Read an Excerpt
Taking It to the Bridge
Music as Performance
By Nicholas Cook, Richard Pettengill The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07177-7
CHAPTER 1
U2 3D
Concert Films and/as Live Performance
SUSAN FAST
CONCERTGOERS HAVE FINALLY MADE IT into the stadium, and they run, barreling through turnstiles and into the vast expanse of the arena, vying for a place near the stage — up against it, if at all possible. The journey to their destination is frantic, chaotic, fast; bodies move at full speed, exerting maximum effort for what they hope will be a big payoff: closest possible proximity to the musicians. Finally, they arrive, the band erupts into the first song, and the sea that is the audience roars and pumps its fist, "swinging to the music," as the singer puts it; "Vertigo" is an apt title for an opening song at a stadium concert, when 20,000 fans or more burst to life in a way that can make one's head spin.
Yet I am silent, my body sitting motionless next to other motionless and silent bodies. I am not at the stadium in Buenos Aires depicted in this scene, but rather in the Scotiabank IMAX theater in Toronto, watching U2's concert film, U2 3D. Released early in 2008, it was the first live-action 3D film of any kind. It was directed by Irish filmmaker Catherine Owens, who has been responsible for many of the innovative uses of technology U2 have made, including the video installations on their last four tours. Utilizing the very latest in high-definition 3D film technology — a far cry from earlier forays in B-rated action and horror movies — it captured the band toward the end of its 2005–2006 Vertigo tour. There were claims in the popular press that 3D concert films like this could serve as a replacement for seeing live concerts ("If you can't be front and center at the concert, then you see it in 3-D," declared a promoter), or might even surpass them ("In many ways U2 3D is superior to a real concert," wrote Toronto Star critic Peter Howell). The band's front man, Bono, suggested the film may act as a substitute for those (apparently younger) fans who can't afford concert tickets: "I'm hoping that all the people in high school or who are college-age and don't have the cash to go see us can go see us for a low price with this film." But as my silent body (and silly glasses) at the screening of the U2 film attest, this is not the same as being at the concert. The film follows cinematic conventions, not the conventions of live popular music performance, so why would the discourse around the film suggest that one can stand in for the other?
Theatrical release of concert films has not been a customary way for fans to see popular musicians in concert; indeed, one commentator calls this genre of film "an afterthought" in the movie industry, although this may be changing. Such films have tended to mix musical performance with an over-arching, albeit sometimes loose, narrative constructed outside of the concert performance which can include interviews and offstage action, turning the film into a full-fledged documentary: in Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane's words, "Notable music documentaries are not fiction films that use rock and roll, or straight-ahead filmed concerts, nor are they simply records of performances. These are fully realized creative efforts." Among the most well-known of such films are Martin Scorsese's of The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), Madonna's Truth or Dare (1991), until recently the highest-grossing concert film, and U2's own Rattle and Hum (1988).
It is the novelty of seeing the artist both in and out of the live concert setting that makes these films special and appealing. One feels as though one has a different kind of access to the artist than at a live show: this is especially the case when there are scenes backstage before, during, or after the concert, scenes that capture the band in rehearsal, or, as in Led Zeppelin's concert film The Song Remains the Same, that show the musicians in their "everyday" settings (at home, with family) before the tour begins, however fictitious these scenes might actually be. Along with audio recordings, live concerts, interviews with and articles and books about the artist, the music documentary/concert film has become one more way to consume popular music, but certainly not a substitute for one of the other media. Further, the vast majority of pop music concert films are released as DVDs for home use, not for theatrical release; indeed, it has become standard practice for artists to release a version of every concert tour they do in DVD form, as U2 did with the Vertigo tour in 2005.
U2 3D does not follow the usual contours of the concert film genre. Aside from the opening shots of audience members running toward the stage, the film presents only the concert: no interviews, no backstage shots, no shots taken before or after the concert, in fact even very little of Bono talking to the live audience. According to Bono, the decision was made to "focus only on the music, not the personalities," eliminating everything deemed "extraneous." In director Catherine Owens's words:
I wanted to document the pure performance. It's tempting to do a lot of B-roll [backstage footage, etc.], because a lot of people do, but I think there's too many films about how many trucks it takes to load in the gear. And even though I know the fans really want to know that, I just wanted to give the band what it is that they had invested in. The band were very happy just to focus on that.
