Clever Beast

Albert Hall slips out of view through a grainy sixties windshield as Bob Dylan, caught unguarded by Pennebaker’s camera, reminisces about the performance he had just rushed from moments ago. 

Dylan: God, I feel like I’ve been through some kind of… thing, man.

Pennebaker (laughs): You have.

Dylan: No but I mean there was, something was, something was special about it, that’s all.

Shortly after the title remerges, DONT LOOK BACK, and the film ends.

Blink and you’ll probably miss it.  Found not in the transcript, nor in much of what passes as critical analysis, nestles a truth as if watermarked on the original print:  Dylan, for the briefest of moments, conveys an emotion that the English language is crudely inadequate to describe: to be nostalgic for a moment as it is happening.

At the risk of sounding overly theatrical and certainly of sounding unscholarly, I consider this to be a rogue revelation (one of many in the documentary) that earns its adjective by violating a certain accustomed way of thinking through cinema.   It is this rogue quality, more so than any particular argument of the filmmaker, or the critics that hound him, that give DON’T LOOK BACK its essential vitality.  The incidentals of the photographic image, the micro-effects of human behavior in-situ, a collection of tics and eccentricities, all too often perceived as shadows or blemishes to be squinted away en route to the familiar, these rogue characteristics exist outside of narrative, history, socio-cultural relevance, and musicology and at times defy even language.  The persona of Dylan at the center of it, who like an unstoppable black hole wrenching from his interlocutors and, indeed, the audience, any semblance of static familiarity, spurs the rogueries further, the minor upsets of naked human emotions and specks of unrehearsed life left in his wake spread and multiply.

This documentary has become sadly domesticated, labeled and shelved.  Some dare call it the greatest music documentary ever made.  I suspect there is maybe ten minutes of music all told.  This is not about music, not chiefly, and I refuse to believe it is about a particular time and place, though they are ingredients; the stew that is made from this collection of long whirring shots of grainy uncomfortable people bears a richness of taste not from any one overarching additive, but from the mixture born of so many.  Its time to set it free, and in the process excise from it the thick patina of so many layers of dull documentarian rhetoric.  DONT LOOK BACK is about life, about immediacy, and conveys it not abstractly, but directly, that is its charm, and that is its vitality.

• 10/28/11