It seems that the pandemic has sent certain enterprising music lovers to the editing rooms. For those still hesitant to get together for a live concert, the 2021 consolation prize wasn’t a slew of ephemeral live streams, but a flurry of clever, powerful music documentaries that weren’t afraid to run for more than two hours. With screen time begging to be filled, it was the year of the deep dive.
Those documentaries include a binge-watch of the Beatles at work in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back”; a visual barrage to evoke musical disruption in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Underground”; far-reaching commentary atop ecstatic performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Questlove’s “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”; and a surprisingly candid chronicle of Billie Eilish’s whirlwind career—at 16, 17, and 18 years old—in RJ Cutler’s “The World’s a Little Blurry.” The documentaries were about recapturing and rethinking memories, about unexpected echoes over decades, about transparency and the mysteries of artistic production.
They were also a reminder of how scarce hi-fi sound and picture were in the analog era, and how ubiquitous they are today. Half a century ago, the cost of film and tape was not negligible, while posterity was a minor factor. Experiencing the moment seemed much more important than keeping a record of it. It would be decades before “pictures or it didn’t happen.”
In its early days, The Velvet Underground was both a soundtrack and a canvas for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a club-sized multimedia event that projected images onto the band members as they played. While the Velvets’ social set featured plenty of artists and filmmakers, apparently no one got the obvious idea of capturing a full-length performance by the Velvets at their peak. What a remarkable missed opportunity.
Haynes’ documentary instead creatively collects circumstantial evidence. There are memories of eyewitnesses (and only eyewitnesses, a relief). And Haynes makes up for the lack of concert footage with a plethora of simultaneous images, sometimes flashing wildly into a tiled screen suggesting Windows 10 is on a rampage. News, commercials and bits of avant-garde films flicker alongside Warhol’s silent contemplations of band members staring back at the camera. The faces and fragments are there, in a temporary fix that translates the distant blur of the 1960s into a 21st century digital grid.
Fortunately, there was more foresight in 1969, when Hal Tulchin ran five video cameras at the Harlem Cultural Festival, later known as “Black Woodstock.” New York City (and a sponsor, Maxwell House) presented a series of six weekly free concerts at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) with a lineup that now looks almost miraculous, including Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone , BB King , Sly and the Family Stone and Mongo Santamaria, for starters. Tulchin’s crew shot over 40 hours of footage, capturing the audience’s eager faces and righteous fashions, along with performers knocking themselves out in front of an almost entirely black audience. Still, nearly all of Tulchin’s material remained unseen until Questlove eventually collected “Summer of Soul” from it.
The music in “Summer of Soul” moves from peak to peak, with unstoppable rhythms, raw compelling voices, spirited dance steps and urgent messages. But “Summer of Soul” doesn’t just enjoy the performances. Commentary from festival-goers, performers and observers (including definitive critic Greg Tate) provides context for a festival that had the Black Panthers as security, and which the city likely supported in part to divert energy away from potential street protests after the turbulence of 1968.
Questlove’s subtitle and its song choices – BB King sings about slavery, Ray Baretto proudly claims a multiracial America, Nina Simone declaims “Backlash Blues”, Rev. Jesse Jackson preaches on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, even Fifth Dimension find fear and redemption in “Let the Sunshine In” – make it clear that the performers offered no escapism or complacency. After five decades in the archives, “Summer of Soul” in 2021 is still current; it is anything but scenic. I hope many more of the festival images emerge; bring on the extended version or the miniseries. A soundtrack album will be released in January.
Cameras were constantly filming during the recording sessions for ‘Let It Be’, when in January 1969 the Beatles presented themselves with a strange, prodigious challenge: to make an album quickly, on their own (although they eventually got the invaluable help of Billy Preston on keyboards), on camera and with a live show to follow. It was another way the Beatles foreshadowed things to come, as if they envisioned our digital age, where bands usually record video as they work and upload work-in-progress updates for their fans. In the 1960s, recording studios were widely regarded as private workspaces, whose listeners would eventually receive only the (vinyl) finished project. The “Let It Be” sessions represented a new level of transparency.
The results, in 1970, were the album “Let It Be”, reworked by Phil Spector, and the heady, disjointed 80-minute documentary “Let It Be” by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg – both a disappointment after the album ‘Abbey Road’. ‘, which was released in 1969, but was recorded after the ‘Let It Be’ sessions. The Beatles had announced their break from solo albums.
The three-part, eight-hour “Get Back” may have been closer to what the Beatles hoped to get on film in 1969. It’s a little too long; I never have to see a close-up of toast at breakfast again. But in all those hours of filming, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras absorbed the iterative, intuitive process of the band constructing Beatles songs: building and toning down arrangements, playing Mad Libs with syllables of lyrics, charging themselves with oldies and jokes, having instruments in hand when inspiration struck. Jackson’s final sequence — the song “Get Back” that pops up as Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr jam one morning — unites boyish camaraderie with deep artistic instinct.
“Get Back” once again reveals the situations in which the Beatles juggled, even as they pushed themselves to their self-imposed (then self-extended) deadline. They moved from the acoustically inhospitable film studios in Twickenham to a hastily built basement studio at Apple. They’ve seriously thought about some ridiculous locations – an amphitheater in Tripoli? a children’s hospital? — for the upcoming live show. There was so much tension that George Harrison left the band, only to reconcile and rejoin after a few days. Meanwhile, they faced predatory reporting from British tabloids. It’s a wonder they could concentrate on making music at all.
But as established stars, by 1969 the Beatles were largely able to operate within their own protective bubble. Fast-forward 50 years to “The World’s a Little Blurry,” and Billie Eilish faces the same pressures as the Beatles: songwriting, deadlines, playing live, the press. But she also has to deal with it as a teenage girl, in an age where there are cameras everywhere – even under her massage table – and the internet multiplies every bit of visibility and every attack vector. “I literally can’t have a bad moment,” she realizes.
In “The World’s a Little Blurry,” Eilish performs to crowds that sing along to every word, takes home top awards at the 2019 Grammys, and gets a hug from her childhood pop idol, Justin Bieber. But as in her songs – melodious, whispering and often nightmarish – there is as much trauma as there is triumph. Eilish also has to deal with a ligament tear on stage, her recurring Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, a video screen failure when she headlines the Coachella festival, an apathetic boyfriend, pointless interviewers, endless meet-and-greets and constant self-questions about accessibility versus integrity. It’s almost too much information. But who knows what an expanded version might add in a few years or a few decades?