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.