The band as a whole is simply a joy to watch through Demme's lens. And the additional players Talking Heads enlisted for the tour - percussionist Steve Scales, guitarist Alex Weir, keyboardist Bernie Worrell and backing vocalists Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry - not only enrich the band's sound but also turn the show into a kind of minimalist pageant. The delight of the performers - even the often-inscrutable Byrne - informs every frame. Although it's a performance by consummate pros (the three founding members of Talking Heads, singer and guitarist Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Franz, had been performing together for nearly 10 years guitarist Jerry Harrison had joined in 1977), there's still something innocently naked about it. From that point on, "Stop Making Sense" is so straightforward, so Spartan in its conception, that you'd hardly expect it to swing, and yet it does. The picture's opening image is the neck of David Byrne's acoustic guitar seen as a shadow in a shaft of light - we're seeing just a suggestion, an outline, of one of the primary tools of rock 'n' roll. There's just no explaining the sense of wonder that creeps into nearly every minute of "Stop Making Sense." Whether you've seen three rock shows over the course of a lifetime or 3,000, you can almost fool yourself into thinking that this might be your first. "Nobody was there doing a job - everybody was there because of the excitement of being part of it, truly." "We were all sort of madly in love with this band and their music," Demme has said. And although Demme and his crew had mapped out every step beforehand - you could see the movie a dozen times and still not quite fathom the extraordinary amount of planning and forethought that must have gone into it - the picture comes off as infinitely more organic than mechanical. (All-new 35 mm prints, with a digitally remixed and remastered soundtrack, open at theaters this fall in honor of the movie's 15th anniversary.) The movie was filmed over the course of three nights in December 1983, at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. "Stop Making Sense" looks just as fresh as it did in 1984. Instead, it's all about stealth inventiveness. There's no rock 'n' roll sloppiness, no seat-of-the-pants spontaneity. "Stop Making Sense" is so beautifully choreographed that in some ways it's more like theater than a rock show. The performers find their way onto the stage in layers, song by song, each one filling in his or her particular space so perfectly that you wonder why you hadn't thought of it as empty. The trappings of putting on a show - everything from lights to stagehands to slide projectors - are in full view at one time or another. It doesn't seem "made." It merely exists, like some inexplicable and wonderful quirk of nature: a redwood, a toad with fabulous markings or something that just mysteriously appeared on a lily pad one day.Īnd yet, it's all about process. Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads concert film, "Stop Making Sense," is one of those miracle movies, a picture that seems to have come together by laws unto itself.
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