



Talking Heads was already a post-punk powerhouse before Jonathan Demme’s fabled 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense helped make the band a pop-culture legend. Now the movie can be experienced with heightened visual clarity and auditory bliss, thanks to Tuesday’s release of the film’s 25th-anniversary edition on Blu-ray.

That timely release will give Talking Heads loyalists and latecomers alike a chance to answer a question that’s been burning down the house: Is Stop Making Sense the greatest concert film ever?

Stop Making Sense caught Talking Heads at the apex of its second life, guitarist Jerry Harrison explains in the exclusive clip above of a previously unseen press conference conducted by the band in 1999 during the film’s theatrical re-release. The clip appears as an extra on the Blu-ray edition of the movie.

“I thought that Fear of Music, you might say, completed the earlier vision of the band,” he says, referring to the band’s third studio album. “Remain in Light was the beginning of a new vision.”

That vision was greatly enhanced by Demme’s film, where the Heads’ rebooted polyrhythmic funk — previously found on studio classics like 1980’s Remain in Light and 1983’s Speaking in Tongues — was performed live in Hollywood before an ecstatic audience stripped entirely out of the picture. Instead, Demme foregrounded the core group of Harrison, vocalist David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, as well as a smoking backup section composed mostly of graduates from George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic mothership.

Eschewing trendy MTV jump-cuts for beautifully long takes and featuring the suggestive title sequences of Pablo Ferro (who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange), Stop Making Sense was a celebration of music and art writ large. In a giant suit, if you will.

“That you could throw something completely new at an audience, and they would accept it,” Byrne adds in the clip, “that for me was an incredible feeling.”

The high-def Blu-ray edition, released by Palm Pictures, piles on much more of the new beyond that one-hour press conference. Also on board are bonus performances of “Cities” and “Big Business/I Zimbra,” as well as new audio commentary from all the Heads and director Demme. There is also a storyboard-to-film comparison, the insanely hilarious video short “David Byrne Interviews … David Byrne” (viewable at right) and more.

The only thing left to be settled is whether Stop Making Sense is the finest concert film ever made, rather than just one of the best (as critic Leonard Maltin argued upon its release). The movie faces tough competition from D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, which chronicled Bob Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour, as well as Gimme Shelter, which captured not just the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway concert but also the cultural death of hippie idealism, thanks to crowd violence ending in a fatal stabbing of a gun-toting man by a member of the Hells Angels, who provided security for the concert. (Whoever came up with that idea must surely have eaten the brown acid.) One can only imagine if that clumsy film could have been improved by integrating footage from a young George Lucas, whose camera reportedly jammed while filming.

Other concert-film favorites are similarly problematic. Woodstock‘s maddening split screens suck a lot of life out of some of the most legendary performances of all time. Similarly, the dream sequences of Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same skew the film strange, and sometimes silly.

All these and more are heavy competition for Demme’s classic. So you make the call: Does Stop Making Sense sit atop the pile of fine films capturing an artist or band at its peak performance? Let us know your vote in the comments section below.

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