dance. A frontal close-up of a blond man smiling encourages us to smile as well. An older couple kisses as they sing, “Well it seems like a month since I kissed my baby goodbye.” Cut to puppies kissing. The cinematic mood is playful. A moment of foreshadowing presents in a wide shot of a shirtless man crowd surfing the seated audience. Wait. Did he kick someone? The camera zooms out. There are so many people here. The zoom is a reveal. Our moment of good-natured festivity begins to draws to a close. A glimpse of the back of a Hells Angels jacket precedes the end of the song. The music cross-fades with the alarmed crowd sounds as the Hells Angels beat audience members with pool cues. A voice over the microphone begs, “Please stop hurting each other,” after which a menacing voice from the crowd growls, “Take him off to the other side.” The signal that the mood has changed is most evident in the frontal shots of an audience member (figure 1.4). The dancer is now alarmed. A camera behind him augments attention to what he is seeing. We sense his reaction.

As Jefferson Airplane plays “The Other Side of This Life,” the crowd sound moves behind the music. In competition, the music never achieves the place of direct address. The long buildup fails musically. As the images show us the escalating violence, the crowd sound comes back to the front, diffusing the musical effect. As we move from reductive listening to causal listening, music is again part of an ecology of sound. A zoom to a man dancing on high scaffolding accompanies an attenuation of the crowd sound. His relationship to others (and to the thought of his potential plummet) is framed out. The music regains its lone forward position and Zwerin offers us several cuts to people dancing and taking in the music. Two shots disrupt: One is of Hells Angel Sonny Barger lighting a cigarette in indifference. The other is of concert organizer Michael Lang looking out of the frame to his right. His noticeable lack of movement reminds us not to dive into the song with abandon. And then, “Easy,” says Grace Slick over the continued rhythm of the band. “Easy … Easy … Easy …” Song turns to plea. As a scuffle ensues, the song falls apart. Some members continue playing. Microphones collapse on the drum set. Listening returns to its causal mode.

A nearly four-minute stretch separates the beginning of the violent end of Jefferson Airplane’s music and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” The crowd sound is on equal status with the attempt at music, each struggling for our attention. The noise of the crowd wins. The instruments offer guitar feedback and a few disconnected beats of the drum. Sounds of pool cues hitting people punctuate the cacophony of the crowd. Grace Slick’s microphone address is futile: “You gotta keep your bodies off each other unless you intend love.” Cut to the Grateful Dead discussing the unfortunate events followed by the noise of the crowd waiting. And then the motorcycles overwhelm the crowd—both visually and aurally. Finally, the Rolling Stones arrive onstage.

The crowd sound changes character at this point (so much so that I wonder if it is sound brought from the Madison Square Gardens show). Whistles and applause organize the mass into audience. Jagger addresses them: “There’s so many of you …” That’s all we really need to hear from him. The close-up sagittal shot encourages us to think about Jagger in relation to the mass. Just as with the Jefferson Airplane performance, the crowd disturbs the music to the point that it stops. But before that, the attenuation and enhancement of crowd sound pulls us between reduced and causal listening. The polarity of 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.”