'Don't Look Back' Revisited: We Look Back At The Classic Bob Dylan Documentary

Approaching the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan's UK tour documented in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 film, we consider what makes 'Don't Look Back' a classic.

One of the strangest choices of any Direct Cinema film of the 1960s, D. A. Pennebaker includes a flashback in Don’t Look Back. Even stranger, the clip used — of Bob Dylan performing "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a Voters' Registration Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in July 1963 — was shot by another filmmaker (Ed Emshwiller) for, but not used in, another documentary (The Streets of Greenwood). What does make sense is the clip’s effect within Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker cuts to the footage after a journalist asks Dylan how it all started. Viewed as the answer to the question, it’s not quite accurate. Dylan was well-established by the summer of 1963, so the scene doesn’t represent his origins. Still, it does illustrate part of the myth of Dylan at the time while Don’t Look Back perpetuated and developed other lore involving the iconic singer-songwriter.

The documentary follows Dylan during his 1965 tour in England and reveals a side of the pop poet not seen before or since. Whether he acted for the camera the whole time has been up for discussion, but there’s also some indication that he was more genuine in the film than he wished to have shared. The following year, Dylan and Pennebaker reteamed for another UK tour documentary with the former taking on the director role, perhaps to have even greater control over his image. Later, Dylan began blurring the lines between reality and fiction — for cinema and himself — with the films Renaldo and Clara and its offshoot Rolling Thunder Revue. Even for comprehensive biographical documentaries like No Direction Home, Dylan guarded his true self, only permitting an interview for the project if conducted by his manager.

Don’t Look Back is full of confrontations: Dylan against the press; Dylan’s playful rivalry with Donovan; Dylan angrily investigating who threw a glass out the window of his hotel room bathroom during an afterparty. Most significant, though, would be his unspoken challenge to cinéma vérité. Pennebaker sought the truth while Dylan fought such a notion — or at least believed the idea wasn’t possible. The filmmaker employed portable cameras small enough to sit on a person’s lap and recording equipment that was similarly inconspicuous. He didn’t mean to be secretive or hidden so much as unnoticeable in a way that made the filming easily forgotten about, resulting in an objective observation of people being honest and authentic. Dylan meanwhile strived for elusiveness.

Throughout the film, Dylan argues against any definition of his identity. He’s not “angry.” He’s not “cynical.” He’s not “folk.” He repeats that last one to multiple writers, once adding “You’ll probably call me a folk singer.” He assumes everyone will get him wrong and means to negate any claims anyway. He opposes a fan’s criticism that the new electric Bob Dylan music, specifically “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” doesn’t sound like him. Even his tantrum over the thrown glass could be seen as him protecting his image from being associated with that sort of rowdiness or people who would cause such a mess. There are spoken clues in Don’t Look Back that he’s always performing, always wearing a mask: “I’m glad I’m not me”; “You’re anything you say you are.” Alan Price refers to the British Dylan doppelganger Donovan as “not a fake,” possibly implying that inversely Dylan is. Maybe those are not conscious hints, but there is one moment when he looks straight at the director filming him, as if to say, “I know you’re there.” He might think he knows the viewer more than the other way around. In his commentary track, Pennebaker says of the glance, “It’s burned a hole right in me, right through the camera.”