When the Music meets the Experience by Craig Hammill

The past two weeks have seen a number of “experience” movies grace the screen here at the Secret Movie Club Theater. Movies like the 1970 documentary Woodstock, the Who’s rock opera Tommy directed by British maximalist Ken Russell, Pink Floyd’s The Wall directed by Alan Parker, and even David Lowery’s A Ghost Story all employ music in service of narratives that are meant to be more like “journeys” or “trips” then straight ahead storytelling.

You know the experience movie even if you maybe haven’t called it as such. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey with its famous tagline “The Ultimate Trip” gave a subtle nod to all the folks who saw this sci-fi masterpiece on acid.

You might not be able to really give someone a quick synopsis of the “experience” movie but you definitely could look them in the eye and say “You’ve gotta see it. I can’t really do it justice but it’s an experience you’ll never forget. It will blow your mind.”

By way of example, just imagine trying to truly communicate what The Wall is like.

“Well,” you’d tell your friend. “It’s about this rock musician who is holed up in a hotel room ruminating about what a mess his life is intercut with animated sequences of really phantasmagoric sexual imagery of flowers, hammers, apocalyptic cities, and then there’s something about fascism and rock audiences and there’s a heartbreaking scene in a playground where a little kid doesn’t have a father and wants one and. . .”

And yet, when I watched The Wall on 35mm with our audience last week, I was stunned how deeply it affected me. Though the story may be incredibly impressionistic and kaleidoscopic, the intensity of its emotional message is overpowering. I sat there, choking back tears, understanding that what happens to one in youth especially with absent or psychologically abusive parents (a theme picked up interestingly in Tommy as well) can have devastating and emotionally crippling effects on one’s ability to be able to connect with others as an adult.

In a way, the experience movie, if it’s done right (and it’s damn hard to do right), can bypass the sometimes intense strictures of classic storytelling to produce a deeper, more complex, profound stew of emotions, thoughts, reactions.

Billy Wilder famously said, “You can tell a complex story simply or a simple story in a complex way.” And that makes a lot of sense. The “experience” movie by burrowing down into the ground of the subconscious announces right away “don’t worry about the story” so much as “open yourself up to the music, the images, the emotions, the moments, the scenes”.

The 1970 doc Woodstock pulls off a really nifty magic trick by both being an exhaustive documentary of the 3 day outdoor music festival AND somehow making you feel like you’re one of the people attending. The Martin Scorsese-Thelma Schoonmaker (they were both editors on the picture) innovation of often using three split screens to show what’s happening in the audience, on stage, backstage, allows the viewer’s mind to instantaneously grasp the different experiences being had by the attendees, the performers, and the producers.

At the same time, the occasional interviews or scenes with young people, rock musicians, event planners, and local townsfolk provide a contextualization of the event as a historical moment that proves more and more insightful almost sixty years on.

By focusing on moments, songs, side stories of the concert, you, as a viewer, are able to SIMULTANEOUSLY attend, appreciate, interrogate, and re-examine the perception of the concert itself.

1974’s Tommy takes Ken Russell’s maximalist aesthetic to possibly its most successful and mainstream application (the movie was a #1 hit for weeks and weeks). And while Mr. Russell’s always intense and provocative visuals are never less than fascinating, one senses it is actually Pete Townsend’s music that really carries the movie into the “experience” realm.

It’s hard to remember how daring and potentially laughable the idea of a “rock opera” was when Pete Townsend set out to write one. But when you sit the theater listening to banger after banger (helped by raise the roof performances by Tina Turner, Elton John, Eric Clapton, among others), you are floored. Townsend not only pulled it off, but each song, refrain, call back, theme, is instantly epic. The Tommy score is the rock and roll gift that keeps on giving. And the ability to enjoy it while watching Russell’s visuals is key. The images help contexutalize the story as really the story of many (as Townsend would point out) Crows (kids born before V-E day during WWII) who experienced the worst of the war, the Blitz, and then were suddenly ejected into a world of sudden prosperity and material wealth.

One realizes that Townsend is talking about a whole generation of people (he among them) who had seen and experienced the worst of human nature (both from the Nazis and at the hands of opportunistic fellow countrymen) but somehow had to find a way to move past all that.

The “experience” here is being able to enjoy the totality of a vision and rock album with the aid of informative visuals that fill in the story that might have escaped us just listening to the album. And these visuals and performances act as a kind of cohesive glue that hold our attention.

Finally, just this week, we screened David Lowery’s 2017 A Ghost Story which was programmed as part of our “Take a Chance” Cinema. To my delight and surprise, I realized it too had a very strong connection to music and the “experience” film. Which just goes to show you how the subconscious works.

Lowery has talked about how his long term composer, Daniel Hart, brought a just mixed song by Hart’s band Dark Rooms called “I Get Overwhelmed”. When Lowery heard it, he built the entire A GHOST STORY idea around it. And Hart composed all the score as well.

Watching it this week, I realized that the overwhelming majority of the movie has no dialogue. So the songs, the score, and the visuals are the architecture around which the cinematic experience are built.

If you’ve never seen A Ghost Story, watch it as soon as you can. It’s one of the great movies of the 2010’s and tells the story of a young couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) dealing with their maturing relationship when the man suddenly dies in a car accident. He decides, as a ghost, to stay with his lover in their house but when she ultimately leaves, he finds he cannot and thus begins a near 100 year cycle of reflection, grief, anger as he watches the world move on without him.

The movie, like all great experience movies, really is much more than that. There’s a stunning twist towards the end of the movie involving how time might work for the dead that elevates the movie to an even more rarefied cosmic point of view.

As you watch A Ghost Story, you get just enough character and story to be deeply emotionally invested but you also get such masterful experience based filmmaking that you’re also able to sit through the movie’s fleet 90 minutes reflecting on your own mortality, relationships, and the nature of existence in which there are never guarantees no matter how much you want there to be.

It is as challenging a movie as it is stunning to experience because it does really focus on what death means for both the living and the departed.

But Lowery’s decision to approach the material more from a poetic experiential and musical base than a narrative one creates just the right amount of distance to truly be able to engage with the movie.

And Daniel Hart’s music is ambitious, stunning, effective, and transcendental throughout.

So these ramblings are all a long winded way of saying, there’s something powerful and unique in the capacity and potentiality of the experience movie to achieve an emotional and psychological and speculative effect on the viewer for which more straightforward narrative pictures are ill equiped.

And, including even Kubrick’s 2001, it’s also clear the absolutely central role music plays as the unifying cohesive force in providing the “electricity” that power these works.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.