This is one reason why the commentary has suggested it might serve as a substitute for a live show, although the notion of "purity" here is suspect: as if at a live show there is not action that happens outside of the presentation of a number of songs. It is also, of course, the use of 3D, high definition, and IMAX theater technologies that has led to speculation about whether this is the wave of the future for concertgoers. But do the film's form and the technology work to replicate the concert experience (could it, indeed, ever work as a substitute for going to a concert?), or do they ultimately serve to distance the audience from the performance? Or are such totalizing, either/or questions the wrong ones to be asking? In what follows, I will examine the U2 film from two perspectives: Erving Goffman's concepts of frame and event, and the use of 3D technology. In the process, I will take up issues of liveness, the ontology of performance, and the nature of performance events. These issues have received considerable attention from theater and performance studies scholars, who have, necessarily, given their disciplinary orientation, focused much more on theater than on music; music scholars have given them little attention. Yet the study of popular music performance has some unique aspects to contribute to this discussion, including the role of an audience in creating a live performance, the question of effort expended by an audience at a live event, and the ways in which performers and audiences interact.
Frame/Event
In one of the few sustained accounts of the subject, Philip Auslander discusses live popular music as a form of authentication for audio and video recordings. Live performances prove that the musicians who made the recording not only were one and the same, but have the musical ability to reproduce the record live; after the advent of music video in the 1980s, Auslander argues, live performance served to authenticate the video. He also argues that the distinction between live and what he calls "mediatized" performance, the latter defined as "performance that is circulated on television, as audio or video recordings, and in other forms based in technologies of reproduction," is increasingly blurred and probably insignificant: "The progressive diminution of previous distinctions between the live and the mediatized," he writes, "in which live events are becoming ever more like mediatized ones, raises for me the question of whether there really are clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones." Live and mediatized performance are, for Auslander, "parallel forms that participate in the same cultural economy." With respect to stadium or arena concerts of popular music, he writes that "the spectator sitting in the back rows of a Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen concert ... hardly participates in it as such since his/her main experience of the performance is to read it off a video monitor." While it is beyond the scope of this essay to interrogate Auslander's ideas in full, I raise them because the discourse surrounding the U2 film would seem to prove his points: the film can be viewed in lieu of seeing the live show, or, the film is actually better than the live show because anyone watching gets the "best" seat in the house.
While to some extent fans do go to live concerts to authenticate what they have heard and seen in recordings — and this is more true for some genres (heavy metal, for one) than for others — the question of authenticity is only one of many reasons fans go to concerts. Absent from Auslander's discussion is the idea of live performance as event, of the constitutive formal elements of such an event, of space, of its social dimensions, or of the body — both the individual and the collective body of fans at a show (bit by bit I am returning to my still body in the movie theater). If one is sitting at the back of a stadium, one may watch a live rock performance largely on a video screen, but it is still fundamentally different to be there, in that stadium, than to be listening to a recording, watching a video, or watching a concert film. And what about those who are not at the back of the stadium, but up front, a concertgoing population that Auslander never addresses? As Paul Woodruff notes, "film resembles theater in several ways, but it does not serve the same need as theater. ... In the theater you are part of a community of watchers, while in the cinema you are alone. ... We become close to each other when we watch the same things." While it can obviously be argued that those in a cinema audience watch a film together, Woodruff is right to see this kind of watching as a predominantly solitary experience (even if one is with friends), compared to the kind of watching that occurs at a live show (my silent body, despite the presence of enthusiastic friends, at the U2 screening, makes the point again). So rather than arguing for live and mediatized performance as "parallel" forms that are increasingly undifferentiated, I would argue, with Peggy Phelan, that live and recorded performances are fundamentally different, that both are indispensible, and that the distinctions between them need to be preserved (indeed, I believe the distinctions are intact in fans' minds). The persistence of rock music tours, the incredible speed with which they sell out, and the profound excitement of fans at the announcement of a tour, all suggest that people want the experience of going to a live show and view it as special: it does not replace audio and video recordings, with which fans also have important encounters, but offers something fundamentally different. Whether or not there are elements of the mediatized in a live concert, being present creates the conditions for a particular kind of event.
Our understanding of an event, according to Goffman, comes through the principles of organization which govern it: "It has been argued that a strip of activity will be perceived by its participants in terms of the rules or premises of a primary framework, whether social or natural." A movie event and a live concert event have two distinctly different frames. My still body at the screening of U2 3D constitutes part of the frame of this event. I am at a movie theater, not a live concert, and those of us in the audience understand what we are witnessing as a movie, not a concert. (I saw the film four times and the audience response was the same on every occasion, although I concede that in other theaters it could have been different.) More than one reviewer I read suggested that the film gives you all of the benefits of a live concert experience with none of the headaches: you not only get a great view, but you are not stuck in traffic for hours while trying to leave the stadium after a show, or faced with the considerable ordeal — indeed, near impossibility — of obtaining tickets, given that tickets for arena and stadium concerts sell out so quickly.
