The opening sentences of The New York Times’ 1967 review of D.A. Pennebaker’s now-classic documentary Don’t Look Back read as follows: “It will be a good joke on us all if, in 50 years or so, Dylan is regarded as a significant figure in English poetry. Not Mr. Thomas, the late-Welsh bard, but Bob, the guitar-picking American balladeer.” Sure enough, 50 years after Pennebaker followed Bob Dylan during Dylan’s tour of England in the spring of 1965, the joke is on us — a public that remains simultaneously baffled and fascinated by the continued relevance of a cultural figure like no other.
Five decades on, it’s hard to contextualize how revolutionary Dylan’s melding of complex, often topical lyrics and popular music was in the mid-’60s, but revisiting Criterion’s freshly minted Blu-ray release of Don’t Look Back is a good start. Pennebaker’s gritty, endlessly probing hand-held camera work was the technical equivalent of Dylan’s game-changing artistry as a singer and songwriter; Pennebaker’s intimate, cinema verité aesthetic would influence everyone from Robert Altman to Michael Moore.
This Criterion release adds a number of features that didn’t appear within Docurama’s excellent 1999 “Collector’s Edition,” including Snapshots from the Tour, a new piece with previously unseen outtakes from Don’t Look Back, and an audio clip of Dylan’s comments about Don’t Look Back that originally appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home. And then there is an interview with Patti Smith, who sums up Dylan’s presence in the documentary thusly: “If anyone doubts the roots of going from Mozart to Rimbaud to the Beats to Bob Dylan to Punk Rock — he (Dylan) is in this continuing stream. You listen to him talking to reporters (in Don’t Look Back) and he was nobody’s patsy, that’s for sure. This is a badass guy.” Grade: A
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2015.