Remake/Remodel: Rock and Roll Movies

“It’s about the music man, the music,” muses a stoned character in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. As anyone who’s seen David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust costume or Mick Jagger’s wiry frame slither around the stage, rock and roll is also about the images. This is, after all, a genre from the age of television.

Remake/Remodel surveys how the movies have documented and advertised rock and roll. Featuring artists from Chuck Berry to Radiohead, the series takes a wide-angle look at rock’s expanding universe. The persona of James Brown in The T.A.M.I. Show is radically different from, say, The Talking Head’s in Stop Making Sense, but both films captured seminal live moments. They also fascinatingly chronicle both the evolution of commercial music and the evolution of documentary film as the essential packaging for any rock star.
Likewise it is equally compelling to track the evolution of documentary filmmaking through an examination of rock and roll films. The earliest examples are either influenced by the French New Wave, as was Richard Lester the director of A Hard Day’s Night, or part of the documentary movement called cinema verité that was made possible by lightweight mobile cameras—Ziggy Stardust, Don’t Look Back, and Gimme Shelter, for example. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, new styles emerged that incorporated either expert talking heads, as in Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock N' Roll or ridiculous amounts of footage. DiG! was culled from 2,000 hours of film.

The ‘60s were an astounding decade for rock and roll; look at all the documentaries. However, Remake/Remodel, which takes its name from a Roxy Music song, tries to broadly trace the development of rock and roll. Joe Strummer stands in for punk. The Talking Heads represent the birth of art rock. As you can see, film both slickly delivers a band’s cultural meaning and exposes the paradox at the heart of rock and roll. How can one fight a system when one is so clearly part of it? This paradox is seen again later, when Radiohead’s anti-rock star stance is yet another iteration of a band trying to keep itself sane and somehow both inside and outside of the system. And Spice World? Spice World is pure rocksploitation—a homage to A Hard Day’s Night. It’s also a nod to how quickly things change. Camp is hardly subversive anymore, but rather good clean fun. Despite all of this, like the Rolling Stones, the rock and roll film is resilient.

Wednesday, January 14, 8:00 PM
Stop Making Sense
(Jonathan Demme, 1984, U.S., 88 minutes, 35mm)
Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads’s classic concert film, is a marvel of the genre. It opens with David Byrne alone with his acoustic guitar, and as the rest of the band joins in, the stage swells with an energy and excitement that lasts all the way to the credits. Revolutionary in its technique, the film—shot over three nights in December 1983—broke all the rules of conventional concert films, relying on longer takes instead of quick cuts and rarely using theatrical lighting or audience reaction shots. Stop Making Sense is the great concert film of the 1980s and was an aesthetic rallying cry for New York City’s contemporary art scene.

Thursday, January 22, 8:00 PM
Meeting People is Easy
(Grant Gee, 1998, U.K., 95 minutes, 35mm)
Nominated for a Grammy as Best Long Form Music Video, Meeting People Is Easy follows the British rock band Radiohead on a world tour to promote their critically acclaimed album OK Computer. A combination of concert footage, backstage conversations, and press interviews, the documentary lets you in on the side of rock stardom that’s, well, rather dull and unglamorous. Filmmaker Grant Gee gets up close and personal, chronicling the band’s burnout and the near-breakdown of lead singer Thom Yorke.

Wednesday, January 28, 8:00 PM
A Hard Day’s Night
(Richard Lester, 1964, U.S., 87 minutes, 35mm)
A time capsule from the beginning of Beatlemania in the United States, A Hard Day’s Night shows us a shockingly young John, Paul, George, and Ringo, looking alternately innocent and rebellious. This now-classic period piece captures the dawning angst of rock and roll in the early 1960s. Richard Lester, highly influenced by the films of the French New Wave, applied many of their techniques to make this rocksploitation film and crucial artifact from the early Beatles.

Wednesday, February 4, 8:00 PM
Spice World
(Bob Spiers, 1997, U.K., 90 minutes, 35 mm)
A Hard Day’s Night for the nineties, Spice World follows Baby, Scary, Sporty, Ginger, and Posh around London the day before a major concert, with Elton John, Jennifer Saunders, Roger Moore, and Elvis Costello making guest appearances. The film, filled with surreal subplots, zany musical numbers, and, yes, loads of girl power, is a must-see for anyone nostalgic for the days when you could slow it down and have some fun, when your boots had to have six-inch lifts, and when your lovers still had to get with your friends. Warm up your winter with a little spice.

