Just as narrative film has evolved, so have documentaries – the changing nature of cultural tastes, historical events, and film technology has allowed documentary films to be given a unique and constantly changing sensibility throughout the years. According to Grierson, documentaries as a film format are typically considered as being “made from natural material,” meaning that the events being filmed are happening organically, without the use of scripts or actors or sets. However, even within that strict definition there are ways to stretch and alter the very fabric of what it means to be a documentary, evoking the cultural and social attributes of a particular era in which the documentary is made. One of these ways is through cinema verite, a method which Nichols describes as having an “increase in the ‘reality effect’ with its directness, immediacy, and impression of capturing untampered events in the everyday lives of a particular people.” D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, about Bob Dylan’s concert tour in the United Kingdom, is an incredible work of cinema verite, demonstrating a malleable sense of documentary which frequently toes the line between music video, concert film and documentary.
Documentaries are just as much a gesture of artistic expression as any other format of film, particularly in the genre of verite and free cinema to which Don’t Look Back belongs. To Lindsay Anderson, the documentary genre “should be one of the most exciting and stimulating of contemporary forms,” as “the documentarist must formulate his attitude, express his values as firmly and forcefully as any artist.” In documentary, “we [filmmakers] are the audience, ” according to Leacock; providing a unique sense of subjectivity that inherently violates the conventional wisdom of documentary simply being an objective ‘document’ of real life events. The documentarian, then, “describes to you those aspects that he finds to be significant and interesting” in a documentary, providing them the freedom to experiment and branch out however possible to sell the greater artistic points they are attempting to make. Don’t Look Back can absolutely be said to evoke these senses of authorial intent within the documentary, with the cameraman acting as a fly on the wall, and yet also a character in the scene.
Existing somewhere between verite documentary and music video, Don’t Look Back raises questions about the veracity and structure of its documentary format from the start. The film’s opening scene is one of the most striking in the film, acting as an impromptu music video for Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The camera zooms out to an alleyway in which Dylan looks straight in the camera, holding up cue cards with certain words or phrases on them. When Dylan reaches that word or phrase in the lyrics, he drops the cue card to reveal the next one, and so on and so on. Occasionally, the cue cards have typos (“Pawking metaws”) or are even the entirely wrong phrases (Dylan scrolls through several aimlessly until he gets back on track with the song). He ends the shot with the final cue card, which just says “What??” (as if in reaction to the song), and he walks off frame. The entire opening consists of a single, static shot, a deliberately staged moment just for the documentary, with Dylan’s blank face looking at the camera and acknowledging the audience’s presence as spectators in the film. By having these kinds of moments within the film, Dylan and Pennebaker establish an unconventional, rebellious approach to the documentary format, in which the subjects of the documentary acknowledge that they are being filmed, and that at least some of the film will be staged for those purposes.
In its desire to step back from the more formal, objective-minded documentaries of previous generations, as it shows the “virtues of a hybrid style” in which there is a “textual voice apart from that of the characters represented.” Don’t Look Back functions extremely well as a character study of Bob Dylan, just as much as it does an exploration of 1960s rock culture and the generation gap that it seeks to illustrate. Dylan himself is in his prime in the film – cocksure, charming and personable, but also with a tremendous amount of arrogance and a confrontational nature to him. In one scene, Dylan is interviewed by Horace Freeland Judson of the London branch of Time Magazine, whom he subjects to a verbal tirade and numerous jabs (”I know more about what you do just by looking at you than you'll ever be able to know about me”). Before one concert, Dylan gets into an argument with a “science student” about philosophy, being visibly rankled by the impertinence and perceived stupidity of the student. Dylan even confronts other artists about their work, such as when he prods Alan Price backstage during a performance to ask him about his reasons for leaving his previous band, The Animals. Throughout the film, Dylan reveals himself to be a somewhat air-headed, overly glib, abrasive punk, providing a fascinating shade to his genius – only because of the sheer poetry of his music would everyone around him deign to stay around him after being treated that way. The capturing of all these intimate moments, and the willingness to show them in their full honesty, demonstrates the documentary’s desire to show the truth about Bob Dylan, warts and all.
In addition to Dylan’s status as a ‘real person’ as revealed by the film, his abrasiveness is tempered by his genius, which is played out in many fantastic musical and concert sequences in which he plays for enraptured audiences that cannot get enough of him. The diversity of his audience and versatility is captured in many of these scenes, including a creative match-cut of a single pair of hands clapping after an intimate outdoor performance to a roaring crowd in the middle of a packed concert hall, as Dylan starts playing “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Dylan is never more still or loved than when he is on the stage playing music in Don’t Look Back, Pennebaker using his cinema verite handheld work to show a diverse mixture of close-ups and wide shots of Dylan and his audience – an indicator of the pure, personal poetry that resides within Dylan and the vast impact it has on culture and society as a whole.
