The greatest concert documentaries find a measure of transcendence and significance beyond the realities of the music onscreen.
Even if they’re largely restricted to actual live performances by their very nature, the classics are as much about the performers and their eras as they are the specific songs; they strip away the artifice associated with more conventional behind-the-scenes nonfiction treatments and demand that you take stock of a particularly ethereal moment of time, inferred upon it a degree of permanence.
Beginning Monday and running through Aug. 13, BAMcinématek spotlights eight of these with an In Concert series that spotlights a diverse collection of all-time great musical talents and some of the shows that permanently defined them.
The retrospective begins with “Fade to Black,” about the 2003 Jay-Z Madison Square Garden concert that was supposed to be his farewell
The “T.A.M.I. Show” spotlights a who’s who of legends, taken from the famous two-night concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in October 1964. That’s Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, The Beach Boys and more.
Selections from more recent years include “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” the LCD Soundsystem documentary that revolves around the since-reunited band’s “final show,” in 2011 at Madison Square Garden.
There’s “Contemporary Color,” in which David Byrne hosts a color-guard performance at the Barclays Center, and “Bjork: Biophilia Live,” depicting the one-of-a-kind icon’s 2013 show at Alexandra Palace in London.
Arguably the greatest movie in the history of the genre, Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” chronicles The Band’s 1976 Thanksgiving farewell concert and maintains transfixing elegiac power. It’s the end of a special and rare moment in musical history, suspended in time forever.
If you go
The In Concert film series plays July 31-Aug. 13 as part of BAMcinématek at Peter Jay Sharp Building at BAM Rose Cinemas. For full schedule and ticket information, go to BAM.org
