Don 39;t Look Back Full Movie
Giulia Satmary
In 1998, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[1][2] In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted Dont Look Back the joint ninth best documentary film of all time.[3]
The opening scene of the film has Dylan displaying and discarding a series of cue cards bearing selected words and phrases from the lyrics to his 1965 song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (including intentional misspellings and puns).[4] This was the first single from his most recent album, Bringing It All Back Home, and a top ten hit in the UK when he filmed it there (a fact discussed in the film). Allen Ginsberg appears in the background having a discussion with Bob Neuwirth.
The film features Joan Baez, Donovan and Alan Price (who had just left the Animals), Dylan's manager Albert Grossman and his road manager Neuwirth. Marianne Faithfull, John Mayall, Ginger Baker and Allen Ginsberg may also be glimpsed in the background. Notable scenes include:
The original title of this film is Dont Look Back, without an apostrophe in the first word. D. A. Pennebaker, the film's writer director, decided to punctuate the title this way because "It was my attempt to simplify the language".[5] Many sources, however, have assumed this to be a typographical error and have "corrected" the title to Don't Look Back. In the commentary track to the DVD release, Pennebaker said that the title came from the Satchel Paige quote, "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you," and that Dylan shared this view.
Dont Look Back was shot in black-and-white with a handheld 16mm-film camera and utilized direct sound, thus creating the template for the "rockumentary" film genre.[6] Production began when Dylan arrived in England on April 26, 1965, and ended shortly after his final UK concert at the Royal Albert Hall on May 10.[7] Pennebaker has stated that the famous "Subterranean Homesick Blues" music video that is shown at the beginning of the film was actually shot at the very end of filming. Pennebaker decided during editing to place it at the beginning of the film as a "stage" for Dylan to begin the film.
Dont Look Back has been very well received by critics. It has a rating of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 55 reviews. The film received a 5-star review from AllMovie and has a Metacritic score of 84, indicating "universal acclaim".[8] In August 1967, a Newsweek reviewer wrote, "Dont Look Back is really about fame and how it menaces art, about the press and how it categorizes, bowdlerizes, sterilizes, universalizes or conventionalizes an original like Dylan into something it can dimly understand".[9][10]
The film has been parodied and paid homage to by many other films and television shows including This Is Spinal Tap,[12] Bob Roberts,[13] and Documentary Now!.[14] The opening sequence featuring "Subterranean Homesick Blues" has likewise inspired many music videos, including INXS' "Mediate",[15] MC Evidence's "The Far Left,"[16] "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Bob"[17] and Hozier's "Almost (Sweet Music),"[18] and was cited by journalist Roger Friedman as "the most copied, most revered, music video of all time".[19]
Dont Look Back has been released and re-released on home video in many formats, from VHS to Blu-ray, over the decades. A digitally remastered deluxe DVD edition was released on February 27, 2007.[20] The two-disc edition contained the remastered film, five additional audio tracks, commentary by filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker and Tour Road Manager Bob Neuwirth, an alternative version on the video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues", the original companion book edited by D. A. Pennebaker to coincide with the film's release in 1968, a flip-book for a section of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video, and a brand new documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and edited by Walker Lamond called 65 Revisited. The DVD packaging was also given new artwork.
What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965. What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey. Did we actually once take this twirp as our folk god? I scribbled down these observations as I watched the newly restored print of "Don't Look Back," the 1967 documentary about Dylan's 1965 concert tour of England. And I was asking myself: Surely I didn't fall for this at the time? I tried to remember the review I wrote when the movie was new. Was I so much under the Dylan spell that I couldn't see his weakness of character? Take the two scenes where he mercilessly puts down a couple of hardworking interviewers, who are only trying to do their job (i.e., give Dylan more publicity), while a roomful of Dylan yes-men, groupies and foot-kissers join in the jeers. I was chilled by the possibility that I reacted to these scenes differently the first time around, falling for Dylan's rude and nearly illiterate word games as he pontificates about "truth." I hurried home and burrowed into my files for the 1967 review of "Don't Look Back," and was relieved to discover that, even then, I had my senses about me. "Those who consider Dylan a lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies will discover after seeing this film," I wrote, "that they have lost their hero. Dylan reveals himself, alas, to have clay feet like all the rest of us. He is immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright." Thank God I was not deceived. I gave the movie three stars, and still do, for its alarming insights.
