Arts&Entertainment
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on’t Look Back
TYPE: Docudrama Video
DIRECTOR: D. A.
Pennebaker
GRADE: A
FIVE WORDS: Dylan fans
need this video.
Dylan’s Don’t Look Back’ video re-release a true rock classic
By Josh Krauter
Staff writer
Movies about rock ’n’ roll are usually pretty
bad.
Whether they’re romanticizing a bunch of
spoiled brats, poking fun at rock cliches or hon
estly trying to capture the spirit of the music,
most rock movies are missing that indefinable
magical quality that makes the best music mean
what it does.
There are a few notable exceptions; “This Is
Spinal Tap” and “Sid and Nancy” come to mind,
but fictionalized or dramatized rock movies are
usually a travesty (“The Doors,” “Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band”).
Most of the time, it takes a documentary to
get rock ’n’ roll right. Partly it’s because rock is
already dramatic, so most dramatic films only
succeed in watering it down.
But mostly it’s because rock’s story can’t be
told in linear stories connecting one event to the
next. Rock’s story is best told by a series of sin
gular, important moments.
So, rather than a “Behind the Music” style ,
“rocker claws way up from the gutter, does
important things, becomes alcohol-drug-sex , *
addict or loses money to greedy manager, Jj
loses favor with public, then dies or makes 1
comeback” story, a successful rock documen
tary usually captures a small slice of time.
A handful of these are truly memorable.
Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” a doc- ,
ument of the Band’s farewell concert, is a J
moving film that shows better than any other M
piece of cinema the joy musicians who are aj
also friends get in playing together. The ^k
Maysles Brothers’ “Gimme Shelter,” cap
tures the dark end of the 1960s and the help- M
less and horrified reaction of the Rolling
Stones as a fan is murdered on-camera by «
the Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival.
There are a few others, such as J
“Woodstock,” a colorful and vibrant take on jn
the original festival and “The Decline of f j
Western Civilization,” a brutal document of J
the early 1980s confused, violent and some- W
times inspirational hardcore punk scene. v
Doc mama video recently releasect a col- Jg
lector’s edition of a film that belongs near
the top of the rock-doc list. D. A.fl
Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” is a can-1
did look at Bob Dylan’s three-week tom offl
England in the spring of 196S. §M
It is a rock film unlike any other for
three main reasons: the ability to get very j
close to the subject, the unglamorous, realis- J
tic take of life on the road and the important fl
context of this period in Dylan’s career.
Pennebaker and his camera were able to
gain extremely candid footage of Dylan, his
bandmates, his then-girlfriend Joan Baez
and his manager, Albert Grossman. Some
of this footage is very unflattering, Sbme
isn’t. But Pennebaker was able to present
his subject as a human being and not the
myth that Dylan’s image has become.
Dylan was 24 years old at the time, <
like most young people, was fraught with!
contradictions. He chastises a Time maga
zine reporter for having an uppity middle
class readership that doesn’t help the poor in any
way, but earlier in the film, his manager is seen
using sneaky, possibly even illegal tactics, to get
Dylan a huge amount of money for a BBC
broadcast.
Later, Dylan is shown playing for a black
audience in the segregated South singing about
murdered civil rights leader Medgar
livers in tne mm s only
pre-1965 footage. ^
shines through. Later, he is complimented by an
African BBC reporter for his humanitarian
efforts. However, his treatment of Baez and the
Time reporter borders on the cruel.
Dylan’s philosophical sparring with a young
reporter is sophomoric and immature, but his
lyrics are profound.
He is kind and giving to a trio of teen-age
fans and even smiles
when one criti
cizes his latest
^^s ingle, but he
is nasty and brutal to anyone who interviews
him, though a few deserve it, especially the
newspaper that labels Dylan an anarchist,
despite his traditional liberal politics, just
because he’s a difficult interview.
Rock tours have long been mythologized as
a non-stop whirlwind of sex, drugs and televi
sion sets thrown into swimming pools. This film
dispels a lot of that myth before much of that
myth was even formed.