But, in fact, these elements, along with entering the stadium with thousands of other people, enduring (or even occasionally enjoying) opening acts, watching the stage being set up, instrument technicians tuning instruments, lighting checks, the crowd growing louder as the recorded music played before the entrance of the band increases in volume, the lights dimming as the band takes the stage, the exit from the building at the end of the show, when one might encounter street vendors selling posters of the band — all of these serve as part of the frame of the live stadium concert experience. Indeed, Richard Schechner argues that these "before and after elements" are not just a frame but as much a part of the performance as the "during" elements.
And the same applies to the rituals that take place while the band is on stage. Whether one is in a "good" seat or watching the action on video monitors, when a performer asks you to sing along, you sing, when you are asked to clap, to raise your fist, to stand up, or sit down, you generally participate, you become part of the collective audience/fan body. When a member of the audience close to the stage has an encounter with the performers, the rest of the crowd responds to that encounter, feels a part of it through their presence in the same space, with events unfolding in the present. In theatrical events, as Willmar Sauter writes, creation and the experience of the creation are simultaneous processes. This is why Peggy Phelan argues that "performance's only life is in the present." Further, there is the question of effort expended before, during, and after a live show. It requires effort to obtain tickets, effort to get to a venue and to negotiate crowds. Effort is required to participate during a show (both physical and sometimes emotional effort). In general, it requires much more effort to take in a live show than it does a film; live shows are expensive, not only monetarily, but in terms of energy expended. This lends to their specialness (there are very few artists for whom I will expend this kind of effort).
Aside from the audience stillness at the U2 3D screening, the frame of this event differed from the live concert in several other significant ways. The film is eighty-five minutes long — a little more than half the length of the live show. It is unclear why the decision was made to keep it so brief (many feature-length films run over two hours), but because of its brevity many songs that were performed at the live shows on this tour were omitted in the film; the decision was made to cut, for example, a foray into the band's very early, less known material, in effect turning the film into a "greatest hits" compilation — something U2 shy away from in their live concerts, where they always play a substantial amount of new, and/or much older, obscure material. Of course this leads to a different kind of overall flow. Concerts are not just reproductions of individual recordings, as is sometimes suggested, but are rather based on a precisely worked-out running order for the songs, which are accordingly recontextualized and understood in relation to their position within the concert as a whole. U2 3D, then, creates quite a different flow, based on a different running order, than the live shows from which the footage for the film was assembled (five shows performed in Latin America in 2006, as well as a performance for the cameras only, with no live audience present), even though it has been edited to create the illusion that one is watching a seamless, single live performance at a single venue. Because of the "greatest hits" running order, this is not a show that one would ever get if one went to a live show.
Other framing elements derive from the fact that U2 3D was made for viewing in IMAX theaters, which means that it had a limited release: there were at that time only 320 IMAX theaters, spread across forty-two countries (it was also shown in a few non-IMAX theaters). Films made for IMAX theaters are shot with special cameras and are shown on enormous projection screens, more than twenty feet high. As the company explains, the theaters are built using a particular "theater geometry," which "maximizes the field of view" through the shape and positioning of the screen. They include sound systems that deliver remarkably clear and well-mixed audio. All of this is intended to create "the most immersive ways to enjoy Hollywood's biggest event movies and ground-breaking documentaries," with the audio designed to "deliver laser-aligned digital sound that envelops each audience member"; in particular, the company suggests that IMAX movies "mak[e] the viewer feel as if they are in the movie," because the 3D technology "enabl[es] images to leap off the screen and into the laps of the audience, further enhancing the immersive experience." Certainly the high-definition images and the particular kind of access the viewer gets to the stage in U2 3D are noteworthy. The camera often moves across the audience in the film, swooping in very low to the stage, close enough to see the grain of the wooden floor — the floor on which the action takes place, on which the performers stand. There are also a number of overhead shots of the band; most notable among these are when the camera moves over Larry Mullen Jr., the drummer, giving the viewer full access to the drum kit, even from the back, which video screens at concerts rarely capture. We see not only the way Mullen's feet work the bass drum, but also the pink-colored drink sitting next to him. It is interesting how often the camera exposes Mullen's (private) performance space, perhaps precisely because drummers are generally the band members least exposed to an audience in live performance, shielded from view by their instruments and position at the back of the stage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Taking It to the Bridge by Nicholas Cook, Richard Pettengill. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
