Gimme Shelter: Cautionary Tale Or Blueprint for a Punk Carnival?
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MEDIANZ ! VOL 15, NO 1 ! 2015 DOI: 10.11157/medianz-vol15iss1id10 - ARTICLE - Gimme Shelter: Cautionary Tale or Blueprint for a Punk Carnival? Peter Stapleton Abstract Gimme Shelter (Maysles, Maysles, and Zwerin 1970), which documents The Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour, is widely regarded as the last of the 1960s rockumentaries. Paradoxically, its chaotic final scenes at the band’s Altamont concert would also unwittingly provide a blueprint for the ‘punkumentary’, a subgenre of films that expressed punk’s revolt against mainstream rock culture at the end of the 1970s. Drawing upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I wish to describe how the punkumentary’s subversion of the rock documentary hinged upon its aesthetic embrace of the very carnivalesque and anti-chronotopic elements, which had torn apart the 1960s counterculture’s utopian dream in Gimme Shelter’s Altamont scenes. In this respect, the punkumentaries destabilise the normative time-space associated with the rock documentary. Moreover, as an aesthetic and political expression of the very phenomenon they document, their subversion of the rock documentary is explicitly embodied. Introduction In this article, I want to historicise a critically neglected cycle of the rock documentary, which I will refer to as the ‘punkumentary’ films that documented the late 1970s/early 1980s punk subculture, such as The Punk Rock Movie (Letts 1978), D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage (Kowalski 1980) and The Decline of Western Civilization (Spheeris 1981). I use the term ‘punkumentary’ as a derivation of the ‘rockumentary’, but here my focus will be specifically on the relationship between the punkumentaries and 1960s rockumentaries such as Dont Look Back (Pennebaker 1966), Monterey Pop (Pennebaker 1968), Woodstock (Wadleigh 1970) and Gimme Shelter (Maysles, Maysles, and Zwerin 1970). What both subgenres have in common is that they attempt to embody the ethos of the respective subcultures they represent. However, notwithstanding their structural similarities, the punkumentary is very different from the 1960s rockumentary in terms of its content. In particular, I want to explore the Peter Stapleton is completing his PhD at the University of Otago in the Department of Media, Film and Communication. His thesis title is The Punkumentary: The Embodiment of a Punk Sensibility Within the Music Documentary. Peter is also a practising musician and organises the biennial experimental music and sound festival ‘Lines of Flight’. MEDIANZ ! Vol. 15, No. 1 ! 2015 connection between the punkumentaries and Gimme Shelter, which follows the 1969 American tour by British rock group The Rolling Stones and is widely regarded to have signalled the death knell of the ‘classic’ rockumentary. The film’s documentation of the tour’s final show at Altamont, in which an audience member was murdered by a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang (which had been hired to provide ‘security’ for the event) would lead to a decade-long reaction characterised by more conservative and tightly-controlled rock documentaries during the 1970s, epitomised by the likes of The Song Remains the Same (Clifton and Massot 1976) and The Last Waltz (Scorsese 1978). Yet, paradoxically, the struggle for control between audience and performer in Gimme Shelter’s Altamont scenes would also, unwittingly, provide a ready-made prototype for the documentation of punk’s revolt against the mainstream rock industry and the rock documentary at the end of the 1970s. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and its sub-variant, the anti-chronotopic carnivalesque, I will describe how the punkumentary’s subversion of the rock documentary hinged upon what appeared to be an aesthetic embrace of the very anti-chronotopic elements that had torn apart the 1960s counterculture’s utopian dream in Gimme Shelter’s Altamont scenes. For Bakhtin, the chronotope (literally ‘time- space’) expresses ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (1981, 84). He used the concept in a comparison of literary genres, distinguishing their different generic articulations of time and space and the manner in which they were generative of cultural meaning. In this respect, the chronotope binds culture and representation. As Bakhtin suggests: ‘out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text)’ (1981, 253). In this article, I follow Michael Montgomery (1993) and Vivian Sobchack (1998) in transposing Bakhtin’s model to the medium of cinema, described by both as uniquely expressive of time and space in its use of devices such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, freeze