The Changing Aesthetics of Concert Videos

November 9th, 2009

Today I am going to get all David Bordwell on ya…

I’ve been collecting a lot of concert videos lately and have noticed how the aesthetic for covering a live performance has changed over the years. (A prog concert, anyway.)

This issue came to mind after grabbing a DVD of the Adrian Belew Power Trio performing on the German TV show Rockpalast in 2008. Here’s “Of Bow And Drum”, a representative sampling of the program.

Now, contrast the videography of the Belew clip with this one – a bit of “Supper’s Ready” by Genesis from 1976.

Aside from their availability on YouTube, I chose these clips because they each have slow parts and fast parts so you can see how the editing and camera work vary according to tempo.

Notice how in “Of Bow And Drum” the cameras are almost always moving just for the sake of having movement as opposed to having to reframe the musicians because of their movement. Cameras often zoom in very ostentatious ways as well with the quick zooming in and out on drummer Eric Slick when Belew starts going crazy and the strobes start flashing being particularly noticeable. (I thought this hyper-annoying technique ended in the early 1970s.) Although the shots are a bit longer in the slower parts, they are still not very long when compared with the very quick cuts used when the songs kicks into gear. In other words, the videography is designed to not let you concentrate on an image for very long. This, I think, is a good example of mistaking hectic for exciting.

The Genesis clip, by contrast, is almost Tarkovskyian. Despite the use of handheld cameras, the operators usually try to keep movement down to a minimum. And shot lengths vary greatly. Here’s an example.

At 5:49 we see Phil Collins again after having watched some footage of an atomic bomb test, presumably from some atoll in the Pacific Ocean. (This kind of montage editing was big in the 70s and this part of “Supper’s Ready” is rather apocalyptic.) Then we see Phil Collins from this angle:

This shot lasts for about 17 seconds. A few shots on the snare by Bill Bruford occasion a brief cut to this shot where we see Collins at a different angle:

This cutaway lasts for all of about 1 second before we cut back to the previous camera view for another lengthy shot which lasts for about 24 seconds. Here we have a 43 second sequence that has only 2 cuts. The Belew video has about two dozen cuts in any given sequence of that length. It is true that this bit is from a slower part of “Supper’s Ready” and so what happens during the “Apocalypse in 9/8″ section when the boys start jamming?

One problem here is that the faster part of the song is littered with cutaways to stock footage of destruction – bombs being dropped, machine guns strafing, and the like. Despite this a couple things are obvious: 1) the cuts come more quickly here but 2) shots are often continued after the cutaways. Let me give you an example or two.

When the guys start rockin’ the apocalypse in 9/8 time, we are shown a long shot of the entire stage.

After a few seconds we cut to some footage of a squadron of bombers.

Then it’s back to the band.

This back and forth between the long shot of the stage and the footage of the bombers lasts for nearly 30 seconds – we get no closer to the musicians than the 40th row during this time. By contrast, views of the entire stage are purely establishing shots in the Belew video where the frame almost always shows one particular performer.

When we do finally cut in, we get Mike Rutherford for a couple seconds.

And then it’s back to stock footage with a view of clouds through a set of open bomb bay doors.

Once again, we cut back to the shot we just left.

The styles employed by the directors of these two concert videos are poles apart. For Belew’s performance, we see a lot of camera movement and there is a lot of cutting. For parts of songs that are slower, the shot lengths increase and the camera movement decreases but only very slightly in each case. On the other hand, the Genesis video has much greater shot lengths overall with much less camera movement. In addition, the differences in these stylistic devices is much more exaggerated between the slow and fast sections of the music, i.e. – when Genesis is playing in a comparatively slow tempo, the shot lengths don’t just get marginally longer, they get exponentially longer.

While both videos were shot for different media (Belew for TV and Genesis for a film to be shown in theatres), they seem to have roughly the same number of cameras. Furthermore, Genesis was a 5-piece onstage at this time while Belew was going with a power trio format. Despite having more people onstage, the director of the Genesis concert film opted for longer shots and fewer cuts than his German counterpart in 2008. The Rockpalast footage has a lot of camera movement to (theoretically) enhance the excitement of the viewer while the cameramen onstage with Genesis in 1976 used camera movement to keep musicians in the frame as well as to pull back to put additional people into the frame for a long take.

Personally, I have a hard time watching more than one song in the Belew video. It’s frustrating never being able to focus on one thing before my eyes are whisked away to another shot. All the cutting and movement is overkill for me and, frankly, it’s mentally exhausting in a way with my brain being asked to process a very quick succession of different angles and shots. I find it annoying not being able to watch a facial expression change or a musician play an entire bar. At least the Rockpalast director refrained from employing canted angles.

I presume that my examples here are on the extreme ends and I readily admit that I haven’t seen much concert footage from this millennium. But, if you watch enough concert vids through the years, you will notice how both camera movement and the number of cuts increase. My guess is that, as the 80s wore on, the MTV aesthetic became more prevalent. Although by 1984/85 20+ second takes were a things of the past, Genesis’ Mama Tour video and 9012Live by Yes still had static cameras and fairly long takes. But by the late 1980s, the aesthetic for concert vids seemed to have gotten much more MTV-like with quicker cuts, canted angles, etc. Now that the music video has fallen out of favor, perhaps its style is also losing its cache amongst concert movie directors – I really don’t know. (Although certainly not with the Rockpalast crew.)

What I do know is that this is prime material for some communication arts graduate student looking for a thesis topic.

Complete
ly tangentially, it was Steven Soderbergh who directed 9012Live. Yes, *that* Steven Soderbergh.

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