Don’t Look Back (no 43)

 

by Allan Fish

(USA 1967 96m) DVD1/2

Subterranean Homesick Blues

p  John Court, Albert Grossman  d/w/ph/ed  D.E.Pennebaker  m/ly  Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman, Joan Baez, Alan Price, Donovan, Bob Neuwirth,

To call this legendary film the greatest concert film in existence could be interpreted as either gross understatement or misleading.  There have been other fine concert films, of course, from Gimme Shelter to Woodstock to The Last Waltz, and yet they somehow fall short of Pennebaker’s achievement.  Where to even think of beginning…

            Don’t Look Back is, in essence, a fly-on-the-wall insight into Bob Dylan as he undertook his 1965 tour of England.  Pennebaker’s camera sees him not only in concert, but backstage, in hotel rooms, taxis and trains.  It’s as up close and personal a portrait as one could ever wish to see.  Yet this is one of those films that operate on so many levels sometimes you don’t really grasp the clarity of vision you’re being exposed to.  There’s a seemingly throwaway piece – in fact anything but, anything Pennebaker included in the film from 20 hours of raw footage is there for a reason – early in the piece where a reporter is dictating his piece to the paper on the phone.  He says that Dylan “is not so much singing as sermonising“, adding that people are only interested in the song and not the sermon.  There’s nothing especially wrong with that, and Dylan would be the first to agree, and yet in terms of the documentary separated from the music, it also illustrates the paradox.  Dylan’s fans come to hear Dylan, his music, his thoughts, his ramblings, the whole kit and caboodle.  Pennebaker offers a lot more; there’s the contractual politics with Granada and the BBC over appearance money, the clashes with local press and the very notion of a phenomenon and their entourage.  Finally, and most fascinatingly of all, is Pennebaker’s shots of industrial England in the mid sixties; Liverpool, Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester et al, whether seen in the form of whip pans away from Dylan to his surroundings to shots of terraced houses through moving trains.

            Now we live in a time where insider peeks into the world of celebrities are ten a penny, where fanatics resort to Hello magazine or the like to get their fix.  Yet this was the age of music artists, of the Stones, the Beatles and, of course, of Dylan.  He seems a man on the verge, jittering nervously under the influence of amphetamines, a poet like so many before him one expected to burn brightly and die out.  Yet he’s still around, over forty years later, having reinvented himself more often than one can count, flirting on the edge of movies, his songs illustrating everything from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which he even appeared, to Wonder Boys, for which he won an Oscar. 

            The concert footage we get, of everywhere from Town Halls to the Albert Hall, is as magnetic as one expects, and yet it’s in the intimate details that it proves most fascinating, as Pennebaker’s camera picks up so much that might otherwise have been missed.  Dylan’s handling of the media is especially intriguing; a mixture of evasion and self-deprecation, trying to show the world that he is, when push comes to shove, “just a guitar player, that’s all.”  And he does so with such insouciance that one almost believes him.  There are obscure answers, if you can call them that, to questions put, such as when asked what his message is replying “keep a clear head and always carry a light bulb.”  In one such piece of verbal fencing he arraigns against the necessity of Time magazine, and through the inevitable substance-fuelled pretension, one still glimpses the honesty and poetry beneath, like headlights in the fog.  It’s a time capsule essentially, and a unique insight into the man and his music in a time he was born for and in a place he seems at home in.  It’s also impossible to watch without thinking of Cate Blanchett’s astonishing portrayal of Dylan in this exact period in I’m Not There.  Dylan always had a faintly androgynous appearance, but Blanchett was, like Pennebaker’s film, worthy of the man himself.  Finally, look at Donovan’s listening to Dylan sing after singing himself.  The face of a man who knows, however good he may be, he’ll never hit the same heights.  For that brief moment, Donovan speaks for all of us by not speaking.