Dont Look Back (1967)

Director: D. A. Pennebaker
Writer: D. A. Pennebaker
Stars: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Alan Price

Index: 2025 Centennials.

“Don’t criticise what you can’t understand,” Bob Dylan sang in The Times They are a-Changin’ in this film, which every critic should keep in mind as they review it. After all, it’s not your typical documentary and wasn’t in 1967.

Ostensibly, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was chronicling Dylan’s tour of the UK in 1965, but, quite frankly, this does a terrible job of that. I left knowing little more about that tour than I did going in, which wasn’t a heck of a lot.

I had to research online to find that it ran for eight nights in seven cities over ten days, that he only performed solo and acoustic and each gig was performed in two halves without support, prompting me to wonder why Joan Baez and Alan Price were there for much of it.

I even had to research online to find who’s in it. Sure, Dylan is instantly recognisable and there are some names floated at the beginning but there aren’t any notes to tell us that Albert Grossman was his manager and Bob Neuwirth his road manager. Others are clear in context, like Donovan, but most aren’t.

I know now where John Mayall and Ginger Baker are, but I wouldn’t from the film alone. Marianne Faithfull’s in there too, as was Allen Ginsberg, both without identification. If you’re not sure who they are, then you’d have to look deeper to find out. This isn’t interested in any of that. They’re just background texture in the crowd scenes, which are almost all of them.

What Pennebaker is really doing is painting a portrait of a musician at a pivotal point in his career, still new but an established voice of a generation. The film’s name is from a quote from baseball player Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” It has meaning. Dylan was being copied already, with Donovan’s presence here a reminder; the song he sings backstage sounds like a pastiche. But when they caught up, he’d moved on.

For instance, the film opens with the music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, on which he played an electric guitar, but that was shot at the end of the tour. Its final date in London was 10th May, just two months before Dylan infamously went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. This movie didn’t reach theatres until 1967. Dylan was such a moving target, even his own movie couldn’t keep up with him!

Today, over half a century later, we can look back as film historians to acknowledge this as a pioneering work. Not only did it start with a music video—not the first but an early one to separate music from performance—but it’s the first true rockumentary. This is Spın̈al Tap took entire recognisable scenes to parody.

Appropriately enough, I’m not watching for Dylan but for that pioneer, D. A. Pennebaker, because he would have been a hundred today.

He was already established, having worked with such minor names as John F. Kennedy on Primary in 1960, on which he used a camera with synchronised sound to get in close with that year’s campaigns, and then Crisis in 1963, which covered his clash with George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, on school desegregation.

His first film about music was a 1964 short about jazz vocalist Dave Lambert, but this film, at feature length, captured a moment, not just in Dylan’s evolution as an icon but of the time that was indeed a-changin’. He also shot Dylan on his subsequent tour of the UK in 1966, but that film, Something is Happening, is unreleased.

Instead, he shot Monterey Pop, which isn’t the first concert film by decades but was the first modern rock festival movie and arguably remains the best, certainly of that era.

For me, much of what makes this special is that it doesn’t capture what we expect. It’s a documentary about a tour, so we might expect footage from the concerts, both the stages and the audiences, as well as interviews with some of the people there. We get very little of that.

There are parts of some songs performed on stage, most obviously during the final couple of nights at the Royal Albert Hall, but we hear more music played backstage, a good deal of it not by Dylan and not of Dylan’s songs.

There’s music everywhere here, as if these musicians need it as much as air. Sometimes it’s Baez singing as Dylan types; sometimes it’s guests singing to showcase their own sound; sometimes it’s a jam, like when Baez and Dylan explore Hank Williams tunes. Often it’s merely background; Dylan keeps playing guitar while arguing philosophy with promoter Terry Ellis, later a co-founder of Chrysalis Records.

We see the audience too but never with the stage. We see them before shows as they wait for doors to open or between shows, whistling up at his hotel windows. “Pinch me!” one says when something moves up there.

And Pennebaker doesn’t interview anyone. What interviews we see are given by others at press conferences Dylan clearly doesn’t want because nobody asks intelligent questions. The best interview is the one with a journalist for the BBC World Service but we don’t see that, just the sharing of its questions first.

So much of this captures moments before or in between, because they’re the most real. It’s Dylan looking for his cane right before he goes on stage. It’s Dylan confused at people calling him an anarchist because he has no solutions. It’s Baez saying that if he finishes Love is a Four Letter Word, she’ll record it. Both did.

It’s a masterful cinema verité approach that worked because Pennebaker was unobtrusive. That’s tough to do with 1965 cameras, though he was an engineer who helped design them, and he mastered the approach, even if, as he pointed out, it means “you edit more and the film changes every three days”.

It would lead to other work with musicians, documenting David Bowie’s “farewell” concert in 1973, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Depeche Mode’s breakthrough 1988 tour of the U.S., which resulted in another pioneer of a film, 101, that arguably sparked reality TV, much of it following a bus of young fans on their way to the gig in Pasadena after winning a “be in a Depeche Mode movie contest”.

That was his favourite of his own films but the one that won awards was The War Room, a feature on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, focusing not on the politician but his lead strategist and communications director.

Inevitably, he married a documentarian and filmmaker, Chris Hegedus, and they made The War Room together, along with many others up to Unlocking the Cage in 2016. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2013 and passed six years later, still working at ninety-four.