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How to watch Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
1988 · Charlotte Zwerin · Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera stay on Monk's hands through whole solos. (camera)
Christian Blackwood's camera settles on the flattened fingers and percussive attack and stays there through long stretches of playing instead of cutting away to reactions.
Payoff: You get to watch the actual physical work of the music instead of being told it mattered.
Notice the hats, rings, and sunglasses Monk wears on stage. (setting)
Monk treats his hats, rings, and sunglasses as part of the music's delivery, occupying the bandstand with the same deliberateness he brings to a phrase.
Payoff: His look is not decoration, it is one more instrument he's playing.
Listen for how completely music replaces any score when Monk plays. (sound)
Zwerin keeps music and speech almost entirely separate, so when Monk plays, the performance itself is the whole of the soundtrack, with nothing laid over it.
Payoff: The silence around the music matters as much as the notes, so the film refuses to cover it up.
Notice the jump between grainy black-and-white and clean color footage. (cutting)
The 1967 footage is grainy black-and-white, the 1980s interviews are clean color, and Zwerin never tries to blend the two.
Payoff: The visual seam is the film's argument: here is the man, here are people explaining him. In the reading: interstice / the irrational cut. Deleuze calls a cut that joins across a gap rather than by continuity an interstice; the twenty years between footage and interview stays visibly open.
Watch Monk rise and turn slowly while his band keeps playing. (performance)
The camera holds as Monk leaves the piano bench and revolves in place during a bandmate's solo, and the film declines to explain or interpret it.
Payoff: The turning stops looking like a symptom and starts looking like part of the work. In the reading: cinema of the body (attitudes & postures). Deleuze calls a film studying posture instead of plot a cinema of the body; time is kept in how long Monk stays inside a tune.
Once you have seen it
Watch Monk drill his band and work out voicings with Overton. (staging)
The rehearsal sequences show a precise, demanding craftsman who knows exactly what he wants and can hear the instant he hasn't got it, cut at real length.
Payoff: This footage does more to dismantle the eccentric-genius myth than any interview could.
Notice Rouse appears as both his young and older self. (structure)
Charlie Rouse shows up as the young saxophonist on the bandstand and as the older man explaining him, neither version demoted into flashback, both treated as present.
Payoff: Rouse died weeks after the film came out, which makes both versions of him feel equally alive now. In the reading: peaks of present. Deleuze calls two versions of a person existing as equally live presents peaks of present, rather than one retrieved from the past.
Notice the film never explains Monk's withdrawal in his final years. (structure)
Monk's disorientation and hospitalization are stated as fact and left unexplained, no diagnosis offered, no cause settled, right up to the film's final silence.
Payoff: A documentary about a man who stopped speaking has the discipline not to speak for him.
Carry this in: Watch the parts where nothing happens, the turning, the waiting, the hands between phrases. That is where the film keeps its subject.
A Deleuzian reading of Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser →