The Screening Room
Concert films, music documentaries and music-driven cinema—one hundred long-form guides following sound as it moves from stage and studio into the frame.
Browse all 100 films ↓Choose a screening
Filter by the film's principal archive shelf or move through the programme in sequence.
Woodstock
How do you film a crowd that has become a city?
Enter the Screening Room →Gimme Shelter
The tour film that changed underneath the filmmakers' hands
Enter the Screening Room →Stamping Ground
The Dutch festival film with two histories
Enter the Screening Room →Celebration at Big Sur
After Woodstock, but before the story of 1969 had settled
Enter the Screening Room →Medicine Ball Caravan
A counterculture road movie with a studio cheque in its pocket
Enter the Screening Room →Glastonbury Fayre
Before Glastonbury became a machine
Enter the Screening Room →The Concert for Bangladesh
The emergency came before the supergroup
Enter the Screening Room →Wattstax
The Coliseum is enormous, but the film keeps escaping it
Enter the Screening Room →Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970
Festival history reconstructed from contemporary footage
Enter the Screening Room →Festival Express
Rediscovered archive film / travelling music documentary
Enter the Screening Room →Glastonbury
Multi-decade festival portrait / archival collage
Enter the Screening Room →Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Archival music film / historical reclamation
Enter the Screening Room →Rainbow Bridge
Failed counterculture experiment with essential Hendrix material
Enter the Screening Room →Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
The concert film that removed the crowd and found something more revealing
Enter the Screening Room →Yessongs
Peak-era progressive-rock performance document
Enter the Screening Room →Pictures at an Exhibition
Early ELP performance document / classical-rock adaptation
Enter the Screening Room →Genesis: In Concert
Transitional-line-up concert document
Enter the Screening Room →The Song Remains the Same
Concert film, tour document and self-created rock mythology
Enter the Screening Room →The Last Waltz
Farewell concert film / staged music documentary / retrospective band portrait
Enter the Screening Room →Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones
Pure concert film / Exile on Main St. touring document
Enter the Screening Room →The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
Shelved television spectacular / recovered rock archive
Enter the Screening Room →The Kids Are Alright
Non-chronological band portrait built from television, concert and newly filmed material
Enter the Screening Room →The Grateful Dead Movie
Concert film, fan ethnography and self-produced archive
Enter the Screening Room →Baby Snakes
Concert film, backstage collage, animation showcase and deliberately abrasive artist-controlled cinema
Enter the Screening Room →The Dub Room Special!
Self-edited television/concert collage combining two Zappa eras
Enter the Screening Room →AC/DC: Let There Be Rock
Concert film with interview material, preserved at the end of the Bon Scott era
Enter the Screening Room →We Will Rock You / Queen Rock Montreal
Concert film with unusually complicated release identity
Enter the Screening Room →Rust Never Sleeps
Concert film staged as an argument about ageing, scale and artistic stagnation
Enter the Screening Room →Slipstream
Hybrid video collection mixing live performance with specially staged song films
Enter the Screening Room →Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture
Concert film that accidentally captured the public destruction of its own central character
Enter the Screening Room →Dance Craze
Multi-band concert film and visual record of the 2 Tone movement at peak velocity
Enter the Screening Room →Urgh! A Music War
International live-performance anthology with no narrator and a notoriously unstable version history
Enter the Screening Room →Stop Making Sense
Concert film built around staged accumulation rather than backstage explanation
Enter the Screening Room →Mad Dogs & Englishmen
Touring-commune documentary and large-ensemble performance film
Enter the Screening Room →Elvis: That's the Way It Is
Rehearsal-and-concert documentary whose later recut changes the balance of the historical evidence
Enter the Screening Room →Cream: Farewell Concert
Farewell performance mixed with explanatory interviews and period television narration
Enter the Screening Room →The Who: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970
Artist-specific extraction from Murray Lerner's much larger Isle of Wight archive
Enter the Screening Room →A Film About Jimi Hendrix
Early posthumous biography assembled before the Hendrix archive became an industry of its own
Enter the Screening Room →Janis: Little Girl Blue
Chronological artist biography built around personal letters and archive footage
Enter the Screening Room →When You're Strange
Archive-only band biography in which later narration replaces talking-head retrospection
Enter the Screening Room →The Velvet Underground
