Pennebaker Looks Back
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D.A. Pennebaker invented the rock documentary with “Don’t Look Back,” in which the groundbreaking former Time-Life Films documentarian trailed Bob Dylan on the musician’s groundbreaking 1965 tour of England. The film became a cult favorite and a touchstone for generations of Mr. Dylan’s fans. Several of its scenes are reimagined in Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic Dylan fugue “I’m Not There,” with Cate Blanchett “covering” the 24-year-old icon as a jittery, self-possessed pop-star-in-the-making.
One of the more interesting facets of “Don’t Look Back” was Mr. Pennebaker’s choice to edit out most of the actual concert performances that made up Mr. Dylan’s 1965 tour. A glimpse, a note or two, and the camera was tumbling backstage, into a taxi, up to the hotel room. No use to stop and wonder why, babe: just action. “I wanted it to be like an Ibsen play,” Mr. Pennebaker said recently. “I thought, ‘They can go buy the record if that’s what interests them. If they don’t care about my Ibsen play, then f— ’em!'”
Yet, as “65 Revisited,” which begins a week-long engagement today at the IFC Center, attests, even Mr. Pennebaker could not resist the power of those songs, especially once he began combing through the mountain of old footage he shot 42 years ago. The succinct (65 minutes) film plays like a B-side version of “Don’t Look Back.” It features several extended musical performances that were only hinted at in the original documentary, intercut with more candid, fly-on-the-wall scenes that flesh out encounters and incidents previously cut short. It’s all become part of our collective cultural lore, as much of the material Mr. Pennebaker shot during the singer’s 1965 and ’66 English tours has been reshuffled for other pop histories, such as Martin Scorsese’s four-hour scrapbook of 1960s Dylan, “No Direction Home.”
Mr. Pennebaker, a robust 82, was reclining in the offices of Pennebaker Hegedus Films, the company he runs with his wife Chris Hegedus from the basement of their family compound on the Upper West Side. The walls were a patchwork of celebrated lives and times, from Norman Mailer — Mr. Pennebaker shot the novelist debating Germaine Greer in “Town Bloody Hall,” collaborated with him for “Wild 90,” and recently memorialized him on the phfilms.com Web site — to Ziggy Stardust. Mr. Dylan, more than most, has had a knack for always resurfacing on the radar. It was time those songs got their due.
“I was taken by the love songs,” Mr. Pennebaker said, citing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” as a favorite. “He was reading poetry, to the English — who really love poetry. I thought maybe I should put all these together. The effect of those songs, I think they will live longer than the protest songs. They’re good songs.”
As for Mr. Haynes’s cinematic “remix” of “Don’t Look Back,” Mr. Pennebaker offered a mixed review.
“I thought she was fantastic,” he said of Ms. Blanchett. “It was like dressing up and going to a costume party and just knocking everybody out. But I thought the film was [taking] such a line on Fellini that it lost touch with now. It’s like someone trying to write Wordsworth. You don’t bother to do that anymore, you don’t need to. It lost some of its impact that she generated with her impersonation.” He paused. “It’s somebody else’s gig. If people dig it then that’s good.”
The filmmaker suggested that John Cameron Mitchell’s gender-bent glam movie musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” was a more adroit appropriation of his own classic rock footage, in this case the concert film “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” “I thought it was just a marvelous film,” Mr. Pennebaker said. “Only if you knew the Bowie film did you see the resemblance. It was a whole thing in itself.”
At present, Mr. Pennebaker is busy working on a new documentary about a secret society of French pastry chefs, a topic that appealed to him, in part, because no other camera crews were onto it. He also has reacquired the rights to his 1993 film “The War Room,” the documentary about Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign for president, which is slated for an election-year repackaging. Whatever fresh angles on Mr. Clinton that Mr. Pennebaker may uncover in the process, it’s clear that hindsight is not always unkind. The Bob Dylan who emerges from “65 Revisited” is a much more likable fellow than the sometimes cruel, abrupt persona captured in “Don’t Look Back.”
“He wasn’t such a bad guy after all,” Mr. Pennebaker said of the young Mr. Dylan. “I always found him to be really easy to get along with, very generous and very nice, and it surprised me that people saw such a different person. I apologized to him — and especially Albert [Grossman, Mr. Dylan’s manager] — and said, ‘I hope I didn’t ruin your reputation!'”
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