Don't Look Back . Tucson Weekly . 07-20-98

Don't Look Back

DIRECTED BY: D.A. Pennebaker

REVIEWED: 07-20-98

One of the best documentaries ever made, D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back follows 23-year-old Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. Pennebaker helped invent the unobtrusive, cinema verité style that's become the common visual grammar of documentaries, but when this film was released in 1967 it was daring and new. Toting a 16mm black-and-white news camera, Pennebaker trails Dylan backstage, at concerts, through parties. Dylan eyes the camera with a suspicion the MTV generation can only regard with overwhelming nostalgia. The famous opening sequence alone is a study in self-conscious cool, as Dylan stands in an alley, flipping through a stack of cards printed with (some of) the lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues, blatantly looking off camera for instructions, with an expression on his face that says when is this going to be over? (A rabbinical Allen Ginsberg lurks in the background.) This is the only part of the film that's staged; the rest has a spontaneous feel, though Dylan continues to be a bit of a cipher, alternately generous and mean-spirited as he enthusiastically plays bits of songs he loves for friends, then enthusiastically makes fun of people less smart or less cool than he is. Pennebaker takes it all in without being overwhelmed by judgment or reverence. The result is an astonishing, potent portrait of the artist as a young man.

--Richter

Interviews
Don't Look Back

Full Length Reviews
Don't Look Back

Capsule Reviews
Don't Look Back

Film Vault Suggested Links
Rabbit in the Moon
Keepers of the Frame
The Fifties

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