Formalist archive documentary that uses avant-garde cinema as part of the historical evidence
Enter the Screening Room →Moonage Daydream
Experiential archive collage built almost entirely around Bowie rather than external biographical witnesses
Enter the Screening Room →David Bowie: Five Years
Selective career portrait built around five points of reinvention rather than a complete biography
Enter the Screening Room →Cracked Actor
Contemporary portrait of Bowie filmed during one of the most unstable periods of his life
Enter the Screening Room →Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage
Full-career documentary organised around musical evolution, fan culture and critical marginality
Enter the Screening Room →Genesis: Together and Apart / Sum of the Parts
Authorised career documentary whose attempt to combine band and solo histories produced significant fan criticism
Enter the Screening Room →In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
Band documentary that mutates into a study of discipline, mortality and the cost of serious artistic work
Enter the Screening Room →Prog Rock Britannia: An Observation in Three Movements
BBC genre history that helped make progressive rock discussable on mainstream television again
Enter the Screening Room →Romantic Warriors: A Progressive Music Saga
Documentary about progressive rock as a surviving contemporary ecosystem rather than a dead 1970s genre
Enter the Screening Room →Romantic Warriors II: A Progressive Music Saga About Rock in Opposition
History of a musical co-operative whose name later became a genre label broader than the original organisation
Enter the Screening Room →Romantic Warriors III: Canterbury Tales
Network history in which personnel relationships matter more than a fixed genre definition
Enter the Screening Room →Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Beyond the Beginning
One-hour documentary embedded inside a much larger archival anthology; the package is more historically valuable than the documentary alone
Enter the Screening Room →Yesspeak
Near-three-hour self-history made during a rare period when a classic Yes line-up was active again
Enter the Screening Room →Crossfire Hurricane
Official fiftieth-anniversary history that deliberately stops before the band's later decades
Enter the Screening Room →Stones in Exile
One-album documentary that uses a notoriously chaotic recording environment to explain why the record sounds coherent
Enter the Screening Room →George Harrison: Living in the Material World
Three-and-a-half-hour biography organised around the tension between worldly success and spiritual discipline
Enter the Screening Room →No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Monumental early-career biography built from an archive project that existed before Scorsese became director
Enter the Screening Room →Long Strange Trip
Four-hour history in which the audience culture becomes as important as the band
Enter the Screening Room →Beware of Mr. Baker
Adversarial artist portrait in which musical admiration is never allowed to excuse personal damage
Enter the Screening Room →Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany
Compact BBC history that frames post-war identity as the central reason a generation rejected inherited musical language
Enter the Screening Room →Romantic Warriors IV: Krautrock
Six-plus-hour regional oral history that demonstrates why Krautrock becomes less coherent the more closely it is studied
Enter the Screening Room →Synth Britannia
BBC history showing how expensive experimental technology became a tool for outsiders and then mainstream pop
Enter the Screening Room →Moog
Intimate portrait of an inventor and instrument designer rather than a complete history of electronic synthesis
Enter the Screening Room →Mellodrama
Instrument biography whose central story is partly a history of copying, disputed ownership and the peculiar physical beauty of prerecorded tape
Enter the Screening Room →I Dream of Wires
History of a technology whose revival becomes a subculture larger than vintage nostalgia
Enter the Screening Room →What the Future Sounded Like
Twenty-seven-minute history of a tiny British company whose instruments escaped into an enormous amount of modern music
Enter the Screening Room →Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
Inventor biography, instrument history and Cold War mystery whose final reunion gives the documentary an emotional shape no technical history could manufacture
Enter the Screening Room →Sisters with Transistors
Archive-led revision of electronic-music history through women whose technical and compositional work was repeatedly pushed outside the dominant canon
Enter the Screening Room →Conny Plank: The Potential of Noise
Producer history fused with a son's attempt to reconstruct a parent through the records and people left behind
Enter the Screening Room →Sound City
Studio history that gradually becomes a manifesto for human performance, analogue workflow and collaborative recording
Enter the Screening Room →Muscle Shoals
