Audient Authentic: Don't Look Back

This is the eighth in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries as yet unseen by me.

So far in this series I've covered a pretty wide range of topics, from war to politics to ethnography, with even a nature documentary thrown in for good measure. From here on out, though, my subject matter is going to become a bit more focused, as three of the last five movies I plan to watch are music documentaries.

The first is the Bob Dylan doco Don't Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, who first appeared in our year-long survey of important documentaries as a collaborator in last month's Primary. Pennebaker is fully the auteur on this one and seems to take some pleasure in reminding us of that, as his name appears rather more often and more prominently than I would have thought necessary.

Pennebaker's trademark fly-on-the-wall approach involves no talking head interviews, though that doesn't mean it doesn't involve any interviews. The setting is a 1965 trip Dylan took to London, where he performed a number of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, spent time with a number of contemporaries who would become lesser luminaries (lesser to him anyway), and was hectored by the press. That last is the interview part.

Surely, some of the press seems impressed, so to speak, with him. But others seem rather dubious in their pointed questioning, at times asking him such things as whether he thought that any of his fans had any idea what his lyrics meant. Dylan is, for the most part, gracious about such questioning, or at least, not openly rude in his responses, though he does engage in a fair bit of a bemused "turn the question back on you" approach in answering their questions. You can see his well-known personality being forged here, as he cheerfully says he doesn't believe he should be described as a folk singer and that he "doesn't believe in anything," when asked about his religious views.

I definitely appreciate the tack Pennebaker takes on Dylan, but I think I'd have been more engaged with the material if I were more of a Dylan fan. I don't dislike Dylan, certainly, but I felt my eyes rolling a bit when "Maggie's Farm" came on at one point. Not a big fan of that particular song, which I find as sort of an embodiment of the kind of bratty punkiness that I don't love about Dylan. (I'm not going to be able to describe in satisfying language what it is that bothers me about him, so I probably won't try.)

I found myself fading from time to time, but then something would happen that snapped me back to attention. Overall I am positive on the movie.

I found it interesting to note that I actually like both of the other luminaries who appear here, Joan Baez and Donovan, more than I like Dylan. Heresy, I know. But I quite enjoyed spending time with Baez, and I was surprised to discover how much Donovan actually sounded like Dylan -- something that has never occurred to me about his work. To the extent that it has any structure at all, the film is sort of set up as a collision course between himself and Donovan, who is proferred as a figure of contrast with Dylan until they finally meet near the end. When Donovan performs one of his songs, at first I wondered if it were a Dylan impersonation -- which is interesting because I have never previously gotten that impression from Donovan's work.

Another thing I was fascinated by was the extent to which Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, reminded me of John C. Reilly. Not only could Reilly play him in a film, appearance-wise, but their voices are almost identical. I checked the internet and others have reached the same conclusions I have.

I know this is supposed to be some sort of landmark documentary, but I guess I needed to be around at that time to get a sense of how different it really was from other documentary portraits on offer. Certainly I am impressed by Pennebaker's ability to make everyone seem to "forget" that there is a camera there. This all feels very real and unvarnished, as no one appears to be playing to the camera or even really realizing it's there. Dylan comes off well despite the fact that it doesn't seem like he's trying to, though he's pretty ornery in certain moments as well.

In trying to get a sense of why the film is so respected, I went to Wikipedia, which doesn't give me very much. I mean, I myself respect it, but I don't think of it as the ninth best documentary of all time, which is how it was judged by a Sight & Sound documentary poll in 2014.

It'll be on to the 1970s in September as I watch another music documentary, the Maysles' Gimme Shelter.