Looking Back at “Dont Look Back”

D.A. Pennebaker's doc on Dylan was a turning point for both the musician and film.

There are no intertitles, no talking heads, no voice over — no context at all, really — a stylistic mutation of the Italian neo-realist ethos and Hitchcock’s “pure cinema” that results in cinema vérité, a monster whose viral mutations in turn, as strongly and insidiously as they have infected our viewing culture, overwhelmingly fail to match the complex artistic integrity of their original blueprints.

“Dont Look Back”’s impact is due in part to the knack of timing: form meeting format meeting moment in a way that would be hard to match. Though there are no talking heads in the film, it’s certainly not lacking for interviews, and most of them set up the dynamic — old against new; lame against cool; fake against real — that animates not just Dylan’s attitudes, but the film’s philosophical stance. Consider the famous scene in which Dylan holds a Time magazine reporter’s feet to the fire in a bratty, combative, superior way that will cramp the bowels of any journalist just trying to do his job.

Taking aim at the reporter’s outlet, Dylan whinges that there’s no point in trying to explain himself to someone from Time magazine because Time’s readers are not interested in reading “the truth” and therefore the magazine has “got too much to lose by printing the truth.” And just what might that truth be? “Really the truth is just the plain picture,” Dylan says. “Like a picture of a tramp vomiting into the sewer and next door to the picture, Mr. Rockefeller, or Mr. C.W. Jones on the subway going to work, Any picture — just make a collage of pictures.” The plain picture, in fact, is what, if anything, “Dont Look Back” purports to be. Of course, the essential impossibility of such an assertion is part of vérité’s Faustian bargain, but the fact that Dylan’s crude example of what might convey the truth of a given situation is exactly the treatment he’s receiving is a large part of the film’s synergistic appeal.

It’s an appeal — and a legacy — that was of course lost on its subject, an artist who should know better than to fault a documentary for being “one-sided,” as though it could ultimately be anything else. As though the plain picture is ever plain. Pennebaker’s strategy — to present the “real Dylan” in a series of crisis situations and record his behavior impassively, then assemble it into what Pennebaker himself has called “celebrity ethnography” — allowed him to weave several narrative threads, including the strange tension emanating between Dylan and recent ex-girlfriend Joan Baez and a rivalry with folky flower boy Donovan, into a heavily performance-oriented film.

The question of whether Dylan is or can ever be really off-stage, no matter how assiduously he ignores the camera and how faithfully the boom operator avoids the frame, and the idea that we have come any closer to the “real Dylan” by watching him spaz out over a drunken vandal or smack down a reporter, are respectively the film’s chief attraction and its finest ruse. In its ruse, in fact, lies the film’s greatest truth — its art.

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