The impact of Dylan on those around him is just as telling as Dylan’s own behavior in the film, Pennebaker giving significant focus to the people who surround Dylan. Dylan himself is often flocked by admirers, his head framed in a sea of other faces looking in on him – an indicator of the fame he has achieved and the inescapable nature of celebrity. Reporters question him incessantly trying to know the truth, reviewers dictate platitudes about his genius over pay phones, and adoring female fans who shout at him from the street in an attempt to get noticed. Even the few times he escapes it, they seem fleeting; one chase scene involves Dylan shouting at a woman to get back from their car as they drive, and a rare scene of creative solitude between Dylan and Joan Baez ends with him exclaiming, “this is the first time this room hasn’t been filled with insane lunatics!” The capturing of these moments, both intimate and chaotic, provides the documentary with a true sense of immediacy, the audience feeling right next to Dylan throughout his travails.
Pennebaker’s fluid sense of time as presented in Don’t Look Back is further evidence of the film’s innovations and fluidity in the history of documentary feature. As Leacock says of filmmaking, “the closer you can get to real time, somehow, the better the thing works” – Pennebaker’s style showcases a greater sense of reality in the scenes of the film because of his dedication to showing real events in real time. While the scenes themselves play out largely straightforward in their continuity, the links between scenes are almost magical and timeless, the film never giving you a solid sense of how many days or weeks have passed over the course of the film.
Though this does not strictly evoke the essence of real time in the entirety of the film, it solidifies the London tour as feeling like a sequence of moments both natural and artificial, that Dylan is experiencing all at once. The documentary itself is a sea of crowds, interviews, concerts and creative inspiration – interviews equated with fights with the hotel manager, friends of Dylan held in the same kind of closeup as strangers and fans, and more. While the scenes elapse in real-time, they all happen in a relative vaccuum, thereby evoking the greater chaos of Dylan’s time during this particular tour.
In showing Dylan, warts and all, Pennebaker’s goal seems to be to distill the essence of Dylan the man, Dylan the poet, and Dylan the rock star into a seamless whole, using his London tour to show all sides of him at once. Pennebaker’s authorial voice is clear within the framework of the film, even as it purports to just show what is on screen – his use of selective cuts, the decisions regarding how intimately or distanced he should film events, and the editing of this chaotic series of scenes altogether indicates a decidedly concrete directorial vision for the work. This matches well with Nichols’ notion of the filmmaker as a “participant-witness and an active fabricator of meaning”; Dylan at all times is being interpreted by the film, whether as a creative genius, a sex symbol, or an abrasive young punk with an arrogant personality. The aforementioned scenes of chaos and dealing with loud, screaming fans are tempered with the simple joys of Dylan clacking on his typewriter while Joan Baez sings, or simply singing into a non-functioning microphone with nothing but a spotlight to light him. These are the moments when Dylan is most alone and at peace, and consequently are the moments in which Pennebaker demonstrates the greatest sense of formalism (more static shots, dreamlike editing), adding to that sense of direct interpretation by the filmmaker.
Nichols argues against the objectivity of the documentary format, with the changing styles and history of documentary filmmaking establishing that they “always were forms of re-presentation, never clear windows into ‘reality’.” Don’t Look Back is a wonderful blend of free cinema, verite, and off-kilter Beat artistic expression on the part of Dylan and Pennebaker, attempting to blend the traditional nature of documentary with elements of free cinema, cinema verite, music videos and concert films. “Free cinema” desires to show society “by watching how things really happen as opposed to the social image that people hold about the way things are supposed to happen,” Don’t Look Back accomplishing this by showing as many sides as possible to Dylan’s encroaching, rising fame. By toeing the line between these disparate filmmaking styles, Don’t Look Back demonstrates a desire to change the way documentaries have been made up to this point, and explore greater avenues of creative and artistic freedom. To that end, Dylan’s documentary does not just explore the man himself from an intensely intimate and honest perspective; it also establishes a sea change in documentary filmmaking with a greater emphasis on fly-on-the-wall immediacy and that pop-music syncopation that matches the rhythms and poetry of Dylan’s music itself.
Works Cited
Anderson, Lindsay. “Free Cinema.” pp. 51-52.
Blue, James. “One Man’s Truth: An Interview with Richard Leacock.” Film Comment 3(2)
(Spring 1965), pp. 15-23.
Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary.” In Grierson on Documentary. Ed. Forsyth
Hardy. (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1966). Pp. 145-156.
Nichols, Bill. “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly 36.3 (Spring 1983), pp. 17-30.
Pennebaker, D.A. (dir.) Don’t Look Back.
