16 concert films (and one concert series) by famous directors
1. Stop Making Sense (1984), Jonathan Demme
The promotional efforts for Jonathan Demme’s 1984 collaboration with Talking Heads centered on a series of rhetorical questions about the film’s most esoteric moments, like “Where do the odd movements come from?” and “Why a big suit?” But none of these serve as a mission statement as well as a quote Demme gave at the time of Stop Making Sense’s release: “This isn’t a concert film; it’s a performance film.” The movie itself is much more fun than that ponderous response implies. With the help of eight cameras and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth (Blade Runner), Demme captured one of post-punk’s greatest acts at the top of its game across three shows at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater. By contrast to the energy pouring forth from songs like “Life During Wartime” and “Girlfriend Is Better” (the latter featuring frontman David Byrne donning the aforementioned big suit), Demme’s direction is slow, sweeping, and singularly intimate—no audience members are seen until the end of the film, and the cameras frequently break from the “odd movements” to dwell on a single band member (usually wild-eyed sideman Bernie Worrell). Steeped in the vocabulary of cinema, with main titles courtesy of Dr. Strangelove designer Pablo Ferro and Byrne’s Breathless-inspired stumbling at the end of “Psycho Killer,” Stop Making Sense synthesizes the fleeting nature of performance and the permanence of motion pictures in the same way the Heads combined funk grooves, world music polyrhythms, and art-rock pretense into a nervy, loose-limbed sound all its own. And it’s doubtful it could’ve done so without Demme at the helm.
2. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Gimme Shelter is generally perceived less as a concert movie than as a record of an epochal moment in American history: the so-called death of the ’60s at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969. That perception has a lot to do with two of the filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles (Salesman, Grey Gardens), the founding brothers of cinéma vérité. To be sure, there is plenty of performance footage in the movie, much of it from the Rolling Stones’ Madison Square Garden show a few weeks before the disastrous free concert at Altamont. But the Maysles (and co-director Charlotte Zwerin) are equally concerned with the behind-the-scenes logistics of mounting an enormous outdoor festival in the San Francisco area. The day of the show unfolds like a kaleidoscope of bad vibes, as if Woodstock had been staged in the world of The Road Warrior. The image of cranked-up Hell’s Angels (improbably hired as security for the concert) contemptuously tossing bouquets back into the audience says it all: So much for Flower Power. The sinister vibe of the film’s last half-hour (climaxing with the stabbing of Meredith Hunter and the Stones making a hasty getaway by helicopter as if escaping the Fall Of Saigon is hard to shake, as the pioneers of “direct cinema” capture some of the most indelible, haunting images of the counterculture era.
3. The Last Waltz (1978), Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese actually has a sizeable body of work devoted entirely to rock, from his time assistant directing for the 1970 documentary Woodstock to 2011’s George Harrison: Living In The Material World. But his best known music doc, and considered by some to be the best rock movie of all time, is 1978’s The Last Waltz, which chronicles the final performance by The Band. Although made at a turbulent time in Scorsese’s life, and under guerilla circumstances (almost every camera ran out of film while shooting the concert), the movie is one of his best. It interweaves an incredible live show (featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Neil Young, to name a few guests) with shaggy dog stories and staged performances. The film also began Scorsese’s collaboration with The Band’s guitarist, Robbie Robertson, who has scored and provided musical supervision for a handful of his films. For anyone unfamiliar with The Band, The Last Waltz manages to be both a biography and a perfect portrait of the group at its peak.
4. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005), Michel Gondry
Shot before, but released after Dave Chappelle made the headlines-grabbing decision to walk away from his lucrative Comedy Central gig, Block Party finds the famous funnyman playing host to a free, daylong hip-hop festival in Brooklyn in September 2004. As emcee of the festivities, Chappelle supplies the personality and the humor, but it’s director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) who gives this chronologically non-linear music doc its celebratory spirit. Cutting between triumphant onstage performances and offstage scenes of its titular celebrity joshing around with local characters, Gondry salutes not just the artists—a dream lineup that includes Mos Def, Kanye West, and a reunited Fugees—but the enthusiastic New Yorkers in attendance too. For Chappelle, the film was an I’m-still-here announcement, a loose reminder that the comic hadn’t lost his mind, just his craving for the spotlight. For Gondry, it was further proof, after the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Eternal Sunshine, that the music-video vet performs his greatest magic when paired with a strong creative collaborator. Any way you come at it, the title is apt: This is the concert film as blowout bash, a neighborhood party with a killer playlist.
5. Neil Young: Heart Of Gold (2006), Neil Young Trunk Show (2009), and Neil Young Journeys (2011), Jonathan Demme
Unlike Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 Year Of The Horse, Jonathan Demme’s 2006 concert documentary Neil Young: Heart Of Gold picks up Young’s storied career immediately following the singer-songwriter’s brain aneurysm in 2005. Young’s post-surgery vulnerability is reflected in the quieter arrangements—sans his raucous backing band Crazy Horse—and the acoustic-based material he showcases on the intimate stage of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. The cool eye Demme brings to his biggest film, The Silence Of The Lambs, is set aside in favor of the New Hollywood counterculture vibe—and in particular the shaggy twang of Robert Altman’s Nashville—although the director lets things get gloriously ragged on 2009’s Neil Young Trunk Show and 2011’s Neil Young Journeys, which complete Demme’s Young trilogy with a cantankerous crescendo.
