![]() ![]() Then all these flat projections disappear, leaving the blunter flatness of space defined by a proscenium arch.ĭesigning this concert for the stage, Byrne was like a grown-up assembling a building-block world, complete with people-the four original Talking Heads, plus five more who have gravitated to the band in the 1980s. The words give way to allover images of bookshelves, then a pattern of a night skyline. Behind the Talking Heads you sometimes see the bare white back wall of the stage, sometimes a field of darkness, sometimes projected planes of color-red or blue, with words like “ONION” in white letters ala Ed Ruscha. Like the movie screen, the architecture of the image is rectilinear. Everything-traps, keyboards, mikes, personnel-lines up with the edge of the stage. The first bears percussion equipment, the second synthesizers. But for that the stage has to be constructed: as the band plays, the crew wheels one, then another, platform into view. The music’s complexity builds from number to number, as the rest of the band comes on stage. Her bass frees Byrne’s guitar to follow a melodic line. With his eyes sliding off to interior thoughts, with his odd Psycho-Pierrot saunter, and the rag-doll stagger of those moments when the music buffets him.across the stage, Byrne gropes his way to an uneasy contact with the audience. Nor does he play the brute who rejects the audience out of hand. With his goosenecked head-bobbing and his voice as “tense and nervous” as his lyric, Byrne dismisses all rock-star fictions of an easy contact with the audience. “I have a tape I want to play.” He sets a ghetto blaster next to the mike, turns it on, you hear a rhythm section, and then Byrne starts to play the chord structure of “Psycho Killer” on his guitar. “Hi,” says Byrne, whose suit is also white and whose dark hair is carefully slicked down. As the camera pulls back, it turns out that his destination is a bare stage. The film begins with a close-up tracking shot of Byrne’s white canvas boat shoes striding toward the camera. We let ourselves believe the image of the stage spectacle will cohere because we see it being built. From start to finish, the music is powerful-“same as it ever was,” to quote the groups song “Once in a Lifetime.” Now and then it comes close to overwhelming the image on the screen. Throughout, severe lighting reduces his face to a play of light and dark planes against a field of darkness.īecause Byrne designs such 2D intensity into his figurative presence, I’m tempted to say this film of a rock performance is more pictorial than musical. Toward the end of the film Byrne encases himself in the literal, boxy flatness of a white suit a couple of feet too wide for his frame. ![]() Instead of a plot, the movie chronicles the elegant gestures and twitches, manic and grand, of Byrne’s ongoing struggle to find a fit between his 3D body and the 2D screen. Byrne had pictorial intentions to his design, which director Jonathan Demme respected. According to the credits, Stop Making Sense was “conceived for the stage” by David Byrne, lead singer of the Heads. STOP MAKING SENSE (1984), compiled from footage of four 1983 Talking Heads concerts, is a good movie, but it counts more as a major contribution to our current stock of troubled figures-or figurative troubles. ![]()
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