Martin Scorsese’s homage to the Rolling Stones has some of the most stunning concert footage I’ve seen. Shine a Light, which opened the 58th Berlin Film Festival yesterday, is far more than just a night on stage in front of a live audience at the Beacon Theater in New York. The director and band chime perfectly. They are vintage bad boys of their respective arts and, true to form, they don’t seem to agree about anything.
There are shades of Spinal Tap about Scorsese’s efforts to plan his concert film while the band rattles around far-flung stadiums on their world tour. The director gleefully documents telephone conversations, and whether the lighting rig will burn Mick Jagger to a crisp.
Mick looks at a doll’s house mock-up of the stage and wonders what on earth Marty was thinking about when he designed the set.
Scorsese thinks it was entirely Jagger’s idea.
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The film is an unexpectedly sharp comedy, shot in silvery black and white. It takes a turn for the surreal when Bill Clinton shows up with Hillary’s venerable mother a couple of hours before curtain-up. “Hiya Dorothy,” leers Keith Richards, with a Jack Nicholson smile and a pirate’s bandana. Bill then introduces Ronnie Wood to the president of Poland.
The deadpan, tongue-in-cheek way this is filmed is beautifully alive to the band’s exotic, almost mythical appeal.
The intimacy is unexpected. Scorsese clearly adores the Stones in the way that he paints them as individuals.
He has plundered some terrific footage from the archives and stitched these clips between their anthems. There are rare shots of the band as shy young men, and then a medley of interviews where they are cast as public nuisances, mavericks, popinjays, drug addicts, rebels, and legends – mostly to their total bemusement.
The concert itself is a piece of Technicolor magic. The camerawork and editing are astonishing. Several tracking shots that follow Keith and Mick across the stage beggar belief.
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The song list is Desert Island Discs nostalgia from start to finish: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Satisfaction”, and so on. Mick’s pouts and wiggles still send ladies of a certain age wild. Charlie Watts puts a thumping end times2 to a song, looks over his left shoulder, and winks. Keith looks fabulously depraved, with a Marlboro clamped between his teeth.
The Stones might be less easy on the eye than they were 40 years ago, but there’s something indestructible about their chemistry.
This is the deep point of Scorsese’s film, and why the newsreel clips that basically map the history of the band are so poignant, and invariably comic.
The famous World In Action programme for Granada Television, inspired by William Rees-Mogg’s editorial in The Times of July 1 1967, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” is an eloquent reminder of just how much nonsense they have survived. The most affecting detail is how their personalities have or have not changed, despite the vast and obvious trappings of wealth.
A collector’s item for fans, a surprise for everyone else, Shine a Light will be released in the UK in April 2008