I've just watched my third music documentary for this series -- and last, I assume, though I haven't yet chosen the series' final film -- but it's the first one that can properly be described as a concert movie. There are snippets of performance in both Dont Look Back and Gimme Shelter, but Jonathan Demme's 1984 film Stop Making Sense is chock full of it. In fact, there's nothing else but the concert. (Actually, an assemblage for footage from four different concerts at L.A.'s Pantages Theatre.)
As it turns out, concert movies make me drift off a bit.
That's not to say that they make me sleepy, just that they don't fully hold my attention, even with bands I really like. Which might be why I don't watch all that many of them.
I think back to the experience of going to see a concert movie of a band that I consider one of my favorites of all time, Phish. I actually wrote about the experience here, when I went to see Phish 3D. (It's probably not worth going to the link, as I just noticed that several updates to blogspot have really thrown off the formatting on that particular post.)
The gist of what I wrote was that it was really hard to stay focused on the movie when it was literally just them playing their songs. Even though they were songs I loved, I needed a bit more of a narrative spine to remain fully engaged. I did notice that without that narrative spine, nor breaking away for interviews, there was no reason for me not to treat it like a regular concert -- in other words, to talk to the guy I was watching it with, if the mood struck us, and to go the bathroom if I needed. Which is something I would never ordinarily do outside of the most desperate of circumstances.
I didn't have anyone to talk to while watching Stop Making Sense in the hotel last Friday afternoon ... but that didn't stop me. In fact, I found myself carrying on several different chats on Facebook while the movie was playing, and I'm pretty sure I went to the bathroom at least once.
You'd think this might have diminished my enjoyment of the film. It did not.
Just because I wasn't watching every second of the movie didn't mean I didn't totally appreciate the experience that Demme and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne were bringing me. I credit Byrne specifically because the staging of the show was his concept, according to the credits. But really, the whole band was bringing the experience to me, enthusiastically, with incredible musicianship, great set design, and great costumes. (Byrne's "big suit" has become kind of a famous image.)
I don't like Talking Heads anywhere near as much as I like Phish, but I like Stop Making Sense a lot more than I liked Phish 3D. Talking Heads are one of those bands where I never bought one of their albums, but I'd be a great candidate for a greatest hits album (presumably one exists out there). There are probably a dozen Talking Heads songs I know and can sing along with, about half of which get played here. But I liked the sound of even the songs I didn't know.
At first I thought there was maybe nothing groundbreaking about this film, but then I realized, what qualified as groundbreaking was a lot different in 1984 than it would be today. This whole series, in fact, is about pioneering new forms of non-fiction storytelling, and Stop Making Sense certainly does that -- to the extent that you can call what it's doing "storytelling."
The most groundbreaking aspect of it is something I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read about it afterward. According to Wikipedia, it is the first film made using entirely digital audio techniques. That's probably more a convenience on the filmmaking side than an observable difference by the audience, but it was a significant enough part of the process to make it into the opening paragraph on Wikipedia.
What I was more likely to notice was the techniques Demme and company used to get the cameras right up in the faces of the band members, something that was probably also fairly unusual at the time (though I think the Maysles brothers may have actually done a bit of that 14 years earlier in Gimme Shelter, if memory serves). I did actually wonder how they went from long shots to close-ups in the same song, yet you don't see the camera operators all over the stage, ruining the long shot. (I also thought it was probably something of an annoying price to pay for those who watched the show live, that there would always be a crew filming all over the stage.)
Of course realizing that it was shot over four nights helps explain that. The close-ups were likely from one performance while the long shots were from another, but it's all blended so seamlessly that you really would have no idea. That does, however, probably mean that the band had to wear the same outfits each night, to create the illusion of one single performance. Fortunately, they'd have the days in between to launder them and remove the sweat stench.
Although all the Talking Heads stuff was, of course, great, I may have most enjoyed the mid-movie song "Genius of Love" performed by the Tom Tom Club, which has some Heads band members in it. In terms of sheer practicalities, the song exists to give Byrne time to do a costume change, but the musicianship in this particular song is just off the charts, and I found myself grooving along to this even a bit more than to the Heads songs.
Really, there's just great showmanship all over this thing. It may be hard to isolate Demme's role exactly here, and it's something I think I might appreciate better if I watched his other prominent concert movie, Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids from 2016. He also made a Neil Young concert movie in 2006. Though of course neither of those fit in the current series. Anyway, to the extent that this is a really captivating movie and someone had to oversee all the various choices that got made just as they needed to be, Demme deserves praise.
Captivating? In a movie I spent talking to friends online and playing my turns in Lexulous?
Yes indeed. All versions of captivation are not equal. This one captivated me visually and sonically, perhaps not in equal measure, but one more than made up for the other, alternating throughout.
Okay! We're on to the last month of Audient Authentic. I don't know what the grand finale will be, but I can tell you it will fall during the years 1985 to 1989, to put a capper on the faithful chronological sequencing I've kept going all year.
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