Dont Look Back

Keith Beattie

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de musique

Dont Look Back, a documentary film of Bob Dylan's 1965 England tour, is recognised as a landmark work in the field of documentary film-making, contributing to the cultural life of an era. This text examines the aesthetic, thematic and social dynamics of the film in order to elucidate how and why it was a groundbreaking piece of documentary cinema.

1 Portraiture, Performance and Collusion

It was only while editing the film that Pennebaker decided to use the cue-card footage as the prologue. He felt that the footage would, in the absence of the informational function provided by titles or voiceover, serve as an introduction to Bob Dylan, aligning the man and his music. Nevertheless, it is not the ‘real’ Dylan – however defined – that is introduced in the segment; rather, it is a particular form of self-presentation that is encountered. In this way, Pennebaker accepted that Dylan, the subject of his portrait, ‘knew that the camera was recording [him] in a way which [he] elected to be recorded’.²²

Such an intervention by a subject applies generally to the act of portraiture. The effect was highlighted by the eighteenth-century philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, who, in an early and influential analysis of the processes of portraiture, noted that the ‘basic action depicted in a portrait is the sitter’s presentation of himself or herself to be beheld’.²³ However, having recognised the basis of a subject’s pose, Diderot was made uneasy by the fact that it carries with it an ‘inherent theatricality’. For Diderot, ‘theatricality’ or performance disrupted the ability of a portrait to capture the ‘essence’ of the sitter.²⁴ Capturing the essence or, in the language most commonly used in this regard, the ‘truth’ of a subject was a foundational premise of so-called direct cinema. Notably, this process was implicated with the ‘crisis structure’ of the direct cinema works associated with Robert Drew.

Abandoning the crisis structure

Having left the Navy Air Corps at the end of World War II, Robert Drew worked as a journalist for Life magazine, thereby inaugurating a fifteen-year association with Time-Life, Inc. In the early 1960s, Drew, together with Pennebaker and his colleague Richard Leacock, founded Drew Associates, a company that produced films for various television outlets – primarily, Time-Life Broadcasting and the ABC network. Their first major collaboration was Primary (1960), a programme that follows John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail during the 1960 Democratic presidential primary. In 1963, Drew Associates revisited the experience of US politics in Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, which records the legal stand-off between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Governor George Wallace of Alabama over the admission of two black students – Vivian Malone and James Hood – to the segregated University of Alabama.

As with many of the works produced by Drew Associates, Crisis, like Primary, exploits a structure in which the narrative is organised around an experience that is inherently dramatic, or likely to result in a tense situation. The progress of critical events and their resolution provide a simple narrative trajectory around which such works were organised. The formula is overt in The Chair (1962), another film produced by Drew Associates. In this work, an inmate on death row anxiously awaits the outcome of his lawyer’s attempts to have his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Implicit within the crisis structure of these films is the notion that a subject confronted with a pressing or critical situation will, due to the demands of the situation, fail to register the presence of the camera, which, as a result, is able to record what are, within the terms of such an assumption, a subject’s ‘true nature’.

Attending this theory is (as the case of The Chair suggests) the supposition that, faced with a critical situation, a subject has no time for pretence or performance. In this way, as the assumptions and arguments of the crisis structure would have it, a denial of performance is a central component of the revelation of a so-called true or essential self. Ironically, the notion of crisis (with its deferral to the idea that a subject is too preoccupied by an urgent situation to be aware of the camera) was often applied to celebrity subjects skilled in responding to a camera. This paradox is present in Jane (1962), a work that Pennebaker, in collaboration with Hope Ryden, produced for Drew Associates within the terms of its contract with Time-Life Broadcasting.

