There's one great problem with making a concert film:  if the audience doesn't respond positively to the music, no amount of great filmmaking is going to save it.  Documentaries about bands are one thing; if there's a good story to tell, an audience might just forgive the band in the spotlight for making music they dont' particularly care for.  But in a concert film, with very little to contemplate but the action on stage, if the moviegoers aren't compelled by the music that's being made, that's pretty much all she wrote.  With some concert films, such as Woodstock, there's enough historical portent to the whole affair that it gets carried along; that film also had the benefit of multiple bands to take the pressure off.  With other films, such as the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, there's the power of a compelling story to alleviate the fact that you might not especially dig the Rolling Stones at their stage in their career:  what was going on all around them was more than enough to compensate for any distaste you might have for the music coming out of the speakers.  With Jonathan Demme's beautiful, moving, nearly perfect 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, though, Demme was taking a huge risk:  he presented no story, no history, no audience, no variance, no nothing:  just the pure experience of watching the Talking Heads play.

It could have been a disaster.  Although they were one of the most successful of the bands to come out of the New York punk scene (they even raised the money to shoot the film themselves), Talking Heads were, then as now, not to everyone's taste.  Their nervy, edgy blend of no wave, funk, and ice-cold electronic pop turned off a lot of people, as did lead singer David Byrne's otherworldly geekiness, which made him come across as even more alien than David Bowie, but with none of Bowie's cool.  And although the band, touring behind their then-new album Speaking in Tongues, went on to have a number of high-profile hits, at the time it was a big risk, both for them and for their record label, to sink so much money and time into a full-length concert documentary with no guaranteed audience.  But it wasn't a disaster:  Stop Making Sense was, and is, quite simply the greatest concert film ever made, the purest and simplest evocation imaginable of the sheer joy of watching a band at the top of their game play an amazing show in a live setting.  It's that rare exception to the rule:  even those who weren't particular fans of the Talking Heads found themselves instantly swept away by the sheer charisma and intensity of the performers.  The movie that Jonathan Demme made at such risk became the gold standard to which all concert films are held.

How did he do it?  Partly through redefining the rules of concert films, and partly through sheer technical innovation.  The movie is structually brilliant, most notably in the device of having David Byrne come out alone for the first track and having him joined on each subsequent number by another band member until the whole outfit is powerfully lockstepped on stage.  Demme also uses an all-digital soundtrack -- unheard of at the time -- and a number of innovative lighting techniques to showcase the band and fulfill Byrne's request that the standard array of colored lights not be used.  Finally, he wisely chooses to show the audience as little as possible and reduce the crowd noise on the skillfully mixed soundtrack; this replicates to an uncanny degree the experience of actually being at a show, and the movie's choice of long shots over quick takes emulates the visual experience of live music for most people.  But, of course, he couldn't have done it without the cooperation of a band at the peak of their powers; Byrne worked with him all the way, and Talking Heads were at their creative peak and their chops had been honed by constant touring.  They even tossed in a few ringers -- especially Parliament/Funkadelic sidement Bernie Worrell and Steve Scales -- to fill out the sound.  Byrne provided the movie with its visual hook by donning a Joseph-Beuys-influenced white suit about five sizes too big, and the band plays as if there's nothing in the whole wide world they'd rather be doing.  It all adds up to a singularly transcendent experience, almost entirely without peer in the history of musical cinema.

BEST TRACKS: There simply isn't a bad track here, and whether you pick up the original or the expanded version of the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense, you're going to get an album full of winners.  Even divorced from the wonderful visuals, this is one of the finest live music documents you can buy, and it's crammed with great songs from beginning to end.  To name three favorites, though, I'd mention the opening rendition of "Psycho Killer" with Byrne, alone on an acoustic guitar, accompanied by an off-state Roland 808 synthesizer which he cleverly disguises as a battery-operated boom box; an edgy, high-energy rendition of "Girlfriend is Better" which lends the film its name; and the glorious version of "Once in a Lifetime" which may be the single greatest bit of concert footage ever recorded on film.

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