I have a bit of a funny reason for being interested in Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary from Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. Yep, we're into the 1970s now. This is the first of two 70s movies before finishing the series with two in the 80s.
The legit reason -- and a genuine reason -- the film is on my radar is because "Maysles" is one of the first names in documentary filmmaking. I've already seen Grey Gardens (1975), the brothers' best known film.
The funny reason is that the film gets alluded to in one of my favorite comedies of all time, The Cable Guy.
When Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey) takes the mic at the karaoke jam he set up at the house of Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) -- with $10,000 worth of equipment he got into the house without a key -- he selects Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love as his song. Only it's not the album version. He engages in a bit of an intro about Jefferson Airplane performing at the Rolling Stones-fronted free concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, the show where the Hell's Angels famously functioned as security, and several people died. Carrey does a couple riffs that I now realize are based on the actual movie Gimme Shelter. Pretending to be Grace Slick, he calls out "We just had a baby born on the left side of the party ladies and gentlemen. We need an ambulance over by the scaff-ol-ding." (Yes, he draws out and emphasizes the three syllables of that word.)
So yeah, these are references that swim around in my head on a daily basis. I am who I am!
Considering that I had been a little underwhelmed by my first music documentary of this series, last month's Dont Look Back, I wasn't sure if this would grab me either. And the version I had to grab off YouTube (not finding it anywhere else) both was poor quality and featured Portuguese subtitles.
I thought these would have a distancing effect, but instead, they combined with the "grubby" aesthetic of the footage to make the film a kind of raw and visceral experience for me. (Also, I think I'm more interested by the music of the Rolling Stones than of Bob Dylan.)
There was something sort of entrancing about the cinematography of this movie, both its actual look, and the placement of the camera. First, the look. As I was wondering how I would describe it in this blog post, I came up with the idea that the images had a "smudged" quality to them, like they had been drawn with cray-pas. You know, those wax- and oil-based crayons you used to use back in school. What was likely a budgetary limitation for the filmmakers has the appearance of a deliberate artistic choice with the passage of 50 years. (Happy 50th Gimme Shelter, by the way.)
The brothers themselves were the cinematographers -- Zwerin was on the editing, which more on that in a moment -- and the way they frame the images is hypnotizing. Way too close to their subjects turns out to be an incredible decision in this case, as half the time, the thing the camera is looking at is only half or even a quarter visible in the frame. I think of this one particular shot of the Stones in a studio environment listening to their song "Wild Horses," where one of the band members (I can't tell the three non-Keith and Mick guys from each other) appears with only half of his face in the frame, as you focus on his wandering eye that sometimes makes contact with the camera before looking away. The whole movie is like this -- the camera wandering, fixing on seemingly unimportant details that speak volumes, indifferent about how much we can see of what we're looking at.
The movie finishes on Altamont -- I suspect the last two-thirds are spent on it -- but before that, it captures the last few tour stops for the Stones. In one of these, a young Tina Turner performs a blistering set as well. I really felt transported back to that time.
The Maysles also do wonderful things with intercutting concert footage with images of them examining the Altamont footage after the fact, with radio DJs giving us a little bit of context and exposition, and even with phone calls between the Stones' management and potential venue hosts as the concert has to quickly be moved from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco just a few days before it's supposed to happen. While these are mostly moving chronologically, they don't all, and again, you've got an entrancing effect here.
You can't use the word "intercutting" without talking about the editing, which was Zwerin's department (with Ellen Hovde). The look of the film is so scruffy that you would instinctively deny that it is strongly accomplished on the technical side, but I noticed at least a couple edits that blew my mind. There's one shot where Mick is approaching the stage from a side door, disappears into the crowd, and seemingly without an edit at all, the camera goes to him on stage, emerging from the shadows. There's stuff like that throughout the movie.
Back to the cray-pas comment, there's an amazing use of color in this movie. There are scenes of volunteers erecting the scaffolding and other staging needed to move the show at the last minute to Altamont, and it's against this amazing orange and purple sky that is almost something out of a fantasy movie. Hypnotic.
I think I could keep gushing but let's wrap up with the Altamont footage itself. In today's litigious times I doubt you could get away with including footage of so many stoned and drunk concert attendees without their permission, but back in 1969, it made for an illuminating portrait of modern youth. I could probably watch a whole movie of just the faces of the people in the crowd. (And if I didn't want to get further into the 1970s with my next pick in this series, I just realized I could watch the actual Woodstock documentary, which I haven't seen, which also came out in 1970, and which presumably includes lots of similar footage.)
It was tense and exhilarating, in a way, to watch as the Maysles captured so much footage of the actual clashes between Hell's Angels (who were drunk on the $500 worth of beer they were paid to be security) and concertgoers, without the possibility of knowing that this type of thing would occur. It was like they had a camera wherever they needed it, when they needed it, which is just a sign of their skill as filmmakers. Of course, footage shot for this event was also used to help determine that a particular concertgoer, who pulled a gun, was stabbed to death by an Angel, in what was later (rightly, it seems) ruled by the courts to be self-defense. There were three other accidental deaths and also four births, if you can believe it. We see the Stones trying to calm everybody down and Jefferson Airplane arguing with Hell's Angels because one of the band members was knocked unconscious by them. The Grateful Dead refused to play when they saw how the situation was deteriorating.
In short, the event was a trip, and so was the movie that captured and delivered it to us.
Here's hoping for as much luck with my next pick in this series in October, which is as yet undetermined.
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