The unseen Bob Dylan: A new DVD shows stunning outtakes
The seminal rockumentary Don't Look Back is being released on DVD. Andy Gill reports
Published: 27 April 2007
D A Pennebaker has some unusual notions about musicians. "They are the closest we have in our time to the saints," he told me some years ago, "because they renounce the material world for something else, as a matter of course: they don't see any other way to do it."
He may be right. As the world's leading rock documentarist, he's perhaps better qualified than you or I to make such statements. After all, he's poked his lens with sometimes embarrassing candour into the lives of stars such as Bob Dylan and David Bowie.
Forty years ago, Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, a filmed record of Bob Dylan's 1965 UK tour, was first shown to the world, its cinema-verité style and grainy 16mm monochrome scenes of grim post-war Britain a blade of earthy reality stabbing into the heart of 1967's gaudy, multi-coloured psychedelic fantasy-world. Not that anyone - especially in Britain - would have realised that at the time, as for years it proved almost impossible to view, having been rejected by every large distributor as unfit for screening.
"Nobody had ever distributed a film like this before," admits Pennebaker. "In fact, I have a letter from someone at Warner/7 Arts saying, 'This film is ratty, badly focused, it's hard to hear what people are saying - it's a disaster!'" In the event, the 16mm print had its low-key premiere at a former porno theatre in San Francisco, before a 35mm print was shown in New York.
Even Dylan himself was initially uncertain about its viability. "The first time Bob saw it," recalls Pennebaker, "I sat there nervously till he got up at the end and said, 'We're showing it again tomorrow, and I'll make a list of all the changes we have to make.' The next night, he sat there in the front row, with a big yellow pad and pen, all ready. Then, at the end, he stood up and showed me the pad: completely blank." Indeed, so enamoured did the singer become with Pennebaker's methods that he made the rarely screened Eat the Document, his own little-seen film of his first "electric" UK tour with The Hawks.
Since then, of course, Don't Look Back has become universally recognised as one of the great rock movies, its mingling of riveting concert footage and revealing backstage shenanigans offering an unscripted variation on the faux-documentary style of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, complete with the screaming fans, the limousine escapes, the press conferences, and the hotel-room interludes in which Dylan's guard is most obviously dropped. And so deft is Pennebaker's editing that several running themes - the Donovan wind-ups, the baiting of interviewers - lend the film a narrative drive that still sets it apart.
This is all the more evident when one gets to see the extra 90 minutes of outtake footage included in the new deluxe DVD edition, a sumptuous two-disc package that also includes the "script" book originally published in 1968 and a lovely little flip-book of the celebrated card-dropping "Subterranean Homesick Blues" sequence that opens the film (there are also two further takes of the sequence, in different locations).
Pennebaker secured the commission to film the tour through the recommendation of Sara Lowndes, with whom Dylan had recently become smitten, and would secretly marry later that year. A friend of the wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman - whose forbidding presence looms over many of the film's scenes - Sara knew Pennebaker through her work connections at Drew Associates, a film production company.
Pennebaker had originally been attracted to the documentary medium after seeing Flaherty's Nanook of the North - "what appealed to me was that he made a film about somebody he liked, and he didn't care if it showed" - and Louis De Rochemont's innovative, Oscar-winning war documentary The Fighting Lady, although he makes a clear distinction between them and his own work. "I don't think of [my own films] as documentaries because I'm really interested in film as drama, rather than film as information," he explains. "It happens that I use situations that are real, but basically the films are kind of an imagined dream of what happened. They may be quite accurate, but they're still as imagined, as dictated, by me."
These days, cinema-verité film methods have become commonplace as technology has become more and more miniaturised: within minutes of a terrorist bombing, footage captured on a cellphone-camera can be broadcast to the world. But back in the Sixties, working in the medium was a labour of love. "Five years earlier, we simply couldn't have filmed it," admits Pennebaker. "The technology simply didn't exist - you needed lighting rigs, and sound equipment that was connected to the camera." Not to mention the sheer weight of the equipment the cameraman had to tote on his shoulder.
