Visual imagery plays an integral role in creating historical memory.  French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard believes people “need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us to our ends.”[1]  Visual mediums, such as sculptures, paintings, and photographs are ubiquitous in human culture and impact origin myths as well as historical memory.  However, due to their static nature, they are limited in their impact.  Fortunately, new technologies can help make still-photographs more interactive.  Embedded deep in America’s historical memory, for example, are the 170,000 pictures taken by a team of photographers from 1935-1944 working for the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) documenting the Great Depression.  These priceless artifacts continue to live in historical memory for a new generation as online interactive maps utilizing data visualization enables deeper spatial analysis and investigation of the photographs.

In addition to the photograph, the motion picture documentary film has become a powerful tool in the creation of historical memory.  Unlike a still photograph, film can record life as it happens and be combined with other media to create a meaningful narrative.  Ever since Robert Flaherty set out to Northern Canada to film his pioneering work, Nanook of the North (1922), the nonfiction medium has evolved and created ways to document, discover, and even alter how people understand the past.  Early non-fiction filmmakers used the new camera technology to document and record their experiences and created sub-genres such as direct cinema.  However as technology and techniques advanced, filmmakers began to cultivate different formats that utilized the medium not only as a tool to document life, but also as a device for discovery.  One example of this type of sub-genre is the “rockumentary.”  

Gaining prevalence in the 1960s and 1970s, the rockumentary typically focuses on a musician, band, or musical genre during a historically significant event such as an album, concert, or tour.  One pillar of the rockumentary is its ability document a moment in time. Canonical films such as The Song Remains the Same (1976), and The Last Waltz (1978) were produced in the rockumentary format.  The Song Remains the Same is a documentary film about Led Zeppelin and was shot over three nights at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.  The film gives viewers intimate access to the band’s live performances at a time when arena-rock, which disconnected artists and fans, was at its height.  While there are cameras focused on the band as well as each member, many of the shots are from the pit giving viewers the unique experience of sitting in the front row of a Led Zeppelin concert.  

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m2FhRv8xF0&w=854&h=480]

The Last Waltz was a film directed by Martin Scorsese and documents The Band’s 1976 farewell performance in San Francisco.  The film includes guest musicians such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, and the Staples Singers.  In contrast to The Song Remains the Same, shots in the The Last Waltz focus primarily on the performers, especially the special guests.  While The Last Waltz film lacks intimacy, it documents a collection of musicians who never performed together, and will never be on the same stage again.  

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ01bSEh4fI&w=854&h=480]  

Recorded visual imagery of musical performances create an abundance of historical, social, and cultural data.  The rockumentary shows viewers how a band looked and sounded, the types of clothes people wore at the time, what hairstyles were in fashion, how the fans reacted to certain songs, what a venue looked like, and other important visual information.  This imagery is important because it informs the historical memory in way that other media cannot.  For example, hearing an audio recording of John Bonham’s drum solo during Moby Dick is one thing, but actually seeing it creates a significantly enhanced historical memory for the individual.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Aacd7jX2s&w=854&h=480]

Along with its ability to document content and create historical memory, the rockumentary also allows for the discovery of unknown information about the musician or band.  This is accomplished by removing performers from the stage and giving viewers intimate access to the musicians’ everyday lives.  For example, Don’t Look Back (1967) is a documentary about Bob Dylan that offers few scenes of him actually performing.  Instead, the film uses archival footage, interviews, and active shots to document the singer’s dealings with friends, the press, and fans during a tour of England.  One of the more intimate moments in the film is a scene of Joan Baez signing to a disconnected Bob Dylan.  While the two were dating, their relationship is said to have ended during the filming of the documentary.  The access to a musician’s private life was unprecedented before the rockumentary sub-genre and is a powerful tool for historical memory-making.  The element of discovery makes the rockumentary more than a visual recording of a concert.  Discovery gives viewers the sense that they are not only experiencing something unique, but also building their historical memory of the artist.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i06LbpM-ccc&w=854&h=480]    

The rockumentary has recently evolved a new sub-genre that expands on its ability to document and discover.  This sub-genre will be called salvage rockumentary and differs from a traditional rockumentary because it documents, discovers, as well as unearths previously unknown information, and presents it in a way that advocates for changes in historical memory.  The salvage rockumentary is rooted in what anthropologist refer to as salvage ethnography and combines the Explorer, Chronicler, and Advocate roles of the documentarian developed by Erik Barnouw.       

During the nineteenth century, anthropologists began participating in salvage ethnography by collecting artifacts from cultures that were thought to be headed for extinction.  The advent of the motion picture made it possible to capture not only artifacts, but visual imagery of traditions, rituals, and other cultural data of primitive cultures that would be eventually consumed by modernity.  Erik Barnouw referred to these early filmmakers as “Explorers.”[2]  While early explorer-documentarians such as Robert Flaherty did his work for “deeply personal rather than scholarly reasons”, modern explorers seem to be interested in discovering larger cultural trends that become apparent after unearthing recorded visual media.[3]  Instead of traveling to distant lands to film a “lost tribe,” the salvage rockumentarian sifts through the massive amount of visual material already available to find the lost band or musician. In other words, the salvage rockumentary does not necessarily focus on something that will soon be extinct but rather on historical data that have been buried or repressed.

