Dont Look Back

Dont Look Back

Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of England was not just another tour, in much the same way that Dylan was not just another 20th-century musician: what characterizes this tour is something that feels like a never-ending birthing process (bringing forth songs and ideas and feelings – an identity that is never complete); but then again, a never-ending birthing process is also the very phenomenon that is Dylan. This thrilling film by Donn Alan Pennebaker – one of the best to have emerged from the direct cinema form – achieves that which every documentary ideally seeks to achieve: to reveal that point where the present intersects the future, forging the eternal out of the ephemeral and the universal out of the singular. In Dont Look Back, the Nobel laureate singer-songwriter is – at once – a wonderfully cocksure youth (making his way through the whirlwind of his recently attained fame, ready to change the world) and that great artist we are all familiar with, but whom no-one truly knows. What we have here is Dylan as a hallucination – as an afterimage on the retina of reality – and a major film that pins one of his fleeting forms down, moments before he changes once more.

Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.


Direction: D.A. Pennebaker
Cinematography: D.A. Pennebaker
Editing: D.A. Pennebaker
Sound: Jones Alk
Actors: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Alan Price, Donovan, Derroll Adams, Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg, John Mayall, Albert Grossman, Bob Neuwirth
Production: Leacock-Pennebaker
Producers: Albert Grossman, John Court
Format: Blu-ray
Color: B/W
Production Country: USA
Production Year: 1967
Duration: 96'
Contact: Jane Balfour Services
Awards/Distinctions: National Film Registry – National Film Preservation Board 1998

D.A. Pennebaker

Filmography

1953 Daybreak Express (short)
1967 Dont Look Back
1968 Monterey Pop
1979 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
1979 Town Bloody Hall (co-direction)
1989 Depeche Mode: 101 (co-direction)
1993 The War Room (co-direction)
2009 Kings of Pastry (co-direction)
2016 Unlocking the Cage (co-direction)