Roof sweet home 3d1/23/2024 Instead, Demme proposed to simply film the band onstage, expertly, while avoiding the rhythmic, fast-paced, jump-cut style of editing associated with the music videos being shown on the recently established platform MTV. Unexceptional as this might sound, it was a departure from the way that rock concerts had previously been presented on film, from Richard Lester’s mock-documentary “ A Hard Day’s Night” to Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” by dispensing with a “backstory” of the musicians coming and going the logistics of staging the show interviews with the band members, promoters, and fans and the fervent response of the crowd. On the advice of their manager, Gary Kurfirst, the group financed the film themselves, with the help of an advance from their record label, in order to retain ownership and full creative control.įor his part, Demme made it clear that he wanted to focus the whole production solely on the band’s performance. As fans of “Melvin and Howard,” the Heads agreed to work with Demme after hearing his thoughts about how––and how not––to present them onscreen. He quickly contacted the group through a mutual friend and pitched the idea of filming their show. The four former statues had turned into a dynamic, interracial troupe of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists performing exuberantly arranged and choreographed versions of their songs. He next saw Talking Heads perform in Los Angeles in the summer of 1983, and was stunned by the change in the band. (“The four of them stood there like statues on this platform,” he recalled.) The following year, Demme achieved his breakthrough as a director with “Melvin and Howard,” a bittersweet comedy about a chance encounter in the Nevada desert between an unemployed factory worker and the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. The New York-based film director Jonathan Demme, who died in 2017, was forty years old at the time that he made “Stop Making Sense.” He had been an avid fan of Talking Heads since he first saw the band perform at Wollman Rink, in Central Park, in the summer of 1979. This marks the first time that the band has appeared together in public since 2002, when the group, which officially dissolved under contentious circumstances in 1991, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In the interests of promoting the film they collectively own, the four former Talking Heads––Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz––have taken part in a series of panel discussions and media events at screenings in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles. Now, in anticipation of the film’s fortieth anniversary, the original negative has been reprocessed in a high-resolution 4K format, and reissued, once again, for theatrical release. In the decades since, each release of “Stop Making Sense” on a new medium––VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming––has been greeted with fresh praise from succeeding generations of viewers and critics. If such a thing as Rotten Tomatoes had existed at the time, “Stop Making Sense” would surely have ranked in the high nineties.īased on the band’s insistence that the film be seen only in theatres, they initially refused permission for it to be made available on videotape or shown on cable TV. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve.” Similarly effusive sentiments were echoed by critics across the country. He seems fleshless, bloodless he might almost be a Black man’s parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. In the pages of this magazine, Pauline Kael praised the film as “close to perfection,” and described the Heads front man, David Byrne, as “a stupefying performer.” “He’s so white he’s almost mock-white,” Kael wrote, “and so are his jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. Reviewer after reviewer settled on the word “exhilarating” to describe the experience of watching an expanded nine-member iteration of the four-piece group perform sixteen of their best-known songs in an uninterrupted sequence of dynamically staged and photographed musical vignettes. When it first opened in theatres, in the fall of 1984, “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme and starring the rock group Talking Heads, was quickly recognized as one of the finest concert films ever made.
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