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Don't Look Back
(1967)
Dir: D. A. Pennebaker
There’s something culturally rapturous about watching 90-plus minutes of a pop star chain-smoking and acting like a petulant ass. It’s even more gratifying when the pop star is one of the premier poets of the 20th century. Don’t Look Back documents Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of London, which was his last acoustic tour, in rough-and-tumbling black-and-white. Ambling interview sessions, hotel-room drinking assemblies and green-room preparations, punctuated by hallowed scraps of live performances; the picture becomes a tumulus organic eruption of a time and a place. One that proved to be a stone in the boot that went well up the ass of mainstream culture; this is history alive. An effective rock documentary cheats the timeline, and this one is the fucking template. It’s about nothing and everything; social impact and bullshit fame; cool collectivity and piss and huff. The technology was new. Cameras hadn’t been in people’s everyday lives this way, so the subjects become a cast. Despite the cigarette orbiting his face, Dylan looks like a baby, but when he’s huffing his harmonica, you can see the Dylan eternal; the one that has somehow outlasted half of the Wilburys. That harmonica is life-support. Early footage of him playing in to a sparse outdoor crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, capturing his Guthrie goodness, segues into his stark mug prophesizing to sold-out crowds. Elsewhere, he seems to delight in fucking with somewhat aloof journalists, notably the self-proclaimed “science student” Terry Ellis (who later co-founded Chrysalis Records). He also waxes profoundly in earnest on the lagging and subservient nature of the media biz in the face of an ogre/reporter from Time. It might be a put-on, but it’s entertainment in its own right. Dylan’s entourage follows suit. The stuffy looking Albert Grossman, his manager and confederate, leaps out of his suit to chide a “fop” hotel manger as “the dumbest asshole” he’s ever met, his camera-shy showing a little; Joan Baez floats in the background like a nervous cupid, but frequently explodes, crystallizing the room with her falsetto; and Dylan’s road manger, artist, composer and filmmaker Bob Neuwirth, does a killer impression of LBJ; but when Alan Price, onetime organist for The Animals is asked by Dylan who has replaced him in the band’s line-up, he leaks the film’s most genuine bit of soul baring, as his nose crinkles and he seems to swallow the pain. Then he chips the piano he’s been maximizing by opening a bottle of beer on one of its edges, as everyone else shuffles out of the room. Dylan unwittingly lets his own guard down while a drunken but silent hotel room listens to a visibly nervous Donavan as he sings one of his early tunes. Dylan can’t sit still, perhaps a little impatient during a moment where he‘s not the center of attention. As for the film’s ultimate scope, a reporter for The Manchester Guardian sums it definitively. Filing his post-concert report from a payphone, he notes, “He is not so much singing as sermonizing: his tragedy perhaps is that the audience is preoccupied with song … The times they are changing, sings Dylan. They are when a poet, not a pop singer, fills a hall.” Shit like this simply doesn't exist anymore.
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