Artist Stop Making Sense

Director Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads' exhilarating Stop Making Sense is unlike any film made before or since (Demme's Storefront Hitchcock excepted), a concert movie that eschews backstage interviews and audience cutaways for the simpler pleasures of watching a band perform at the top of its game. Pop artists both, Demme and Heads frontman David Byrne collaborated on an evolving-stage concept that fuses clever, minimalist performance art with the accumulating narrative force of great cinema. Filmed over three nights at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, Stop Making Sense opens with a white-suited Byrne strolling onto a bare stage with only a tape recorder and an acoustic guitar, and grows into a massive stage spectacular.

Updated 11/12/2009