ABSTRACT
Dont Look Back is arguably Dylan’s most accomplished and artistically successful cinematic endeavour. The cinéma vérité documentary covers Dylan’s brief concert tour in England in 1965. While D. A. Pennebaker directed the film, Dylan dominates the profilmic material and provides the film’s dramatic core. The chapter posits a productive synergy between the two artists. Pennebaker and Dylan’s aesthetics often reinforce each other, with Pennebaker’s vérité approach finding multiple commonalities with Dylan’s concurrent recording practices, lyrics, and countercultural leanings. Soviet montage, for instance, forms a part of Pennebaker’s style, the logic of which has parallels in Dylan’s then-recent lyrics. Discrepancies emerge nonetheless, analogous to the contrast between Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov’s philosophies for how best to convey truth through cinematic technique. Finally, the chapter alights on how Dylan—despite not being formally engaged as director or writer—contributes significantly to the film’s themes through his interactions with other members of the ‘cast’. The chapter outlines a series of character dynamics and thematic binaries around which the narrative revolves. Character dynamics include Dylan’s encounters with women, managers, journalists, and various doubles or acolytes in his orbit. Each represent points on various thematic spectrums, such as audience/performer, and public/private. Both the binaries and the archetypes who embody them prove surprisingly durable and recur in subsequent Dylan films.
