Remarkably, D.A. Pennebaker didn’t know a whole lot about Bob Dylan when the folk singer with the hurricane hair and Woody Guthrie drawl invited the filmmaker along on a 1965 tour. But no single piece of media has provided more insight into Dylan’s art than Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” the 96-minute documentary chronicling the singer’s watershed three-week solo trek across England.
It captured Dylan at a crucial moment: He had already changed the language of folk, acoustic and protest music, but he is ready to move on. His explosive electrified performance at Newport and the rock ‘n’ roll of the “Highway 61 Revisited” album are only weeks away, and there is an impatient energy about the singer as he plays his last round of fully acoustic shows. Pennebaker, meanwhile, was doing for cinema what Dylan had done for music; he helped create a new “cinema verite” art form with his hand-held, 16 mm cameras, documenting such historic events as the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
“Don’t Look Back” is the result of this three-week marriage of new music and new film, the cool, unobtrusive director and his fascinating, exasperating subject — caught in all his glory and, occasionally, all his frailty, insecurity and ugliness. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of “Don’t Look Back” is that it came out at all.
“It was his film in every way — I was just the camera man,” the director says. “He had final approval, but he didn’t change a thing after I presented it to him. I think he realized that here was this groundbreaking merger of new music and new film, and it all worked together as a whole. But at the same time, I think he wishes the film were about anybody but him.”
Newly issued on DVD, with commentary from Pennebaker and Dylan road manager and co-conspirator Bob Neuwirth, “Don’t Look Back” still startles. In contrast to many of today’s celebrity portraits, “Don’t Look Back” presents a three-dimensional, startlingly human rock star, prone to outbursts of cruel humor that still leave viewers mumbling, “How on earth did Dylan allow him to film this?”
“I became part of the background as the tour progressed, and he got more comfortable around me,” Pennebaker says. “The camera was always on, and so it became not that big of a deal.”
But after viewing “Don’t Look Back” again, years after I first saw it, it strikes me that Dylan is more self-aware than Pennebaker and many early reviews of the documentary would suggest. As Dylan says in announcing one of his songs from the stage of the Albert Hall: “This is a true story . . . nothing in this story has been changed, except the words.”
Dylan plays to the camera, the audience, his hangers-on. Much of his petulance now seems, in retrospect, tinged with sarcasm and playfulness. In what is arguably the movie’s most famous scene, Dylan comes head to head in his hotel room with Donovan, the callow Scottish folk singer hailed as the “new Dylan.” Lore has it that the two pop-culture giants staged the folk-rock equivalent of the shootout at OK Corral: Donovan plays an innocuous ditty to polite applause, then Dylan takes the guitar and slays his rival with a devastating “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.”
Indeed, Pennebaker’s camera shows Dylan singing with an I-just-ate-the-canary smile, while a wide-eyed Donovan shrinks back in his chair. But Donovan now says the scene was overblown: “The film was propaganda on a grand scale, presenting this rivalry between the two camps. I was kind of naive, and it was shocking to me to be compared to him. I mean, I loved what he was doing. But the scene that day was very edgy and uptight, and I suppose it had to do with the fact that the Americans were all taking amphetamines whereas I was more into pot, so it made it appear even more that I was the little boy lost.”
Throughout the movie, Dylan makes similar sport of journalists, often launching into absurdist monologues that suggest this was the proving ground for his famous generation-gap anthem, “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”
“You’re not gonna get it all,” Dylan snarls at a journalist from Time magazine.
Yet Dylan’s posturing is almost understandable, given the questions with which he was barraged: What is your real message? Would you say you care about people? Do you believe what you’re saying?
It’s an almost laughably stereotypical case of an older generation’s gatekeepers coming to have a look at the latest teeny-bopper curiosity, and deciding whether to pat him on the head or cuff him about the ears. Marilyn Manson could relate.
Like Manson, Bowie and countless others after him, Dylan turns the media ritual into a game, an ironic amusement that leaves those seeking illumination into the Dylan “persona” with only the songs themselves for sustenance. In the end, Pennebaker even acknowledges, the movie is not about Dylan the person, real or put-on. Instead, “Don’t Look Back” affirms what Dylan has been trying to tell probing journalists and obsessive fans from the beginning: It’s all in the music.
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Hear Greg Kot on “Sound Opinions” at 10 p.m. every Tuesday on WXRT (93.1 FM)