Wednesday, February 11, 8:00 PM
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
(D.A. Pennebaker, 1973, U.S., 90 minutes, 35mm)
Directed by D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars documents David Bowie’s glittering last performance as his glam-rock alter ego Ziggy Stardust. This is Bowie at his most flamboyant and outrageous, and working with footage that’s at times blurry and hazy, and sound quality that’s never pristine, Pennebaker manages to preserve the feeling of being present at this final Ziggy extravaganza. As Pennebaker later said of Bowie, “I have never seen anyone turn on an audience, men as well as women, the way he did that night.”

Thursday, February 12, 8:00 PM
Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock n' Roll
(Taylor Hackford, 1987, U.S., 120 minutes, 35mm)Simply put, Chuck Berry is rock and roll. In 1986 Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones paid tribute by organizing a 60th birthday concert for Berry in his hometown of St. Louis. Notorious for not rehearsing, Berry was backed here by an all-star band put together by Richards. The concert’s spectacular, but Hail! is most notable for its copious rehearsal and interview footage, including Berry feuding with Richards and just about everyone else on the set. Not to mention an amazing roundtable discussion on the origins of rock and roll, featuring Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. With renditions of songs like “Maybelline” and “Johnny B. Goode,” this just might be the catchiest documentary ever made.

Wednesday, February 18, 8:00 PM
DiG!
(Ondi Timoner, 2004, U.S., 107 minutes, 35mm)
The winner of the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize, DiG! turns the story of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre—both rock bands on the make—into an epic about ambition, integrity, and the future of rock and roll. Director Ondi Timoner had a good idea and time: Accumulating some 2,000 hours of footage over seven years of filming, Timoner watched as the Dandy Warhols came closer to commercial success and the Brian Jonestown Massacre spiraled away from it. Disowned by the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s lead singer as “Jerry Springer-esque,” DiG! is a street-level look at making it (or not) in the new music business.

Friday, February 27, 8:00 PM
The T.A.M.I Show
(Steven Binder, 1964, U.S., 123 minutes, 35mm)
From the slice of time between the birth of mainstream rock and roll and the advent of R&B comes the T.A.M.I Show. The Teen Age Music International show, a 1964 concert in Santa Monica, featured a hall-of-fame lineup: Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes—and on and on. But the concert’s best known for James Brown’s performance: Brown shimmies across the stage on one leg, wails into the microphone, and collapses onstage, only to rise up and do it all over again. (Keith Richards says that following James Brown onstage was the worst mistake of the Rolling Stones’s career.) A much-loved, rarely seen rock documentary, filmed by a crew from The Steve Allen Show. Introduced by Northwest Film Forum Programmer Adam Sekular.

Wednesday, March 4, 8:00 PM
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
(Julian Temple, 2007, U.K., 123 minutes, 35mm)
For his critically acclaimed portrait of Joe Strummer—The Clash’s iconic lead singer—director Julian Temple has put together an amazing array of obscure early footage, including film of Strummer when he was still John Graham Mellor, the privileged son of a British diplomat. Deftly incorporating a series of interviews, from Strummer’s old friends to Bono and Damien Hirst, and displaying a nuanced appreciation of Strummer’s cultural significance, Temple has managed to make a film with the vitality of its subject. “It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud,” as A.O. Scott wrote in his review.

Thursday, March 12, 8:00 PM
Don’t Look Back
(D.A. Pennebaker, 1967, U.S., 96 minutes, 35mm)
Don’t Look Back follows Bob Dylan for three weeks during his 1965 tour of England, a period when the 23-year-old Dylan was already redefining himself by switching from acoustic to electric guitar. The epitome of the rock documentary genre, Don’t Look Back may or may not capture Dylan’s personality—Dylan famously said he was acting the whole time—but it gives a glimpse of Dylan’s life and the early 1960s music scene, with Joan Baez and Donovan making appearances, that feels honest and true to life. Called “the first and best pop documentary of its kind, a defining study of celebrity as suffocation” by Rolling Stone, D.A. Pennebaker’s film is still fresh and revealing today.

Friday, March 13, 8:00 PM
Gimme Shelter
(Albert and David Maysles, 1970, USA, 91 min, 35mm)
Documenting the Altamont Free Rock Concert, which has been called the end of the peace and love era of the 1960s, Gimme Shelter is a collage of the music and violence at the infamous concert that the Rolling Stones had originally envisioned as Woodstock West. The Maysles brothers were around for the tour leading up to the Altamont concert and they were able to capture all the shaky planning that led to tragedy, including hiring the Hells Angels to serve as security. Restless and tense, the film anticipates the events of the day and amplifies the anxiety of what’s to come. A thrilling glimpse into a legendary and terrifying day in rock history.