When Bob Dylan “went electric” in 1965, his decision made a lot of noise.
The folksinger’s choice to swap his acoustic guitar strums for a rollicking rock and roll sound at the Newport Folk Festival was a controversial one, and it was the beginning of a new chapter for Dylan – one that D.A. Pennebaker captures in his 1967 documentary “Dont Look Back.”
The Paducah Film Society – Maiden Alley Cinema’s monthly movie club that features classic, cult, and foreign films – is screening the verite rock doc in Paducah Tuesday at 7 p.m.
The 1965 tour sparked a great deal of controversy among music listeners and fans of Dylan’s folk music who felt he was betraying his base by changing his sound and becoming more commercial – much of which was depicted in the recent Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothee Chalamet. Pennebaker’s film features live performances from Dylan and his interactions with the press, fans and his surroundings, uninterrupted by narration or added music.
“This is a document of Dylan really stepping out on his own and really trying to experiment with what music meant to him at the time,” said Derek Operle, the programmer for Paducah Film Society. “If you watched that new Timothee Chalamet movie, ‘A Complete Unknown.’ These are events that happen probably like two or three months after the end of that movie.”
Nearly half of the tracks on his “Bringin’ It All Back Home” are featured in the film through live performances on the tour. But the documentary also features Joan Baez and Donovan. It also shows Dylan often irritated when talking to the press on his tour.
“Dylan is kind of famously a shifty character, if you will, somebody who always wants to defy expectation, and you can really see him toying with people in this movie,” Operle said. “It also features what's often considered to be an early music video in the form of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ with the sequence with the cue cards, where he's dropping like one-word or two-word lyric passages. I feel like that's probably one of its most indelible images.”
Operle said that the title of the documentary “Dont Look Back” is not an error on the part of Pennebaker, but a deliberate choice based on a unique idea.
“There's actually no apostrophe in the title. That's not a typo, though a lot of people assume that it is. D.A. Pennebaker said that it was his attempt to simplify the language, which I think is a pretty interesting way to look at a complex person like Bob Dylan, is to try and peel back that language barrier,” Operle said. “But the actual title, the words Don't look back, is a quote pulled from a Satchel Page, the negro league pitcher, where he once said, ‘Don't look back, something might be gaining on you.’ And you know, in the context of Bob Dylan, that's really interesting to have him, like watching these people that were lauding him as he was singing these folk songs. And here he is switching up the form, and all of a sudden, here comes this anger, here comes these shouts of ‘Judas,’ or ‘traitor,’ somebody who's defying what people thought the box that he should have been in. He tried to break out of it, and people didn't like that.”
Operle also said that Pennebaker’s vérité
style of filming does not add music or narration to the film itself but left it largely as-is.
“In the film you see [things] sort of naturally play out. There's not really any narration,” Operle said. “It's just interviews put together, sort of him interacting with the press and him interacting with people that he sees … Kurt Cobain loved this documentary. He once called it the only good documentary about rock and roll.”
The Paducah Film Society is screening “Dont Look Back” on Tuesday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. at Maiden Alley Cinema in Paducah. Tickets and additional information can be found on the Maiden Alley Cinema website.
