There's one great problem with making a concert film: if the audience doesn't respond positively to the music, no amount of great filmmaking is going to save it. Documentaries about bands are one thing; if there's a good story to tell, an audience might just forgive the band in the spotlight for making music they dont' particularly care for. But in a concert film, with very little to contemplate but the action on stage, if the moviegoers aren't compelled by the music that's being made, that's pretty much all she wrote. With some concert films, such as Woodstock, there's enough historical portent to the whole affair that it gets carried along; that film also had the benefit of multiple bands to take the pressure off. With other films, such as the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, there's the power of a compelling story to alleviate the fact that you might not especially dig the Rolling Stones at their stage in their career: what was going on all around them was more than enough to compensate for any distaste you might have for the music coming out of the speakers. With Jonathan Demme's beautiful, moving, nearly perfect 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, though, Demme was taking a huge risk: he presented no story, no history, no audience, no variance, no nothing: just the pure experience of watching the Talking Heads play.
It could have been a disaster. Although they were one of the most successful of the bands to come out of the New York punk scene (they even raised the money to shoot the film themselves), Talking Heads were, then as now, not to everyone's taste. Their nervy, edgy blend of no wave, funk, and ice-cold electronic pop turned off a lot of people, as did lead singer David Byrne's otherworldly geekiness, which made him come across as even more alien than David Bowie, but with none of Bowie's cool. And although the band, touring behind their then-new album Speaking in Tongues, went on to have a number of high-profile hits, at the time it was a big risk, both for them and for their record label, to sink so much money and time into a full-length concert documentary with no guaranteed audience. But it wasn't a disaster: Stop Making Sense was, and is, quite simply the greatest concert film ever made, the purest and simplest evocation imaginable of the sheer joy of watching a band at the top of their game play an amazing show in a live setting. It's that rare exception to the rule: even those who weren't particular fans of the Talking Heads found themselves instantly swept away by the sheer charisma and intensity of the performers. The movie that Jonathan Demme made at such risk became the gold standard to which all concert films are held.
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