It's hard to turn your eyes away from a train wreck, airplane crash or terrible car accident. Such is the viewer's fascination while watching the ultimate bad vibe epic "Gimme Shelter," which chronicles the build up to and dark unfolding of the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969. Our major discussion points of this film during last night's CineVerse meeting included the following:
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS ROCK DOCUMENTARY COMPARED TO OTHERS?
- It carries with it a negative legacy based on the event it chronicles: the free Altamont concert, during which four people were killed and many injured. There’s a feeling of foreboding and doom from the very start because we know what’s going to happen by the end of the movie.
- It’s very meta – constructed as a movie within a movie; we see Mick Jagger and other bandmates watching footage of the concert, which makes for a strange dynamic and perspective.
- “The film takes as its subject not only the events it covers but the experience of watching those events on film, and thereby implicates the viewer in its tight mesh of art, crime, and evasion,” wrote Godfrey Cheshire in another Criterion Collection essay.
- “By using the structural device of having the Stones witness the footage, the filmmakers break the illusion of seamless omniscience -- an illusion they're skillful enough to maintain if they want to -- and raise the question of their own complicity. Why are they showing this chronicle to the Stones? Are they themselves looking for the Stones' approval -- and our blessing? "Gimme Shelter" is a self-reflexive movie in the best sense: While presenting a chronicle of a catastrophe, it implicitly asks the audience to keep one eye focused on the chroniclers,” wrote Salon’s Michael Sragow.
- Despite being remembered as a film that documents the Altamont show, the actual concert only takes up the second half of the film. The first half is devoted to the Stones’ triumphant Madison Square Garden performances a few weeks earlier, recording sessions for their album Sticky Fingers, and the planning and buildup to the Altamont gig.
- Arguably, the filmmakers and the Stones (who presumably had to approve of the final cut) chose to begin the film with the MSG concert footage and Sticky Fingers sessions footage to show the band in a happier, more creative light; this helped balance a movie otherwise weighed down with the darker second half. It also provides a more positive contrast to the negative vibes of the actual Altamont footage.
- Other than the opening songs of the film shot at Madison Square Garden, the actual music and performance isn’t as important the understanding and appreciation of this movie; arguably, the viewer becomes more consumed with what’s going on off the stage or peripheral to the music then the songs or the concert performances. This is in contrast to the effect produced by the Woodstock or Monterey Pop films.
- There are no direct interviews and no narration via text or voiceover. This picture was considered part of the “direct cinema” movement of the 50s and 60s; followers of this movement attempted to chronicle events as they happened organically instead of examining the subject matter via interviews, voiceover narration, reenactments or other traditional documentary tactics.
- Despite the sentiment of many that the event tainted the Rolling Stones’ legacy and underscored the band’s culpability in the violence, this movie tries to remain objective.
- Criterion Collection essayist Amy Taubin wrote: “Gimme Shelter neither blames the Stones nor lets them off the hook, although compared to the Angels and the kids crowding the stage, stoned on bad acid and speed, they seem like the good guys. “It’s so horrible,” says Jagger toward the end of the film, watching the shot of Hunter’s murder running forward and backward in slow motion on the editing table, as if—as was believed of the Zapruder film—it could show us the truth. There is a multiplicity of truths in Gimme Shelter; putting them together is up to us.”
SOME CRITICS, INCLUDING THE LEGENDARY PAULINE KALE, CHARGED THAT GIMME SHELTER’S FACTS ARE “MANUFACTURED FOR THE CINEMA” – THAT THE FREE CONCERT WAS STAGED AND LIGHTED TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED AND THE FILMMAKERS WERE COMPLICIT IN THE VIOLENCE BY HAVING FILMED IT AND PROFITING FROM ITS RELEASE AS A MOTION PICTURE. DO YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE?
- Consider that the Maysles brothers responded to Kael by saying: “The filmmakers were not consulted and had no control over the staging and lighting at Altamont. All the cameramen will verify that the lighting was very poor and totally unpredictable.”
- The filmmakers were paid by the Stones to film their intended free concert, which got moved to Altamont Speedway, and would have had no idea that it would be such a disaster. They were merely ready to capture what they saw by virtue of having many camera and sound recording personnel on hand. Then, they leave it up to us the viewer to judge what happened and who was responsible, especially by filming the band watching the disturbing footage weeks later.
WHAT THEMES STAND OUT AFTER WATCHING GIMME SHELTER?
- The end of an era: Altamont marked the literal end of the 1960s and the figurative end of the peace, love and counterculture movement for many people, suggesting that the consciousness raised and socio-cultural gains made in the previous years – which seem to reach an apex at Woodstock months before – were dashed.
- Hubris: the arrogance and naïveté of the band to think they could top Woodstock, beat that film to theaters with this movie, and get away with hiring the Hells Angels as security – a motley crew that they likely presumed would help sustain their bad boy outlaw image – with no negative consequences.
- The human fascination with disaster and chaos. Not only are we fixated on this mess and its aftermath, but so are the Stones, who we watch watching the footage.
- Some scars never heal: consider the infamous freeze-frame final shot of Jagger as he stares at the camera, suggesting perhaps his guilt, remorse, indifference, shame, or otherwise. That image is for the ages, and it has become the central image of the movie poster.
OTHER FILMS DIRECTED BY THE MAYSLES BROTHERS
- Salesman
- Gray Gardens
- Running Fence
- Muhammed and Larry
- Islands
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