Much of the film is Dylan sitting impatient
ly backstage or in hotel rooms, forced to do
interview after interview, impatient with the
limitations of the way he is being labeled.
No one gets laid. No one snorts coke. No one
drives a car into the Holiday Inn pool. The most
drama occurs at a small party when an inebriat
ed friend tosses an empty bottle into the street
and gets yelled at by Dylan.
LThe dramatic tension in the film comes
from an issue that isn’t even mentioned.
Shortly after this tour, Dylan aban
doned the acoustic folk sound of old.
He debuted his new, electric rock
sound at the Newport Folk Festival
in 1966 and immediately polarized
the audience. Folk purists screamed
i “Judas” and “sell-out,” and the most
1 fertile period of creativity in Dylan’s
I career had begun.
I None of this is in the film, but
the specter of the idea haunts it
throughout and is spelled out
explicitly in the film’s title. Dylan
repeatedly tells reporters and
friends, “I’m not a folk singer.” He
is restless and ready for his next
move, like an Olympic diver waiting
to jump off the tower.
This moment is expressed best
when Dylan talks to a band member.
“You know, I realized that I don’t
give a shit if the audience claps or
not,” he says.
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be some
thing if they just sat there and wait
ed,” his friend says.
“Don’t Look Back” is full of
great moments like this. In another
great scene, a young man at the
aforementioned party (maybe the
same age as Dylan, but with a more
youthful face), who probably knows
the rock star through a friend of a
friend of a friend, listens to Dylan yell
about the bottle that has been thrown
in the street.
“Who’s going to clean it up
now?” Dylan asks. “I suppose I’m
going to have to go out there and
clean it up.”
“I’ll help you clean it up,” the
young man says, his face beaming
Ik at the opportunity to be in the same
■ room as his hero.
H Never has a moment in film
■ better expressed the cult of person
■ ality we build around our rock
H stars.
“Don’t Look Back” is rock ’n’
Scott Eastman/DN ro^- '
Shakespearean protagonist awakened
■ The tale of the two star
crossed lovers becomes a
sequel at the Johnny Carson.
By Jason Hardy
Staff writer
Since William Shakespeare first
wrote “Romeo and Juliet” in 1593, it
has been dealt with in many different
fashions.
But never before has our tragic
hero found himself alone and in the
trenches of a World War I battlefield.
Such is the case in “Romeo Sierra
Tango, a solo theater piece written,
directed and acted by Rinde Eckert.
The piece will be performed by
Eckert on Feb. 16-17 at the Johnny
Carson Theater as part of the Lied
Center for Performing Arts
“Discovery!” series.
In “Romeo Sierra Tango,” Romeo
awakens in his tomb several hundred
years after he tried to kill himself
with a lethal dose of poison. It seems
the poison actually made him age
very slowly, so when, he wakes up, his
mind is able to replay the events lead
ing up to his death.
Much of the piece is, therefore, a
retrospective exploring Romeo s
tragic follies.
Eckert said he wanted to elaborate
on some of the themes in “Romeo and
Juliet” by abstracting Romeo from
his surroundings and giving him time
to reconsider what had happened.
“I felt the real folly was dying
naive,” Eckert said. “So one of my
objectives was to talk about romantic
idealism vs. modem sensibility.”
Eckert said by setting the play in a
WWI no-man’s land, Romeo was able
to rerun the play in his mind without
any distractions. To accomplish this
Eckert took about 15 percent of the
dialogue directly from Romeo and
Juliet” and wrote the other 85 percent
himself, thus adapting Romeo to his
current age.
“In the end he learns a great deal
about himself,” Eckert said, “about
his youthful love vs. his more mature
love. This is a much wiser Romeo
who’s had time to reflect on his fol
lies.”
Despite being a relatively com
plex concept for a one-person perfor
mance, Mark Moore, senior events
coordinator for the Lied Center for
Please see ROMEO on 7
Courtesy Photo