DA Pennebaker and The National

If the fact that DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus recently directed a live webcast of a performance by The National at Brooklyn's BAM Theater is notable to you, you're probably interested in at least one (and possibly all three) of the following things: The National, the general idea of the concert movie and/or the work of Pennebaker and Hegedus.

The National are the Brooklyn-based band who've spent the past decade building up a fanatically loyal fanbase and critical army for their anthemically mopey music; Pennebaker is the man who's built an entire career upon the admitted coup of being able to follow Bob Dylan around during 1965 and giving the world Don't Look Back. And the concert movie is the hardest to evaluate with any kind of critical distance.

My gut feeling is that Pennebaker's filmography isn't as formidable as his reputation; he only seems to be firing on all levels when he's in the presence of the already famous, people who bring their glamour and presence with them. That's neither here nor there, though: it's fascinating that Pennebaker - who filmed Bowie's last Ziggy Stardust show and helped create one of Bob Dylan's most iconic moments - was brought in to helm a live webcast, something pretty much anyone could do. This raises questions like: who are The National and what kind of company are they stepping into? What are the limits of a live musical webcast? And just what is a concert movie capable of anyway?

To try to figure some of this out, I spent half a day watching Monterey Pop - Pennebaker's famous chronicle of 1967's Monterey Pop Festival - and The National's show. This wasn't precisely a fair comparison, but I'd always heard that the Stardust movie hadn't been released for forty years because it couldn't disguise the raw footage inadequacies, and I wasn't interested enough to watch Down From The Mountain, which chronicles the tour of the short-lived post-O Brother Where Art Thou? bluegrass revival. As it turned out, it was a reasonably instructive comparison anyway.

"I think it's going to be like Easter and Christmas and New Year's and your birthday all together, you know?" a young woman says at the start of Pop, describing what she expects before things kick off. If you're not a fan of the music - and I could easily live without half of what's included - what's striking is the general aura of enthusiasm her statement accurately predicts.

Pop alternates between observing the audience and training its attention on the performers: for the most part, it prefers the latter even when the crowd's more fun to watch. If you don't care about, say, Janis Joplin (I'm fascinated by how she knows precisely how loud she can be every half-inch away from the mic, but otherwise I'm just not responsive), there's not much to watch when you're supposed to be contemplating the music. There's some stylized '60s moments - during Otis Redding's performance, whenever his head movies back the frame is completely whited-out by the stage lights - and some fascinating tangents: I like the shot of a girl with a ring that has a butterfly with faux stained-glass wings staring in rapture while the guys behind her couldn't care less, suggesting the inevitable dissonance of an audience at a festival. But mostly there's not much here to watch: Pennebaker's so committed to the performers that not until Ravi Shankar goes off for 18 minutes does he feel comfortable in ignoring the stage for half that time and walking through the crowd.

Here's the crux: it's near impossible for me to think of a single concert film that would engage people not interested/amenable to the actual music. (I'd like to think this is the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party, but am assured by my more ornery friends that this isn't actually the case.) It's the genre least capable of sustaining criticism (music criticism maybe, but not film); fascinating though Jonathan Demme is, I feel no urge to accompany him on every visit to his old friend Neil Young, even though Stop Making Sense is capable of inducing Talking Heads-related euphoria in me in under ten minutes. There's not a single director capable of taking music and making it into a stand-alone film if, say, you only want to listen to 18th-century lute concertos.

As far as Pennebaker and Hegedus' helming of the BAM show, it's predictably unexceptional and deliberately self-effacing. If you want to talk about trans-media or whatever, there's not much here to suggest that the final product would have come out any differently given editorial time. In Pop, framing with a mild degree of chaos and clutter from the sidelines was preferred, alternating with straight-forward close-ups and the occasional tapping foot (one of those "small gestures" that seem to arouse editors): sure enough, four minutes into the generic intro, we zoom in on vocalist Matt Berninger tapping his foot on the subway. There's a few glitches in there - I seriously doubt anyone meant to include a shot of a spit-valve being released in the foreground of the frame, then looming in front of the piano, which happens during "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks" - but it's mostly unexceptional. Late in the proceedings, someone had the bright idea of sticking a camera directly under the drum kit and pointing it straight at the ceiling lights for some flare, but that's about it. Performance wise, it's fun to watch Berninger get very very drunk, do some half-assed walking through the crowd and forget his cues both at the beginning and end of the last song, but it's hardly Jimi Hendrix humping an amp.

Which raises the question again: what's a concert film, and what does it do? Monterey Pop at least has some external fascination as a time capsule of the audience, which it's suggested is as important as the bands. Unless someone wants archival footage of white Brooklynites ranging from their twenties to forties, this is unlikely to prove the case with this document. Plus no one's as amusingly zonked-out/feeling the best acid trip of their lives here; it's a mostly staid crowd, full of stoically unimpressed women and fist-pumping young men. If it's possible that the only value of a concert film - besides recording for fans a performance - is in the crowd, it's safe to say almost every concert movie ever made is a failure. It's an impossible genre, no matter who's behind the camera.