jonathan demme – The News Desk

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. 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. 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. He seems fleshless, b...

Talking pictures began with a musical—“The Jazz Singer,” in 1927—and the filming of musical performance has been an artistic battleground ever since. With great performers, unadorned recording is a virtue; film plays an archival role in preserving onstage singing and dancing that would otherwise have been lost to history. But movies are an art in themselves, and, when performances are filmed without an aesthetic, the result is numbing, as the up-and-down fortunes of early movie musicals reflect. In the wake of the success of “The Jazz Singer,” the genre was overused and underthought, and soon became box-office poison, until Busby Berkeley reimagined and revitalized it, with the artistry of his highly stylized numbers in “42nd Street” (1933). The conflict endures, especially in the subgenr...

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The Origin Story of “Stop Making Sense”

“Stop Making Sense” and the Transformative Power of Collaboration