It was April 1984 and you could not have known that this would be the last tour of the Talking Heads, just as you could not have known that that film, Stop making sense, would be considered one of the best adaptations of a concert in the big screen (if not the best), an award they still own thanks to the work of a director, Jonathan Demme, who didn’t know he would win five Oscars with The Silence of the Lambs. Forty years later, the film shot over four nights in December 1983 at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater returns to the big screen in a restored high-definition version that opens in theaters on March 8 to the delight of fans of the New York band, who have gathered two decades later to meet the press on the occasion of the re-release.
“That person is very strange, someone I haven’t been around for many years, but she’s intense, very intense”, says David Byrne about the memories of that concert. His face appears on the computer screen from what appears to be his home. There are also, from their respective homes, Jerry Harrison and the couple formed by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, together on the other side of the connection. “I feel enormous pride for this legacy”, adds the drummer of Talking Heads, happy that “people can see in the future what we did, a tremendously good show”.
Without crowds or special effects, the film represents one of the concerts of the Speaking in Tongues tour in 1983. With a careful production that focuses on the stage, the music and the musicians become absolute protagonists since Byrne appears alone in the stage, armed with a guitar and a radiocassette for the rhythms of Psycho killer, opening from which the rest of the band will be added, one per song, accompanied by the parts of a stage that is built to measure that advances the performance. The operators set up the stage while the band joins the songs until adding, in total, nine musicians in a minimalist space where the lights and the rest of the effects “could have been made in the thirties”.
“The result is of a timeless quality, there is nothing that corresponds to the eighties”, highlights Jerry Harrison of the scenography, for which they renounced the latest technology of the moment, such as the varilites, the mobile lights that those years began to be used.
“We came from New York, and there minimalism was in fashion in the visual arts as a continuation of pop art,” explains Chris Frantz. “We just went on stage and turned on the lights, nothing overly fancy. We felt that we could hold the audience’s attention with our personality, our interpretations and interactions.” The result is a film “that doesn’t try to distract you from what the musicians are doing with what’s happening on stage, but lets you see and feel the people who are up there”.
In this sense, Byrne highlights the work of Demme, who is far removed from the aesthetics of the music videos of the eighties, full of cuts and syncopation. “I wanted the audience to spend time looking at the band, seeing what was going on and cutting only the essentials”, which is why in Once in a lifetime almost half of the song is shown in a single camera shot. An aesthetic far removed from the then fledgling MTV, but the Talking Heads were not considered part of the mainstream. “We always felt like outsiders, despite the fact that we weren’t opposed to putting on a big show, we just had a perspective that came more from modern art.”
For Chris Frantz, the most interesting thing about the new viewing of the film has been to verify that it is “as beautiful as any film you can see today”, and compares it to Taylor Swift’s videos. “The contrast could not be more strange, there are too many quick cuts, too much of what we could call filmic activity instead of the necessary personal activity.” For this reason, he considers that, as with Bogart’s Casablanca, “the passage of time has not damaged the filming”.
