“Music is a unifier,” said George Myers, general manager of Amherst Cinema — and he knows from experience, because one of his other longtime jobs is being a deejay, filling dance floors by picking the perfect records.
Myers similarly curates Amherst Cinema’s popular summertime “Sound and Vision: Music in Film” series, putting together a diverse and magnetic mix of concert films, biographies, documentaries and music-centered narrative films, screening one every Wednesday for the next ten weeks.
The series’ second year will begin with D.A. Pennebaker’s classic concert film “Monterey Pop,” next Wednesday, July 5, at 7 p.m.
It’s a legendary motion picture for numerous reasons — Jimi Hendrix’s iconic performance (in which he lights his guitar on fire), Otis Redding and Janis Joplin’s knockout sets, The Who in all their destructive glory — but even if you think you’ve seen it before, you haven’t: Amherst Cinema is showing a just-released 4K restoration, with the clearest and richest image and sound currently possible. Myers explained the technological minutiae but succinctly summed it up like so: “It’s going to look amazing.”
Myers immediately knew “Monterey Pop” was the perfect film to start this year’s series, as he said during an interview earlier this week. “It’s fairly raw. There is nothing superfluous there, no studio trickery. The power of the music and the performers is apparent,” he said, calling the festival, which ushered in the Summer of Love, “a really significant turning point. It happened at a time that was really explosive and the film feels that way.”
The ten “Sound and Vision” selections, which Myers narrowed down from his initial wish list of over fifty films, run the gamut. “Chasing Trane” is a brand-new documentary about jazz saxophone legend John Coltrane. “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World” is a just-out doc about “the arc of Native Americans in popular music. There was a ton of stuff I didn’t know. I really like that one,” Myers said.
“Rock ’N’ Roll High School” and “The Blues Brothers” are upbeat comedies filled with music; “From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale” is a documentary that celebrates the musical life of the South Bronx, and its director, Henry Chalfant (who produced the legendary 1983 hip hop doc “Style Wars”) will be in attendance, with local favorite DJ Bongohead spinning records at the afterparty.
“In Pursuit of Silence” is an exploratory film that Myers described as “more meditative. It’s about ambient and not-so-ambient noise and how that plays a role in all of our lives. There’s no star power in it, outside of the section on John Cage [an ode to the composer’s groundbreaking composition 4’33”].”
The 1974 Sun Ra film “Space Is the Place” is the big one that Myers knew he had to include in the series.
“It’s a completely singular film. There is no category for it. It sits in a place that you can’t name, which is always an exciting prospect for giving something the big screen in a giant dark room,” he said. “Sun Ra was never compromised in his creative vision, and that’s true of this film.”
This writer was able to attend one of last year’s Sound and Vision highlights, the powerful 1973 concert documentary “Wattstax.” It felt like a true community event — a packed house, a diverse crowd, palpable excitement. The energy in the theater was undeniable, before, during and after the screening.
“I was completely taken aback at the number of people in the audience who had never seen the film — it was more than half,” said Myers, who’d asked for a show of hands when he introduced the film at the top of the night. He said he envied the people who got to experience the film for the first time on a big screen rather than “on a VHS tape on a little crappy 18-inch TV.”
Myers described the “Sound and Vision” film series as having “something a little bit more celebratory that’s not always present in our programming that is really nice to bring to the space. It’s turned up. It’s rockin’.”
For more information on Amherst Cinema’s “Sound and Vision: Music in Film” series, visit amherstcinema.org.