The four films you’ve been assigned are quite different in character:
Ray, is best characterized as a “biopic,” the kind that is often described as “based on true events,” although, as the article by David Ritz (who collaborated with Charles on his autobiography Brother Ray) reveals, loyalty to the historical record is far from thorough. All the historical figures in the film are portrayed by actors.
Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night is a concert video. As previously noted, this is not quite so simple as letting a camera roll (among other intricacies, the film was shot with seven cameras, which is a lot),
but the fundamental aspiration of the film is to chronicle a concert, though one that was also forthrightly intended to become a film.
A Hard Day’s Night is a work of fiction starring The Beatles as themselves. As the late Roger Ebert (arguably
the greatest American film critic) indicates, the film is in the style of a documentary and has things to say about
the band that resonate with their reality.
Don’t Look Back (the omission of the apostrophe is correct) is, apart from beginning with an early (perhaps the
first) example of a music video (of Dylan’s electric “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) a documentary chronicling a tour of the UK by Bob Dylan, his last acoustic solo performances prior to “going electric” with a band (that
called itself The Band). The filming covers two weeks of the tour, both onstage and offstage. It is a documentary of a particular type, in that there is no narration or any other attempt to describe events in any
way. Nothing is staged. Director D. A. Pennebaker seems simply to have captured events as they happened,
although of course he needed to make many choices, most important what to include and not include.
Discuss the positives and negatives of each of these four approaches to making a music film, providing examples of specific scenes as they support your case. Discuss what you learned about each featured artist
(or artists in the case of The Beatles) and how the type of film helped or hindered your learning. Which approached to music filmmaking do you favor and why, based on what you’ve viewed and the accompanying
articles. Be sure to reference in some detail all four articles that accompany the four films.
Finally, in an Appendix, provide an analysis of one song from each of the films. If the song is not heard in its entirety in the film, listen to a complete version. Note: as mentioned in the Study Notes, the Spotify version of Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” (should that be one of your choices) is not the original and lacks many of the original’s most important features. One source of the original can be found on YouTube: “Georgia on My Mind.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRgWBN8yt_E
Sample Solution