Jane portrays the actress Jane Fonda as she rehearses a limp farce, The Fun Couple, for its Broadway debut. As rehearsals and out-of-town try-outs continue, a crisis emerges in the form of the potential reception of the play by the notoriously unforgiving New York critics. As the Broadway opening looms ever nearer, the anxieties of the cast members become apparent and tempers flare – particularly those of the play’s director, Fonda’s then offstage boyfriend, Andreas Voutsinas. Fonda is not, of course, exempt from the narrative emphasis on the play’s imminent failure. In one scene, for example, the strains of the production are evident on her face as she sits before a mirror in her dressing room. However, in another sequence, Fonda uses the mirror to break out of the frame of the crisis structure as she knowingly performs for Pennebaker’s camera. In this scene, which is unique within the Drew films, Fonda begins, seemingly spontaneously, to enact a series of grimaces, poses and looks to the camera. In this extraordinary performance, the notion of a subject revealing her true self in response to a critical situation is replaced by a practice in which a subject openly performs a series of routines and impersonations that effectively mask and hide selfhood.

To highlight the artificial, enacted and fictive nature of Fonda’s scene before the mirror, Pennebaker wanted it to run longer, and for the sound of the camera to be clearly audible on the soundtrack. As the film historian Stephen Mamber has pointed out,

Pennebaker felt that the noise [of the camera] should remain, making it clear that the audience was not seeing Jane alone in her dressing room, but Jane alone in her dressing room with a camera observing her. Drew apparently won out, as the sound of the camera is scarcely heard in this scene.²⁵

Such editorial interference added to the growing list of objections that Pennebaker had with Drew’s working methods. In this relation, Pennebaker sought to resist the pressure to produce programmes for Time-Life Broadcasting that in effect replicated and reasserted the established generic feature of the crisis structure. In many cases in the Drew films, the crisis at hand was described within and through a voiceover narration, a didactic practice Pennebaker equated with a pallid television journalism.

As a result of the combined effects of deteriorating relations with Drew, the demands of Time-Life Broadcasting, the stylistic straitjacket of the Drew films, and a desire to move beyond television and in doing so secure cinematic release for their films, Pennebaker and Leacock left Drew Associates in 1963. Looking back on that period, Pennebaker has noted that ‘[Leacock] and I were speeding very fast in another direction’.²⁶ That direction was away from the forms of Drew’s direct cinema and, for Pennebaker, toward Dont Look Back.

Certain commentators have suggested that Lonely Boy (1962) – a short programme by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor for the National Film Board of Canada that portrays the teen idol Paul Anka (a film that Pennebaker did not see until after he’d completed Dont Look Back) – and the Maysles brothers’ What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) could, given their focus on pop music performers and use of direct cinema-inflected techniques, be considered precursors of Dont Look Back. More particularly, Pennebaker has identified Jane as the immediate influence on Dont Look Back. Pennebaker understood that by making Dont Look Back, he would be able produce a work devoid of the constraints imposed by Drew on Jane. By making Dont Look Back, he has said, ‘I was really correcting Jane.’²⁷

Abandoning the strictures of the crisis structure freed Pennebaker’s film-making from the restraints of Drew’s televisual, journalistic direct cinema. Pennebaker, nevertheless, maintained in Dont Look Back the practice of celebrity portraiture, which, as Fonda’s presence in Jane suggests, was a prominent aspect of many of the programmes produced by Drew. Portraits of celebrities served a dual function: people in the media spotlight were able to negotiate the demands of being continually filmed, and a well-known subject such as Dylan held the potential to attract a sizeable audience to a work of documentary.