To surmount these problems, Pennebaker had taken to adapting his equipment and inventing new devices, including a new sound-synching system. For the camera he used to make Don't Look Back, Pennebaker installed a new, quieter motor, and replaced the metal gearing with lighter nylon cogs. Pennebaker carried three loaded magazines, each holding 10 minutes' worth of film, and using stock that could cope with low light levels, he was able to film relatively unobtrusively, without using lights.
"The advantage of making a film this way," he explains, "with no script and no idea of what's coming next, is that you see things the way you see them in a theatre for the first time, and if they interest you, you follow them, and if they don't, you lag away from them. What comes out is what was interesting to you at that time. You know you're going to miss 90 per cent. But 10 per cent of something nobody had got any of before seemed not bad."
Capturing Dylan on the cusp of his folk and rock periods, the result is a witty and informative portrayal of a star in several kinds of metamorphosis - from folk to rock, from idol to icon - and feeling the constraints of mass adulation while gradually realising the kind of power he could come to wield because of it. Other celebrities - Ginsberg, Marianne Faithfull, John Mayall, Dana Gillespie and, in the new scenes, Nico - are glimpsed in passing, sitting in hotel rooms, limousines and dressing-rooms. Joan Baez, with whom Dylan had just finished a 10-date American tour - and with whom he was having an affair, by then waning - hangs around for the first half of the film, clearly unaware that Dylan's attentions had moved on, and unsettled by his declining interest in her.
Most revealing of all, perhaps, one lengthy scene sees Grossman and the British promoter Tito Burns stretching the definition of business ethics while negotiating with TV companies. "They didn't care that we shot it," says Pennebaker. "It was like, 'We're all on the same side.' Tito really loved his role in this film. I thought he'd want to kill me, but whenever I would see him, he would always laugh, pat me on the back and say, 'You made me a movie star!'"
Likewise with Dylan, "What you see is what you get," claims Pennebaker. "And for everybody I know who says, 'You really savaged that bastard,' somebody else says, 'God, he's wonderful.' It's clear that people see what they set out to see. And I'm no different - I guess I tried to make that film as true to my vision of him as I could make it. But as a storyteller, I wanted there to be stories in it."
Pennebaker was aided in this regard by Bob Neuwirth, a singer and painter who served as Dylan's tour manager. Neuwirth had proved himself Dylan's equal in droll acerbity - he's the one who jokes, "Joan's wearing one of those see-through blouses you don't even want to!" - and he clearly saw part of his job as providing entertaining moments for the camera.
"Bobby Neuwirth understood instantly the theatre of what we were doing," says Pennebaker. "Without saying anything, he would construct 'scenes' that worked." Dylan and Neuwirth were instinctively aware that, despite it being a documentary, the film was just as much a performance as Dylan's nightly steps to the stage - a short journey that Neuwirth likens to a matador preparing to meet the bull.
Pennebaker's favourite moments in the film are the small, seemingly insignificant details that you probably wouldn't notice unless you too had watched the scenes hundreds of times in the editing-room - the way that Dylan provides the perfect full-stop to a scene by lighting a cigarette and looking out of a limo window, or the way a protective Neuwirth nonchalantly pushes Dylan back into the safety of his room during a contretemps with management in a hotel corridor.
As for what he might have revealed about Dylan, Pennebaker regards such matters with equanimity. "If you had gone along instead of me, would you have figured out much about Dylan?" he asks, rhetorically. "It's the process of being there that's interesting. The one sure thing in life is that you never know what's going on in somebody's head. That's what the novel was invented for. You can't point a camera at someone and find out what's in their head. But it does the next best thing: it lets you speculate."
The deluxe edition DVD of 'Don't Look Back' is available through SonyBMG from 30 April
