Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Monk stands up in the middle of a tune. Hat on, rings on, he leaves the bench and starts turning slowly in place while Charlie Rouse keeps blowing and the rhythm section holds the floor under him. The camera stays. Nobody cuts to a reaction, nobody explains, and the shot runs long enough that you stop waiting for it to mean something and just watch a man revolve in a nightclub.

Almost any other music documentary would have used four seconds of that as proof of eccentricity. Charlotte Zwerin lets it run, and by letting it run she changes what it is. It stops being a symptom. It becomes work: the thing he does while the band plays, as regular as a drummer's foot.

Gilles Deleuze has a name for this, and it helps precisely because it isn't a psychological name. In his second cinema book he describes films that stop using bodies to advance a story and start filming attitudes — how a person waits, sits, holds a hat, occupies a room. He calls it a cinema of the body. A body in an action film is a means: it runs, it arrives in time. A body in this other kind of film is where time is kept. You don't learn what Monk thinks by watching him turn. You learn how long he can stay inside a tune without touching it, and the camera on his hands through whole choruses (the flattened fingers, the elbow clusters) tells you the same thing from the other end.

The footage that permits this exists by accident. West German television, a more reliable patron of American vernacular music in the late sixties than any American broadcaster, commissioned a short profile. Christian Blackwood shot roughly fourteen hours across 1967 and 1968 and kept rolling through everything nobody would have scripted: hotel rooms, airport concourses, cars, the sitting and not-speaking that fills a touring musician's day. Deleuze calls those stretches dead time, temps mort — passages that advance nothing, and are the point anyway. Blackwood's habit of not switching off is the only reason there was anything to recover twenty years later.

Underneath that lies the oldest idea in Deleuze's cinema books. He begins with Bergson's observation that film's basic wager was to sample movement at any instant whatever — mechanical, evenly spaced, indifferent — rather than the posed climactic instant older arts used to stand in for motion. Most jazz films go hunting the climax: the peak of the solo, the sweat, the rapt face in the crowd. Gjon Mili's Jammin' the Blues (1944) is the beautiful version, each number a continuous take against black, cut on the music's phrasing instead of on story beats, hands and embouchure treated as the drama. Zwerin obeys that grammar every time she refuses to leave a solo. But her images aren't composed the way Mili's are. Available light does the work; highlights blow out, faces slide into shadow, the grain is legible and she doesn't hide it. These are documents, not compositions, and the instant they catch is any instant whatever. That turns out to be the honest unit for a musician whose art was built out of what he left out.

Watch what those ordinary instants accumulate into. The hats, the sunglasses, the deliberateness with which he takes a bandstand. The same body in the Columbia studio, in an anonymous hotel room, in an airport. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social arrangement a gest. Not a gesture of feeling — a stance that makes a whole situation readable. Monk waiting in an airport is a gest. It shows you the touring economy that structured a Black musician's working life in the 1960s more exactly than any commentary could: perpetual transit, unglamorous rooms, the band as a small mobile workplace. The film argues its economics by framing them.

Every so often it cuts from 1967 to 1985, from black-and-white 16mm to color interviews, evenly lit, on sticks, framed conventionally. Zwerin makes no attempt to blend the two. Deleuze would call that seam an interstice: a cut that joins across a gap rather than by continuity, so the join itself becomes something you read. Here is the man. Here are the people trying, now, to account for him. The gap is twenty years wide and Zwerin leaves it open on screen.

Its sharpest consequence is Charlie Rouse, who appears twice — as the young tenor on the stand, and as an older man explaining that young man. Two presents, both live, neither one demoted to flashback. Deleuze's term is peaks of present: contradictory presents coexisting rather than a past retrieved. Rouse died in November 1988, weeks after the film opened. That isn't the film's doing, but it is now part of watching it.

There is no narrator. The connective voice belongs entirely to people with an interest: Monk's son T. S., the manager Harry Colomby, the producer Orrin Keepnews, Barry Harris. Deleuze separates dialogue from the speech act — testimony, legending, someone caught in the act of making a story out of a life. Because Zwerin attributes everything, you watch the legend being assembled and can see its seams. Then she sets counter-evidence beside it. The sequences in Hall Overton's Sixth Avenue loft, where Monk hammers out voicings for a large-ensemble treatment of his tunes, and the passages of him drilling his own quartet, do more damage to the mad-genius story than any rebuttal could. He is exact. He is demanding, sometimes witheringly. He hears the instant he hasn't got what he wants. Deleuze's word for a cinema that lets its subjects tell themselves into being is fabulation; what's rare here is that Zwerin films the legending and the labor that contradicts it, and lets you weigh them yourself.

Her invention is structural, and it has been copied so completely it has gone invisible. Direct cinema — the Drew Associates line whose crystal-sync rigs and Nagras (Primary, 1960) put Blackwood inside the dressing room to begin with — had a rule against interviews. Rouch and Morin had already bent it in Chronicle of a Summer (1961) by letting subjects respond to footage after the fact; Dont Look Back (1967) fixed the touring film as corridors, promoters and waiting rather than concerts; Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) had proved a jazz film could run numbers end to end with nobody explaining them. Zwerin, an editor by training who built Salesman and shaped Gimme Shelter, took orthodox observational material and admitted the one device the movement was founded to reject, because footage of a dead man cannot explain itself. Archive plus testimony, performances left whole: that is now the house style of the serious music documentary, and it runs straight to Amazing Grace and Summer of Soul, both built on the same premise that the crucial document was shot decades ago and shelved.

What she left the form is a discipline more than a template. The film never diagnoses him. The withdrawals are stated and left unexplained, and it ends in a silence it declines to fill, which is the only decent way to end a film about a man who stopped speaking. Watch it again for the parts where nothing happens — the turning, the waiting, the hands between phrases. That is where it keeps its subject. And it leaves a harder question sitting there: how much of any artist survives at all, and how much of what does is an accident of who happened to be rolling.