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Both a classic documentary and a vital pop-cultural artifact, D.A. Pennebaker's portrait of Bob Dylan captures the seminal singer-songwriter on the cusp of his transformation from folk prophet to rock trendsetter. Shot during Dylan's 1965 British concert tour,
Don't Look Back employs an edgy vérité style that was, and is, a snug fit with the artist's own consciously rough-hewn persona. Its handheld black-and-white images and often-gritty London backdrops suggest cinematic extensions of the archetypal monochrome portraits that graced Dylan's career-making early-'60s album jackets.
Pennebaker's access to the legendarily private troubadour enables us to witness Dylan's shifting moods as he performs, relaxes with his entourage (including then lover Joan Baez, road manager Bob Neuwirth, and poker-faced manager Albert Grossman), and jousts with other musicians (notably Animals alumnus Alan Price and Scottish folksinger Donovan), fans, and press. It's a measurement of the filmmaker's acuity that the conversations are often as gripping as Dylan's solo performances. Grossman's machinations with British promoters, Baez's hip serenity, a grizzled British journalist's surrender to the fact of Dylan's artistry, and the artist's own taunting dismissal of a clueless sycophant are all absorbing.
With the exception of the studio recording of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," the live performances (including five newly restored, complete audio tracks excised from the original film but included on the DVD version) are constrained by crude audio gear. Their urgency, however, is timeless, as is Pennebaker's film, a legitimate cornerstone for any serious rock video collection. --Sam Sutherland
On the DVD
A second disc with more than an hour's worth of previously unseen footage is the main appeal of this latest reissue of
Don't Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's seminal Bob Dylan documentary--and for Dylan completists, it will likely prove very appealing indeed. Of course, the outtakes come from the same material that comprised the original release, filmed during the artist's 1965 British concert tour. Yet a slightly different Dylan is revealed here. He seems to be "acting" (Pennebaker's word) less; he's less caustic and willfully enigmatic, and considerably more accommodating to and genuine with his fans (which may reveal as much about the filmmaker's previous editing choices as about Dylan himself). Best of all is the inclusion of heretofore unreleased music; we see Dylan fooling around with "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and "I'll Keep It with Mine" on the piano, as well as concert performances of "It Ain't Me, Babe," "If You Gotta Go," "To Ramona," and others. Entitled
Bob Dylan 65 Revisited, the disc is bolstered by commentary by Pennebaker and then-road manager Bob Neuwirth.
First released on DVD in 2000, Don't Look Back itself remains an interesting if somewhat self-conscious look at Dylan in the midst of his final all-acoustic tour (when the film was released in '67, he had already, and controversially, plugged in his Fender Stratocaster). His adversarial relationship with the press, fueled both by their often-moronic questions and his deliberate self-mythologizing, his interactions with then-paramour Joan Baez, Donovan (Dylan actually seems less scornful of the folk singer than wary of him), and others, implacable manager Albert Grossman's business dealings, and all the rest of the material prove no less fascinating than was the case four decades ago. This Deluxe Edition includes not only a Pennebaker-Neuwirth commentary track, discographies, and such, but also a book containing a complete transcription of the film and an entertaining frame-by-frame flipbook of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" cue card sequence (two alternate versions of the sequence are contained in the set, neither nearly as good as the official one). --Sam Graham