Using pre-recorded visual imagery as a way to develop historical memory became popular after World War II by documentarians who Barnouw refers to as “Chroniclers.”[4]  Chroniclers used fifty years of newsreel footage to develop a deeper understanding of issues such as the causes of the war and the rise of Naziism.  Most importantly, chroniclers “learned to consider almost any historic relic or artifact a potential narrative instrument” and illuminate trends based on the compiling and organizing of all available content.[5]  In contrast to explorers who had a narrow scope of investigation, chroniclers had the luxury of perspective and visual artifacts to shape their narrative.

The salvage rockumentary format is unique because it incorporates the “Advocate” role of the documentarian in addition to searching for repressed historical data and stitching it together in a creative narrative that chronicles trends or themes.  The advocate role was popularized by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, who saw the documentary as a way to combat the problems facing society by presenting “issues and their implications in a meaningful way.”[6]  One of the more famous documentary films that utilizes the medium to introduce the populace to an important social issue is The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936).  The film brilliantly mixes photographs, video footage, narration, graphics, and an audio soundtrack to illuminate the causes of the Dust Bowl.  The film not only documents and delivers new information to the viewer, but also advocates for better land management techniques to combat unrestrained conventional agriculture.   The advocacy role has helped the element of discovery, which is a lynchpin of the classic rockumentary, evolve.  

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8&w=854&h=480]

Rather than simply allowing viewers intimate access to a musician’s life, salvage rockumentary filmmakers have developed a unique style of storytelling that includes drama, mystery, and intrigue.  These components help the format be more meaningful to viewers by discovering performers who were thought to either not exist, or even be dead.  Making a story meaningful helps retain the viewer retain information so that the historical memory can be informed or altered.  For example, over the last ten years, salvage rockumentaries about musicians who have otherwise been unknown to American culture have been developed in an attempt to offer different perspectives as to the development of the punk and folk musical genres.  These films include A Band Called Death (2012) and Searching for Sugarman (2012).  

A Band Called Death is a film about three African-American brothers from Detroit, Michigan who formed a band in 1971 and, because of their unwillingness to change their name, never gained commercial success.  The music Death played, later labeled as punk, was ahead of its time and few record labels knew how to characterize the unfamiliar genre.  Since there was little information or media available to document the story of Death, the salvage rockumentary was an obvious choice for informing the historical memory about the band.  The filmmaker relied on photographs, interviews, and audio recordings as well as a dramatic narrative to make the band’s story meaningful.  

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDPDm9_nX0o&w=854&h=480]

The band broke up in 1977 and although they continued to play music, they never performed as Death again.  In 2000 David Hackney, the oldest brother and primary visionary for the band died of lung cancer.  However, the narrative shifts away from tragedy when it is revealed that digitized copies of a seven-song album by Death had made their way into underground listening clubs.  These songs were then shared around the internet and eventually made their way to a son of one of the Hackney brothers who recognizes his father’s voice in the recordings.  Death’s redemption story is then told through the lense of the younger generation who claim not to have known their parents and uncles were in the band before hearing.  The remaining Hackney brothers form a new band, tour, and cover Death songs while the rest of their recorded discography gets properly released and distributed by an independent record label.  The salvage rockumentary format made this film meaningful because the viewer was able to discover the music of Death along with the children of the bandmembers.  Given the dearth of visual content, a traditional rockumentary about the band would not be as interesting, if it could have been developed at all.  A Band Called Death leaves the viewer feeling empowered with new knowledge.  The film not only introduces fans of punk music to a new band, but supplies them with the missing link between hard rock music and the punk movement that occurred later in the decade.   

Searching for Sugarman is a film about Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American folk singer from Detroit, Michigan.  Rodriguez began to record music in 1967 and while he was known around Detroit, as well as in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, he never gained commercial success in the United States.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL5TffdOQ7g&w=854&h=480]

Rather than simply documenting Sixto’s story, it is told in a fantastical narrative that consumes the viewer with drama and mystery.  Thought to have committed suicide, the musician is actually found alive through the efforts of two South African writers who were also Rodriguez fans.  Rodriguez’s story fits perfectly into the salvage rockumentary format.  Media that had been repressed, or altogether dismissed, was uncovered by modern explorers.  The filmmaker chronicles Sixto’s story by putting together photographs, audio recordings, archival footage and interviews to create an intriguing narrative.  Advocacy is present throughout the film as the story tells how, unbeknownst to Sixto, he is famous in South Africa and his music was the soundtrack of the Anti-Apartheid movement.  Sixto is painted as a tragic figure who, for various reasons, missed his chance to become a successful commercial artist.  However, after it is revealed he is actually alive, the film’s tone turns redemptive as Rodriguez begins to play music and tour again.