Of course there is the music. Always the music. I'm listening to "Highway 61 Revisited" as I write these words. I like his music, and I like his whiny, nasal delivery; it speaks to the eternal misunderstood complainer in all of us. I remember the thrill we all felt as undergraduates when we first heard "Blowing in the Wind." At the time we thought we were the Answer, my friends. But we were young, and hadn't seen this movie.
As a musician, Dylan has endured and triumphed. Perhaps he has also grown and matured as a human being, and is today a nice guy with an infectious sense of humor and soft-spoken modesty. Or maybe not. I don't know. What I do know is that D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 film, which invented the rock documentary, is a time capsule from the period when Sgt. Pepper was steamrolling Mr. Tambourine Man. "You don't ask the Beatles those questions, do you?" Dylan says to one reporter. To which the only possible answer was, Bob, you just don't know the half of it.
Another irony is that a true folk goddess, Joan Baez, with her remarkable voice, presence and soul, tags along during the early scenes, barely acknowledged by Dylan. She brings the film to a glow by singing "Love Is a Four-Letter Word" in a hotel room one night, and then disappears from the film, unremarked. My guess is that she'd had enough.
The movie is like a low-rent version of the rock concert documentaries that would follow. Dylan is badgered by a room full of journalists at a press conference--but it's a small room, with only half a dozen reporters. He insults them, lacking the Beatles' saving grace of wit. He's mobbed by fans--hundreds, not thousands. He fills Royal Albert Hall, not Wembley Stadium. He reminds me of that mouse floating down the Chicago River on its back, signaling for the drawbridge to be raised.
Sometimes you simply cannot imagine what he, or the filmmakers, were thinking. "How did you start?" he's asked at a press conference. Cut to a scene in a Southern cotton field. Dylan stands in front of a pickup truck with some old black field hands sitting on it. He sings a song. Are we supposed to think he rode the rails and bummed in hobo jungles and felt proletarian solidarity with the workers, like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or Ramblin' Jack Elliott? I was reminded of Steve Martin in "The Jerk," saying "I was born a poor black child." The field hands break into grateful applause, as the scene dissolves into a thunderous London concert ovation. Give us a break.
If Dylan sees this re-release, I hope he cringes. We were all callow once, but it is a curable condition. A guy from Time magazine comes to interview him. "I know more about what you do just by looking at you than you'll ever be able to know about me," Dylan tells him, little suspecting how much we know just by looking at him. He suggests that the magazine try printing the truth. And what would that be? "A photo of a tramp vomiting into a sewer, and next to it a picture of Rockefeller,'' suggests the man described in a recent review as "one of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century." Significance I will grant him. More than we knew.
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I obeyed the teacher completely. I went back, left her in the school and did not look back even though she was crying and shouting papa papa and papa. Very soon a time came when she was independently going to the play-school and managing her home-work and other activities.
You call them superstitions or black magic, but there are few things that are not written in the books but are largely followed by people from all parts of the world, irrespective of the cast, religion, region or gender.
No superstition was invented in the large cities and towns, they all have their origin in some village in India. There is some fairy-tail or a story attached to them and many similar incidents put together were reasons for origin of a superstition.
We all have seen cricket matches. Notice, when a player is out, he would straight walk to the pavilion without even having eye contact with his fellow player, who is standing at the wicket or the one who is replacing him from the pavilion. It would be very rare if they would exchange some gestures or some words.
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