Craig’s Friday Countdown - Concert Films

In homage to Jonathan Demme, who passed away this week, the Countdown ranks concert films.  Due respect to Last Waltz, Gimme Shelter, Bullet in A Bible, Ziggy Stardust, Monterey Pop, loudQUIETloud and Buena Vista Social Club, Stop Making Sense is on an entirely higher plain than any other concert film.

Ranking Stop Making Sense against other concert films is like ranking Thin Mints against other Girl Scout cookies, red delicious against other apples or Jackson Pollock against your house painter and his drop cloth.  There’s no competition.  I’m looking at you, Grannysmith. 

Stop Making Sense (trailer here) is a masterpiece.  It’s a brilliant, ebullient piece of art, and the spare and articulate direction is itself part of the brilliance.  You have the dual arcs of how a concert comes together and how shared musical experience creates memory and connection from isolation.  The lighting, the camera movement, the storyboarding, the Tina Weymouth bassline and percussion, percussion, percussion; it’s all magnificent.  It’s Shaker-like in its ecstatic craft, and thirty-three years after it was first released, there isn’t another film that can match it today for being contemporary.   

I first saw it at the theater at the Union at WIU, and have watched it all or in part hundreds of times.  If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and find the biggest screen with the crispest sound you can.  Alternatively, ask me to play it any time you see me, because I carry it around on my iPhone.