New Order: The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985
It would be tempting, perhaps seductively so, to shoot a Talking Heads live show from multiple angles and train every camera on David Byrne. His sudden jerks and lurches and twitches never fail to catch the eye, as they should, but with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme is solely interested in capturing the totality of this performance, and this band, and these songs, and these people. Byrne’s unstoppably jagged charisma is a huge part of this, running laps of the stage, dancing with a floor lamp, performing in an enormous grey business suit, but it’s just one layer of dozens, each happening at the same time in the same place in total harmony. The alchemy of live music. Even split into its constituent parts and pieced back together, it’s impossible to see how it all comes together.
A year later, Demme took a similar approach with his music video for New Order’s single The Perfect Kiss, shot in the band’s practice room in Manchester as they perform the song from start to finish. The video cuts between close-ups of each member individually, either playing their instruments or waiting to play them, with the camera mostly trained on their faces. Demme isolates each person in a frame of their own and emphasises their individual contribution to the song: Bernard Sumner singing and playing guitar and hitting a cowbell; Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris turning the dials and pressing the keys of various synthesisers; Peter Hook playing a bass riff and hitting some drum pads. Each close-up underlines a certain sound visually as a single layer among dozens of others, created by one of four people and their instruments, and by focusing on the means by which these layers are constructed, Demme finds the same thing he found in Stop Making Sense: that music is alchemical. It’s water into wine, lead into gold. It’s a thousand individual noises thrown together to create something dense and magic and unknowable.