1967 was the Summer of Love, and by that time Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the counterculture, was already two years into his transformation from folkie legend to rock star which began when he plugged-in a Fender Stratocaster and “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan had even released rock masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde by the time the Summer of Love was in full bloom which made the release of D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering rock doc, Don’t Look Back, seem exactly like looking back in 1967. The film captured the last flickers of Dylan as a wandering acoustic troubadour during his 1965 tour in England. Here’s the word from The Guardian…
“Very few people change the way of the world,” says Baldassare. “To me there is before Elvis and after Elvis, before Cassius Clay and after Muhammad Ali, and before Bob Dylan and after Bob Dylan. In Don’t Look Back we have the rare vantage point of seeing that moment just before.”
Shot handheld on black-and-white 16mm film, Don’t Look Back invented the “rockumentary”. Its fly-on-the-wall style flew in the face of contemporary cinematic convention, and its reputation and influence has steadily grown since its release in 1967. In 2014, the British Film Institute’s authoritative poll of movie industry experts ranked Don’t Look Back as one of the 10 best documentaries of all time.
Since the mid-1950s Pennebaker had been a pioneer of the observational “direct cinema” style, and had even helped develop the small synchronised sound and vision system which enabled it. While making films for Life magazine, he was looking for a more personal project when he met Bob Dylan in a bar in Greenwich Village. “He [Dylan] said: I have an idea for a film where I write out all the words to this song on pieces of paper, and I’ll just throw them down as I read them,” Pennebaker recalls. “I said: that’s a fantastic idea.” This eventually became the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues “video” (actually the opening sequence in Don’t Look Back).
Celebrating the film and looking back on Don’t Look Back, here’s more than an hour of outtakes from the film that I found on YouTube…
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