Don't Look Back

"There are no ideas in Time magazine. There are just these facts." - Bob Dylan You might also say there are just facts and no ideas in D.A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back (1967) but in the past four decades not many people have complained. (And yes punctuation buffs, there's no apostrophe in the title). A stream of filmed snapshots from Bob Dylan's last acoustic tour, the documentary follows cinema verite dogma in avoiding any kind of voice-over narration, talking heads interviews or even scene-setting titles except for the opening "London 1965". The result is bustling and vibrant but don't expect to learn much about music; though routinely called one of the best-ever rock 'n' roll films there's actually almost no rock at all in it and little about the creative process. Instead, Dont Look Back is more a portrait of not Bob Dylan the musician but Bob Dylan the person, composed from the accretion of detail: the way he looks out a window, his interest in fans, absent-minded guitar strumming and his love of confrontational interviews. The end result is a complex film that appears simple and one that improves with repeated viewing. A superb new DVD release allows you to do just that and is available in either a single disc or a deluxe set with an additional documentary and book. In 1967, Dont Look Back was a shock. Stars from the music world or elsewhere rarely give this kind of intimate exposure. There had been gossip columns and magazines for decades but those were often orchestrated by publicists and even if some tended not to focus on gossip and scandal they rarely offered anything more substantial. Dont Look Back instead gave viewers something that could be considered the "real" Dylan. Boredom, frustration, laughter, arguments, confusion; these are the elements of Dont Look Back. The Dylan we see in the film isn't just a pop star even if he claims to be an entertainer not a folk singer, a status further supported by the constant presence of his benignly amused manager Albert Grossman. This Dylan is somebody who's struggling and exploring, not giving the world a finished product. He's curious about clothes, guitars, the Royal Albert Hall, newspapers but most importantly people and how they think. Take for instance, the famous extended sequence where Dylan harangues an interviewer from Time. (The interviewer, by the way, was Horace Freeland Judson who after a few years in the journalism trenches became a respected science historian and taught at Stanford and Johns Hopkins.) It's a little unclear what prompted Dylan to unburden himself - according to Judson the film only shows the last third of the interview - but regardless, it's fascinating. Dylan's point that the magazine has the facts but no overall connections is true as far as it goes but then that's the same of most journalism, and actually almost defines it. Dylan continues by pointing out how Time appeals to a certain demographic and he feels that they've prejudged him. According to him, Time refuses to show "the truth" but as the interviewer presses Dylan about what he means his confused example is no more truthful than Time. In 1967 the sequence must have seemed like Dylan was really giving it to The Establishment but today he seems as often wrong as he was right. When the interviewer asks "Do you care about what you sing" Dylan just explodes with "you have the nerve to ask me that" but really, it's an interesting question. How many singers were just following the folk or protest bandwagon? This far down the road we've seen enough changes in Dylan to wonder what he's been thinking at numerous stages in his career. There are several such exchanges in Dont Look Back, most not as weighty and some downright playful. But there's far more to the film than just conversations. The rough black-and-white images, shaky camera, low lighting and long stretches of unedited shots are familiar enough today but at the time were so new and unsettling to the movie studios that they passed on distributing the film and it had to be premiered at an adult movie theatre. The cinema verite approach to documentary had been developed in the U.S. not for theatres but mostly as a form of TV journalism (the films of Robert Drew with Pennebaker and Albert Maysles were generally funded by Time-Life for NBC and by ABC News). Though the style constantly evolved it made a sharp contrast to earlier documentaries (and even most today) by omitting most contextual information. As an example, there's a scene in Dont Look Back where Dylan talks with an older man about records this man recorded. There's no identification of the man and it's unclear that even in 1967 many viewers would have recognized him as Derroll Adams, a collaborator of folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Today, Adams is probably only remembered by anybody other than folk historians for his brief appearance in this film. Perhaps the ID wasn't important because we get the fact that Dylan admires this guy and learned from his music but the verite style avoided anything that wasn't "naturally" present in front of the camera. This can be simply confusing and merely raw data but when it works it requires the kind of interwoven imagery seen in Dont Look Back where the point actually isn't to provide a finished truth. The only obviously staged sequence in the film is the one that opens it, one of the most famous in music history and what is sometimes incorrectly called the first music video. Scopitones, short filmed performances designed for special jukeboxes, blazed that trail a few years earlier and in the DVD commentary Pennebaker reveals that Dylan was hoping to make a Scopitone with this sequence. It features Dylan in an alleyway holding up cards with select words from each line of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," no lip-synching and a pretty peculiar way to sell a song. The DVD includes a fascinating alternate version that was filmed in front of what appears to be a flower bed at a park (with Allen Ginsberg still in attendance) and if you still haven't seen enough the documentary in the deluxe edition has yet another version done on a rooftop (this time Ginsberg-less). It's not just an attention-grabbing opening but the song had just been released as a single before Dylan's tour and was hugely popular despite some dissenting opinions such as the young fan in the film who complains it doesn't sound like Dylan. Ever generous, his response is that he made it with friends and "I have to give some work to my friends. You don't mind that, right?" The DVD includes a nice commentary by Pennebaker along with musician and tour road manager Bob Neuwirth, though they both spend a bit too much time watching instead of commenting. Pennebaker, nevertheless, has a forthright honesty and open charm that shows why he's able to win the trust of so many documentary subjects. It's certainly worth hearing him explain about newly developed camera systems that allowed this type of filming, backgrounds of various people passing through the film, why he doesn't always let songs play completely through, how financing was arranged, Dylan's opinion of the film and anything else that occurs to him. Neuwirth is valuable for his "I was there" contributions though he sometimes states the obvious and like many musicians has a shaky understanding of musical history. Still, he gives Pennebaker something to play off and sparks memories that might have passed unrecorded without him. The disc also includes five uncut audio tracks from the tour and useful subtitles. The deluxe edition has a second disc with an hour-long film called 65 Revisited composed of outtakes from Dont Look Back. It's a nice companion of additional on-the-road scenes, musical performances and a celebrity or two (including Nico, shortly before she would sing on the first Velvet Underground album). While such material has its own value, this new film is interesting for revealing what Pennebaker didn't consider appropriate for the original. Shots where people directly address the camera or the film crew wanders on screen might have compromised the verite idea of an unbiased observer merely recording events and were not used. This time around Pennebaker also specifies each location (Liverpool, Newcastle, etc.) more clearly. The deluxe set also includes a reprint of a 1968 paperback that transcribed the film. Original copies would set you back almost the price of the set so in that sense it's something of a bargain. Still, the book is more a curiosity though it does provide the identities of people and songs that you don't get from the film itself. Pennebaker told film historian P.J. O'Connell that Dont Look Back "is not documentary at all by my standards. It throws away almost all its information and becomes purposely abstract and tries to be musical rather than informational." Perhaps all art aspires to the condition of music, perhaps not. The idea, though, gave Pennebaker a way to organize the mass of material he filmed and if you can't nail down any way that the finished work is actually musical that hardly matters. Pennebaker created something new. He also unwittingly opened the gates for a flood of music films - a dozen or so directed by him - and though most lack the substance and charm of Dont Look Back that's not Pennebaker's fault. His film is the one we'll still watch again and again. To order Dont Look Back, go to TCM Shopping. by Lang Thompson