It Might Get Loud. David Guggenheim, director. Sony Pictures Classics, 2009./ Les Paul—Chasing Sound. John Paulson, director. John Paulson Productions, 2007./ Solidbodies: The 50-Year Guitar War. Guy Hornbuckle, director. Lightning Lab Productions, 2007./ Stars and Their Guitars: A History of the Electric Guitar. Kent Hagen, director. Passport, 2008.

摘要

The electric guitar became the most popular and culturally important instrument of the second half of the twentieth century because it was as compelling visually as it was aurally. Consider how many of the defining moments in the visual culture of popular music have featured an electric guitar: Elvis Presley's groundbreaking series of television appearances in 1956, with Scotty Moore's Gibson hollow body electric provoking the singer to new heights of pelvic motion; Chuck Berry's seductive affair with his Gibson electric in the film Rock, Rock, Rock, also from 1956; the Beatles sporting their Rickenbacker guitars on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964; Jeff Beck's guitar smashing fury unleashed in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow Up; Jimi Hendrix setting his Fender Stratocaster on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, captured on film by D. A. Pennebaker; and many others. Yet as much as filmmakers and television programmers have exploited the electric guitar's visual appeal, to date few films—fictional or documentary—have had much to say about the cultural processes that made the electric guitar such a potent instrument of desire.