By the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan had shambled from the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village into the flashbulbs of the paparazzi and the questions of news reporters pondering the meaning of his protest songs. Dylan wanted no part of it and relentlessly tried to monkey wrench the gears of a media machine hungry to crush him.
That was the story going on in director D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. Ostensibly a documentary of Dylan's three-week tour of England (1965), Don't Look Back includes much wonderful footage of Dylan alone on stage, singing reproachful ballads such as “Don't Think Twice, It's Alright” or the angry social commentary of “It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding.”
But Don't Look Back is also a successful rehearsal of the verities of its era's underground filmmaking, with hand-held cameras shooting in natural light to capture flashes of reality in a bottle as Dylan's entourage goofed around in cabs and hotel rooms. The singer took center stage during interminable press conferences. When asked, “What is your message?” he replied, evasively, “We all have our own definitions of all those words.” Dylan refused to be pinned down like a butterfly in someone's catalog. He regarded the world as too large for the ideas of journalists—a breed whose intelligence has generally slipped since those times.
There were sensitive off-stage moments, but only when Dylan—alone or with traveling companion Joan Baez—sang Hank Williams or old folk ballads in the privacy of the hotel room. Otherwise, Dylan saw the circus surrounding him as an opportunity for his own amusement. “Dylanmania” might be pitching the British public's response in too high a key, but the 1965 tour had its Hard Days Night moments and fans gathered at the stage door treated him as a pop star. Dylan's supposed rival for the hearts of the UK, Donovan, who began as a Dylan imitator, was a running gag throughout the film.
Don't Look Back and its fully coherent set of outtakes, 65 Revisited, is out on a DVD-Blu-ray set. The messy lack of polish represented the integrity of artists at work in a moving studio whose walls were the world itself. Unlike future generations of indie filmmakers, Pennebaker saw no need to jump from scene to scene but lingered long, like the endless verses of Dylan's songs.