While the explorer and chronicler roles played a large part in the development of these two films, the aspect that places them in the salvage rockumentary canon is how they advocate for different perspectives of the understanding of race in popular music.  These two films do not deal directly with racism in the music industry, but instead illuminate the fact that non-white musicians are not often credited as visionaries. As an example, Death was never mentioned as a progenitor of punk music until a 2009 New York Times article claimed they were a “band that was punk before punk.”[7]  Bands such as the Sex Pistols, Ramones, and The Clash are often cited as the ones who took hard rock and gave it a political edge.  However, with high-energy riffs and songs entitled “Politicians in My Eyes,” Death was ahead of its time and should be credited as one of, if not the, founders of American punk.  The story of Sixto Rodriguez is similar.  Although he is not a founder of folk music, Rodriguez was never considered a contemporary of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Cat Stevens, or other musicians who infused a political message with their music.  However, we learn from the salvage rockumentary that his songs inspired an Anti-Apartheid movement an entire continent away.  

The salvage rockumentary format was able to unearth art by non-whites that has been suppressed or discarded.  In the process, these salvage rockumentaries question the popular historical memory and the role of non-whites in punk and folk music genres and challenge the dominant narrative of popular music.  Unfortunately, the salvage rockumentary is not without its limitations.  The format’s creative use of content, storytelling, and advocacy can both mislead viewers and mythologize a musician.  For example, it seems that Sixto Rodriguez was actually aware of some of his fame.  In the film he is portrayed as a tragic figure who missed out on commercial success and lives a hard life in a rundown home.  However, as a solo artist he toured and released albums in Australia into the late 1970s and even opened for the popular band Midnight Oil on their 1981 tour.[8]  His albums were also in print across Europe well into the 1990s.  Although these facts do cast doubt on the efficacy of the salvage rockumentary format and the film, they actually implicate the historical memory of dominant culture even more.  If Sixto Rodriguez was well-known, and his music available across the world, why did it take the production of a nonfiction film to make his name a part of the historical memory?  Perhaps one answer is that those who have been making historical memory up to this point have been part of the dominant culture and didn’t think a Mexican-American making folk music was important to his genre.  The advent and meteoric rise of digital technologies has made memory-making more democratized.  History is no longer being documented by a few, but by an increasingly-connected and diverse populace.  On the other hand, directors and editors of salvage rockumentaries have complete control over what and how information is displayed to viewers.  The story of Rodriguez and Death are dramatic, tragic, and redemptive because someone decided to tell those stories in a certain way which means some information was included and some was not.  Ultimately, the viewer is not necessarily always experiencing a pure story as it happened.  They are experiencing the story as it was discovered, chronicled, and advocated through the salvage rockumentarian’s lense.           

This essay introduced the salvage rockumentary format and traced its roots to the field of anthropology as well as Erik Barnouw’s explorer, chronicler, and advocate roles of the documentarian.  This sub-genre of the rockumentary not only documents and discovers, but also creates a meaningful narrative that can be used to advocate for a change to the historical memory.  The power of the format is not only in the way it chronicles visual content, but also that it allows for the discovery of different perspectives within popular music.  While the format is not without its limitations, its ability to impact the historical memory has only begun to be realized.

Sources

[1] Jean Baudrillard., Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983. 19.

[2] Erik Barnouw. Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

[3] Ibid., 45.

[4] Ibid., 198.

[5] Ibid., 205.

[6] Ibid., 85.

[7] Rubin, Mike. “This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk” New York Times 3/12/2009: 2.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/music/15rubi.html?_r=0. 7/8/2016

[8] Cody, Bill. “Searching for Sugarman: True Story or The Making of a Myth?.” 1/21/2013: 1.comingsoon.net.http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/574376-searching-for-sugar-man-true-story-or-the-making-of-a-myth 7/8/2016.

Secondary Sources

Books

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936).

Documentary Films

A Band Called Death. Dir. Mark Covino, Jeff Howlett. Perf. Bobby Hackney, David Hackney, Dannis Hackney. Drafthouse Films. 2012. Netflix.

Searching for Sugarman. Dir. Malik Bendjelloul. Perf. Sixto Rodriguez. Red Box Film. 2012. Netflix.

Documentary Reviews

Dargis, Manohla “Rock Musician Shrouded in Mystery of What Might Have Been” New York Times 7/26/2012:1.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/movies/malik-bendjellouls-searching-for-sugar-man.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0. Accessed 7/6/2016.

O’Malley, Sheila. “A Band Called Death.”rogerebert.com 7/1/2013:1. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-band-called-death-2013. Accessed: 7/6/2016

Scholarly Articles

Gruber, J. W. (1970), Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 72: 1289–1299. doi:10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00040