frames and slow motion. Here, I want to employ the chronotope in a comparison of historical subgenres of the rock documentary, beginning with an analysis of what Sobchack calls their ‘concrete and visible premises’ (1998, 130). More specifically, the naturalised chronotopes of the rock documentary, forged within the idyllic/pastoral time-spaces of the 1960s rock festivals, represented in rockumentaries such as Monterey Pop and Woodstock, become inverted within the screen-world of the punkumentary. In this respect, the latter recalls the Altamont scenes of Gimme Shelter, invoking an alternate model of time- space explored by Bakhtin (1984): the anti-chronotopic ‘carnivalesque’. In the carnivalesque, to quote Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, the wholeness and unity of established chronotopes disintegrates, ‘value is divorced from any specific time 155 Peter Stapleton frame, real history is not registered, and space becomes thoroughly fantastic’ (1990, 440). In the spirit of the carnivalesque, the punkumentaries embrace an alternative dystopian version of the 1960s, in which the Vietnam War, Altamont, and the Manson Family murders take on a greater constitutive force than Woodstock and the so-called Summer of Love. By perversely drawing on the dark side of the previous decade, diminished and largely avoided in the earlier rockumentaries, the punkumentaries invert the pastoral idyll and, in doing so, subvert expectations of a normative rock documentary time-space. At the same time, this fantastic expression of time and space stands in uneasy relationship with conventional documentary practice, particularly with observational modes such as direct cinema which, initially at least, espoused a philosophy of ‘unmediated’ observation.1 While Stacy Thompson (2004) has discussed punk cinema (including The Punk Rock Movie) in terms of its interrelationship between economics and aesthetics, this essay aims to complement the work he has done on the punkumentary’s textuality and material dimension. Similarly, in an article examining what he calls ‘performative display’ within the rockumentary, Keith Beattie proposes that, in contrast to direct cinema’s scopic regime, the form of knowledge produced within the rockumentary is ‘subjective, affective, visceral and sensuous’ (2005, 23). I would suggest that punkumentaries such as The Punk Rock Movie, D.O.A. and The Decline of Western Civilization take the subjective modalities of experience to another level. They both represent (from the outside in) and enact (from the inside out) a punk ethos that is practiced on and through bodies. In that respect, as an aesthetic and political expression of the very phenomenon it documents, the punkumentary’s subversion of the rock documentary is embodied through its invocation of the carnivalesque body, in which ‘the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome’ (Bakhtin 1984, 317). Gimme Shelter Although Gimme Shelter’s concluding scenes devolve into anti-chronotopic chaos, the film is initially expressive of the idyllic time-space familiar from rockumentaries such as Monterey Pop (Pennebaker 1968), and Woodstock (Wadleigh 1970). For example, the earlier concerts on The Rolling Stones’ American tour enact a spatially expansive, communal and above all celebratory time-space, onto which can be read the 1960s counterculture’s utopian ideals for the future. The film also reproduces the festival rockumentaries’ representation of the onscreen concert audience as the metonymic equivalent of the counterculture, equal at least to the musicians as social force, documentary subject, and visible spectacle. Through sound bridges and shot reverse- shot structures, it enacts utopian relations between the performers and the film’s two 156 MEDIANZ ! Vol. 15, No. 1 ! 2015 audiences: at the concert and in the cinema. The film’s concert scenes from earlier in the tour offer the cinematic spectator a fluid reciprocity of viewing positions, allowing him/her a simulated version of the live rock concert experienced both from the stage and the space of the audience. At the same time, while Gimme Shelter reproduces the focus on the audience as counterculture inaugurated by the festival rockumentaries, it also restores the fixation on the individual rock star that had been a feature of the earlier rockumentary Dont Look Back’s treatment of Bob Dylan. It does so by offering the cinematic spectator a privileged behind-the-scenes intimacy with Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger watching playbacks of the film’s documentary footage in the filmmakers’ editing booth. As the Rolling Stones’ tour progresses, Gimme Shelter’s fascination with Jagger’s persona begins to displace its concern with broader countercultural unity. The intensification of mediated