Demystifying the creative processes of film-making and, in this, decentring the concept of a primary artist (film director or, to use the French term common in film criticism, ‘auteur’) has characterised much of the evolving methodologies of academic film criticism of the last few decades. Even in recent years, gendered (re-)readings have tended towards excavating formerly hidden contributions from female creators, in and out of ‘traditionally’ female creative roles. In this respect, Film Studies and Film History have had some negotiation with the year-zero of the ‘death of the author’ (and, indeed, came to it later than English Literature disciplines) – dethroning the individual author figure through a fuller scoping of a multitude of creative inputs, in both the making of the film and then, via Fan Studies, its receptions and senses of ownership.

So it is very arresting, in this context, to encounter something of a Return of the Magnificent Seven (Albert and David Maysles, Jill Godmilow, Shirley Clarke, D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, and Jem Cohen) as auteurs in Benjamin J. Harbert's American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies of Ciné-Ethnography. Inviting these auteurs back to the party is achieved – somewhat ingeniously but, as I'll note below, arguably problematically – via a methodological enhancement: ‘ciné-ethnography’ itself. That is, the documentary-makers are conceptualised, irrespective of their status as auteur film-makers (and hence, one assumes, Harbert's use of French terminology), more as the handmaids than the parents of their films – via key historical figures in the film ethnography field such as Jean Rouch and Robert Flaherty. In this respect, the auteurs’ input to this book is welcomed in terms of the shared commentary that Harbert deftly co-evolves around particular films from each, for a study that then ‘draws heavily’ (p. 23) on these original interviews. So they're therefore back in, but now at the service of something else, since Harbert's goal ‘is not to establish a science about music films but to articulate how making films about musicians can contribute an ethnomusicological understanding about music’ (p. 7). Harbert then includes an expanded reception category: the ‘viewer/listener’ (p. 64; his italics). And he carries this through too, assembling screenshots against musical notation to map, say, Mick Jagger's movements onto chord changes and plagal cadence (p, 47).

What is telling is that, firstly, Harbert's scope can be understood as aligned to the particular positioning of the figure of the star musician in North America. As per writing more generally on iconic figures (particularly Bob Dylan), the figure is seen as rhizomatically embodying or chivvying along the times, as they are upended. It is difficult to exorcise this idea from lived experience: seeing Dylan in 2015 was an experience of (pace Philip Auslander's writing on liveness) authenticity – the performance of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ connecting the gig-goer, in the now, to other decades’ gig-goers/listeners who rode the crest of history to this one clarion voice, fired by this call to arms (no matter how idiosyncratic, obscured and immobile the rest of the show proved to be). So the space and ambience around the iconic figure is, a priori, deserving of investigation and documentation. Early on, Matt Stahl's analysis of the documentary Dig! (dir. Ondi Timoner, 2004) is cited as an example of the use of the raw data extracted by such an approach. Stahl can read the chaos and drug-fuelled self-aggrandisement surrounding the Brian Jonestown Massacre as fatally misaligned to the commercial demands made on the group, culminating in a flailing onstage scrap during an industry showcase, and charting shouting matches, police busts, group disintegration and – in 2004 at least – a beckoning obscurity. Compliance (with some objections), and the resultant rewards for former co-conspirators and now rivals, the Dandy Warhols, apes all this. And Dig! could be analysed in terms of psychiatric matters too, as much as an exemplar exposé of neoliberal modes of music promotion.

Secondly, then, Harbert steps away from a parallel tendency, perhaps more apparent in European music documentaries, towards a discursive looking to various ‘scenes’ – and, in this respect, proto-Media Studies, of beginning to assess music as a commonality or glue for a wider cultural movement or moment. Hence the ur-text of Woodstock (dir. Michael Wadleigh, 1970) – supreme (in the sense of epic) cinema: a three-hour plus 70 mm Bayeux Tapestry of the looks, voices and demographics of the North American countercultural music scene, and frequently conceptualised as the polar opposite to Gimme Shelter – is almost entirely absent. (But Woodstock has, of course, been endlessly discussed for half a century and, moreover, Harbert laudably diversifies his films, purging the usual suspects.) At any rate, Harbert promotes a new scene, around a lower-key ciné-ethnography than its uses for the ethnomusicologist academic/film-maker. The book opens with Harbert blocked from pen-and-paper research in Soledad Correctional Training Facility – but informed, counterintuitively, that making a documentary inside was quite acceptable. The book closes with an agenda for change around ‘disciplinary and institutional challenges’ (p. 249) for film-making-as-research: uncertainty as to the un-peer-reviewed worth of such outputs for tenure committees, off-piste screening slots in conferences, full economic costings falling outside standard (lone) academic requests for travel funds.

This return of the auteurs is done via direct engagement: discussions and interviews, and wider interactions – early on, Harbert recalls Albert Maysles speaking to his students, and offering framing advice as one has his photo taken with him. The only exception is Shirley Clarke, with respect to her Ornette: Made in America (1985), who died in 1997 – here, archival documents and interviews are used to channel her voice. Neither auteur nor Harbert, then, technically, claims ownership of meaning. Yet, pragmatically, both do lay claim to tranches of ownership – at times mutually enforced too, and layering in positionality to do so (so that the use of ‘me’ and ‘I’ abounds). For example, in talking to Albert Maysles:

Whether this represents a stealth resurrection of the author, or a recalibration of such authorial voices on more nuanced grounds, and the uses of the net results, will be up to the reader. However, Harbert's easy-going style makes for a book that is enormously readable and fuses, as with the best writing from Jonathan Rosenbaum or Simon Reynolds, or Greil Marcus on the Doors, critical theory with tenacious criticism. For myself, I hope others are emboldened to reprise Harbert's approach.