Review of Gimme Shelter (2013) by Nick R — 26 Jun 2009

Rock documentaries are generally prosaic affairs, at best good extended promotional films for their subjects, at worst overlong pop videos with bad interviews. There are noble exceptions, the most famous being D.A. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, but even that is only a heightened diary, a fly-on-the-wall character study. The most alarming and dramatically satisfying rock documentary must surely be the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, released in 1970, a film of the Rolling Stones's 1969 U.S. tour.

With its narrative structure-partially imposed rather than verite-style inherent-and its climax, the disastrous, tragic free concert at Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, Gimme Shelter is a harrowing, exciting social commentary and rock n roll all at the same time. The film begins conventionally enough, with the Stones performing at Madison Square Garden, but then cuts to an editing room, some months later, where the band are listening to a radio report on the aftermath of Altamont. This is a directed narrative, product of Albert and David Maysles's (and editor/codirector Charlotte Zerwin's) belief in Direct Cinema, which used techniques drawn from "fictional" movie-making and applied them to nonfiction works. Thus the Altamont concert is "reedited" to increase dramatic tension; sticklers for realism may carp at the fact that the murder of black concert-goer Meredith Hunter takes place during the wrong Stones song, but the Maysles were editing for dramatic effect, not for rock history books. Gimme Shelter ends with the Rolling Stones watching the murder (committed by one of the Hells Angels hired by the band for "security" purposes) in their editing suite. It's a unique moment, rock stars confronted by the consequences of their own actions.

The movie helped seal the image both of the Stones as rock devils and, more important, of Altamont as the Anti-Woodstock, as negative closure to the 1960s. It suggested that the counterculture was really a lot of drugged fools who thought murder was a "bummer" and that the '60s dream was well and truly over. That may be debatable, but the force and drama of this documentary are not.