Don’t Look Back

Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker, USA, 1967, 96’, OV with Spanish subtitles

It’s impossible to talk of life on the road without thinking about Bob Dylan. His kinship with the beat generation, the exaltation of the nomadic essence of the words of his songs, are some of the factors that have made him the counterculture icon of each and every generation from the 60s till today. His tour of England in 1965 is the base material for this documentary, one of the major milestones in the history of so-called direct cinema, and one of the most accurate and priceless portraits of an artist in all of the XX century. Pennebaker does not in any way set out to meticulously depict, psychoanalyze or even understand the folk hero. What is revolutionary about the political and poetic posture chosen is his awareness of the limitations of the camera (in this case built by Pennebraker himself, in line with the handcrafted route he has chosen to go down) thanks to which we get closer to such an evasive character/person, complex and not easy to pin down. Accepting that truly capturing Dylan is an impossible undertaking is precisely what allows this record of a bit of life on the road to be a genuine film. In this sense, Don’t Look Back, (which, allow me to point out, en passant, could also have been the name given to this cycle), is the road movie par excellence. It is the pure road movie, which takes on the visceral, fragmentary form of the subject being followed, bereft of cause-effect rationale, following the star on and off stage, in the present, in movement, directly alive.