Place-and-studio history where racial politics, session musicianship and local myth compete to explain one of American recording's most productive regions
Enter the Screening Room →Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
Portrait of an engineer whose real innovation was making technology serve musicians faster than studio culture usually changed
Enter the Screening Room →D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage
Guerrilla punk documentary made while the movement was still collapsing in front of the camera
Enter the Screening Room →The Filth and the Fury
Revisionist band history made partly to wrest the Sex Pistols story away from Malcolm McLaren's earlier cinematic mythology
Enter the Screening Room →Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
Biography built around the distance between a public political icon and the more contradictory person who constructed Joe Strummer
Enter the Screening Room →Gimme Danger
Affectionate band history directed by a filmmaker/friend who openly begins from admiration
Enter the Screening Room →Joy Division
Band and city history made almost simultaneously with Control, but using testimony and original archive rather than dramatic reconstruction
Enter the Screening Room →White Riot
Movement history showing how music, graphic design, fanzines and mass organisation became mutually reinforcing anti-racist tools
Enter the Screening Room →Here to Be Heard: The Story of The Slits
Band history assembled from archive, reunion-era footage and testimony after the death of its most visible frontwoman
Enter the Screening Room →Privilege
Fictional pop-star satire using mock-documentary language to imagine celebrity as a state-management technology
Enter the Screening Room →Magical Mystery Tour
Self-directed Beatles television experiment whose production freedom exceeded the amount of narrative planning holding it together
Enter the Screening Room →Yellow Submarine
Animated Beatles fantasy created largely without the band's direct performance involvement, yet ultimately more durable as cinema than several films they controlled more closely
Enter the Screening Room →Head
Self-destructive pop satire in which a manufactured television band attempts to destroy the image that made it famous
Enter the Screening Room →Performance
Gangster film and counterculture identity experiment whose soundtrack, editing and casting dissolve the border between criminal and rock-star performance
Enter the Screening Room →200 Motels
Video-shot surreal road-movie mockumentary in which Zappa turns touring boredom, sexual frustration and band paranoia into deliberately unstable cinema
Enter the Screening Room →A Clockwork Orange
Violent dystopian satire in which classical music, electronic synthesis, youth style and state conditioning become parts of the same argument about free will
Enter the Screening Room →The Harder They Come
Jamaican crime-and-music film whose international cult life helped globalise reggae while documenting the local industry and social conditions from which the music emerged
Enter the Screening Room →That'll Be the Day
Anti-rise-to-fame story about a restless young man learning that popular music offers escape without promising adulthood
Enter the Screening Room →Stardust
Sequel that transforms teenage escape into an unsentimental history of the industrial, psychological and financial machinery around rock stardom
Enter the Screening Room →Phantom of the Paradise
Grand-guignol rock satire about ownership, contracts, image manufacture and the industrial theft of a songwriter's voice
Enter the Screening Room →Slade in Flame
Fictional band drama built from real touring anecdotes and designed to dismantle the cheerful pop-star vehicle Slade were expected to make
Enter the Screening Room →Tommy
Ken Russell transformation of a rock opera into maximalist visual mythology, celebrity casting and consumerist religious satire
Enter the Screening Room →The Man Who Fell to Earth
Science-fiction drama in which the casting of a rock star deepens an alienation story without turning the film into a rock-star vehicle
Enter the Screening Room →Jubilee
Punk-era dystopian fantasy that uses the movement's people and imagery while attacking punk's own violence, commodification and nihilism
Enter the Screening Room →Rockers
Fictionalised hybrid built from real musicians and real Kingston music infrastructure, turning a stolen-motorcycle story into one of reggae cinema's richest social maps
Enter the Screening Room →Quadrophenia
Non-musical dramatic adaptation of a rock opera, shifting Pete Townshend's interior concept into streets, pills, scooters, jobs and the collapse of subcultural identity
Enter the Screening Room →Pink Floyd: The Wall
Film adaptation that abandons the concert-film idea and transforms a rock album/stage show into an almost dialogue-free collision of live action, music and Gerald Scarfe animation
Enter the Screening Room →Keep exploring
Connect this collection
Move sideways into another part of RetroForge. Every route is a different way back into the same music archive.