Evidence: Monk as Documentary Subject

Abstract

For those familiar with Thelonious Monk only through recordings, the experience of first seeing him perform on film can be startling. The outrageous hats, the splayed fingers, the sucked-in cheeks, the spastic dancing--all of it suggests a character with a story that goes well beyond the music. Yet for many years, Monk has been consistently presented as an inscrutable figure who could only be known through his music.(1) At least one filmmaker simply gave up trying to make sense of his puzzling exterior: when Bert Stem filmed the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival for Jazz on a Summer's Day (1958), he kept cutting away to shots of yacht races during the pianist's performance of Blue Monk; Monk is onscreen for less than thirty seconds. More ambitious filmmakers have extended a more searching gaze in three documentaries that provide strikingly different approaches to how Monk might be understood. The title of Matthew Seig's 1991 documentary is itself significant; Thelonious Monk: American Composer presents a dedicated artist and family man who created a spiritually rich music rooted in a great tradition. In Charlotte Zwerin's Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (1988), Monk is bizarre and unpredictable, functioning as an artist primarily because of the highly professional support of sidepersons, the steadfast dedication of his wife Nellie, and the patronage of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The Monk prominently featured by Jean Bach in the film A Great Day in Harlem (1995) is a trickster who carefully choreographed how the world would see him. The Life and the Music: Meditations on Integration Although some writers of biography would like to turn their prose into a window with an unobstructed view of their subjects, they can never deliver the semblance of truth that is available to the documentary filmmaker.(2) Biographers in general and jazz biographers in particular face additional problems as they attempt to integrate the work of the subject with the life of the subject. Writers who examine a collection of biographical material eventually produce nuanced language to explain how the work relates to the life and vice versa. If documentary filmmakers are to justify the inevitable truth claims inherent in their work, they must rely on some combination of voice-of-God narration, archival footage, and talking heads to present their subjects. In the classical and documentary, narration is scrupulously avoided. John Grierson, perhaps the father of documentary cinema, simply turned his camera--and later his sound equipment--on his subjects in the 1920s and 1930s and recorded their activities (Winston 1995). In the modernist documentary--which probably begins with Point of Order (1964), Emile de Antonio's careful selection of early television footage to expose the malevolence of Joseph McCarthy--narration was written out as pretentious and awkward. In the jazz documentary of the 1980s and 1990s, we are likely to watch people being interviewed, often in front of carefully composed backgrounds and with no real evidence that anyone is doing the interviewing. When the documentary subject is a living person, filmmakers will train the camera on the subject and hope for moments of self-revelation. Even if there is no self-revelation, the mere presence of a camera and film crew ensures that the subject will at least seem to be transparent. When the documentary subject is a black jazz musician, transparency is much less inevitable, and the task of revealing the life through the work and vice versa becomes more complicated. For one thing, jazz archives are not nearly as full as archives for the Civil War and baseball, to pick two examples from Ken Burns' mammoth portfolio. (Burns' anticipated multipart series on jazz promises to provide a revealing comparison to his programs on less-controversial subjects that lend themselves more easily to documentary treatment.) Jazz filmmakers often have to improvise with a limited amount of stock footage, stills, and interviews. …