However, Pennebaker’s portraiture differed from Drew’s – and the aims of documentary generally – in that he did not seek in Dont Look Back to provide information about Dylan. In line with this position, Pennebaker shunned the label ‘documentary’, with its connotations of a tedious informationalism, and has said of his work during his association with Drew that ‘the idea of a documentary … was anathema’.²⁸ According to Pennebaker,

[m]ost people look at [Dont Look Back] and say it’s documentary. It is not documentary at all by my standards. It throws away almost all its information … I broke my neck trying not to be informational … [I was interested in] the mood … not the information.²⁹

In place of a dry documentary informationalism, Pennebaker’s acceptance that Dylan is performing for the camera is the basis of the film’s resultant richly entertaining spectacle. Notably, within this approach, Dont Look Back is not organised around, or intended to pursue (as in the case of the programmes produced by Drew), putative revelations of the ‘essence’ of a person. The film replaces a search for the authenticity of selfhood within and through the presentation of a subject who is, as Pennebaker has noted, ‘enacting his life as he wishes to enact it. Not necessarily as it is, and not necessarily as he wishes it were, but just as he wants to act it.’ The outcome of this approach, notes Pennebaker, is a film that is a ‘kind of fiction, but it’s Dylan’s fiction, not mine. He makes it up as he goes along.’³⁰

Among its other important functions, the presence of such a performance within the form of portraiture undertaken in Dont Look Back recasts the role of observation as it was defined within Drew’s direct cinema. For Drew and his team of direct cinema practitioners in the early 1960s, ‘observational’ film-making involved the conceit that the practice of filming does not interfere with or intrude upon the scene being filmed. According to this assumption, a cameraperson is, in effect, an all-seeing microscopic presence – a position summarised in the pervasive characterisation of the observational film-maker as a ‘fly on the wall’. In turn, as the theory of unobtrusive observation has it, a result of this practice is (as with the implications of the crisis structure) that a subject does not recognise the presence of the camera, which thereby records a subject’s unfeigned, ‘natural’ action.

Pennebaker’s filmic practice in Dont Look Back is not that of a ‘fly on the wall’. (As he has commented, drawing attention to what is a pejorative assessment of a film-maker’s skill, ‘I never wanted to be a fly on the wall, it’s a kind of disgusting idea.’³¹) In fact, the fly on the wall is swatted in Dont Look Back. Dylan is, contrary to the theory of the invisible insect, fully aware of the camera. In this way, observation is deployed in the film as a style that suggests close physical proximity to subjects, though any sense of intimacy, personal insights or revelations that may accrue to such proximity is – as Pennebaker’s comments on Dylan’s performance make clear – deferred or rejected within and through a persona projected before the acknowledged presence of the camera.

Collusion, collaboration, conspiracy

Differences between Pennebaker’s practice and the theory of the fly are further indicated in the fact that collusion, collaboration and conspiracy, as opposed to an assumed observational non-interference, characterise the relationship of film-maker and subject in Dont Look Back.³² One aspect of the collusive, collaborative relationship is exemplified by the cue-card idea for the film’s prologue that was proposed by Dylan and readily agreed to by Pennebaker during their first meeting. The meeting came about through the intervention of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, who in March 1965 visited the offices of Leacock-Pennebaker Inc., the film production company formed by Pennebaker and Leacock after their departure from Drew Associates. The purpose of Grossman’s visit was to enquire if either Leacock or Pennebaker was interested in making a film of Dylan’s forthcoming English tour. The film-makers were recommended to Grossman by Sara Lowndes, soon to be Dylan’s wife, who worked in the offices of Time-Life and knew Pennebaker and Leacock from their days at Drew Associates. Lowndes had provided Dylan with a copy of Pennebaker’s New York ‘city symphony’ Daybreak Express (1957), the soundtrack of which features the Duke Ellington tune that gives the film its title. The film reflected Pennebaker’s devotion to jazz, and it was his interest in music, and his desire to make a full-length film about a musician, that motivated Pennebaker to agree (following Grossman’s visit) to meet Dylan and Neuwirth at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village.

At the time, Dylan was very much taken with verbal games, punning routines and pranks. In this regard, he kept insist...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: On a Prologue
• 1 Portraiture, Performance and Collusion
• 2 Screen Test
• 3 Hanging Out
• 4 ‘You Don’t Need a Weatherman’
• 5 Casting a Spell
• Afterimages
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright