Rock 'N' Film presents a cultural history of films about US and
British rock music during the period when biracial popular music
was fundamental to progressive social movements on both sides of
the Atlantic. Considering the music's capacity for utopian popular
cultural empowerment and its usefulness for the capitalist media
industries, Rock 'N' Film explores how its contradictory potentials
were reproduced in various kinds of cinema, including major studio
productions, minor studios' exploitation projects, independent
documentaries, and avant-garde works. These include Rock Around the
Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956) and other 1950s jukebox musicals;
Elvis's King Creole (Michael Curtiz, 1958) and other important
films he made before being drafted as well as the formulaic musical
comedies in which Hollywood abused his genius in the 1960s; early
documentaries such as The T.A.M.I. Show (Steve Binder, 1964) that
presented James Brown and the Rolling Stones as core of a
black-white, US-UK cultural commonality; A Hard Day's Night
(Richard Lester, 1964) that precipitated the British Invasion, Dont
Look Back (1967), Monterey Pop (1968), and other Direct Cinema
documentaries about the music of the counterculture by D. A.
Pennebaker; Woodstock (1970); avant-garde documentaries about the
Rolling Stones by Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Robert Frank, and
others. After the turn of the decade, notably Gimme Shelter (1970)
in which Charlotte Zwerin edited David and Albert Maysles's footage
of the Altamont free concert so as to portray the Stone's
complicity in the Hells Angels' murder of a young man, the 60s'
utopian biracial music-and films about it-reverted to separate
black and white traditions based respectively on soul and country.
These produced Blaxploitation and Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J.
Furie, 1972) on the one hand, and bigoted representations of the
Southern culture in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) on the other.
Both these last two films ended with the deaths of their stars, and
it seemed that rock 'n' roll had died or even, as David Bowie
proclaimed, that it had committed suicide. But in another
documentary about Bowie's concert, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars (1973), D.A. Pennebaker triumphantly re-affirmed the
community of musicians and fans in glam rock. In analyzing this
history, David James adapts the methodology of histories of the
classic musical to rock 'n' roll to show how the rock 'n' roll film
both displaced and recreated the film musical.
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