Maysles, Maysles & Zwerin: Gimme Shelter (1970)

Gimme Shelter started out as a documentary about the Rolling Stones’ participation in the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in 1969, but ended up being about the death of one of the audience members, Meredith Hunter, at the hands of one of the Hells’ Angels groupies that were called on as an informal security presence. As a result, the film isn’t directly interested in the crime so much as its bearing on the Stones, alternating footage of the concert with their efforts to recall it or recognise themselves in it, just as Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin set out to recall the film they were originally going to make – an affirmation of “West Woodstock,” the first great public gathering since the Summer of Love, and the first great counterculture documentary since Wadleigh’s Woodstock, that mutated into its exact opposite. Far from shedding any real forensic light on the concert, or the crime, then, the film tends to make the events surrounding the Festival even more singular, inscrutable and mystical, not least because the directors seem to have captured the Stones at their most withdrawn, sombre and introspective, with an astonishing eye for the minutiae of their expressions, clothes, tics, postures and, above all, their incredible faces. Even forty years later, the Stones feel like the youth, and the directors seem prescient that they’re shooting what would turn out to – surely – be the best looking rock band of all time, a band that deserved to be shot in perpetual close-up, perhaps explaining why it often feel as it the musical numbers are seguing from concert footage into nascent music video, especially during an incredible rendition of “Love In Vain” in which the directors build on and amplify the fluorescent-lit Speedway with an extraordinary array of slow-mo superimpositions. Yet for all the interviews and musical segments, the most fascinating moments tend to be the incidental footage of the audience before the concert, since they really capture the nation in miniature, the provisional, elastic sense of community that the concert set out to be, even as the directors glimpse early warnings of the hippy-Hell’s Angels clashes out of the corner of their eyes as well, to the point where you can almost see the collective, countercultural ambience of the 60s dissociating and fragmenting into something more divisive and sinister before your very eyes, migrating from the East Coast to the West Coast, and settling around the first few rows of the audience, the zone most blinded by sound and light, the scene that eventually became a crime scene. By the end, it’s more like a war zone or a Romeroscape than a free festival, with the Stones spending more time threatening to leave than actually performing their catalogue – and leave they eventually do, ending up in the drab, downbeat morose framing device that brackets this incredible film like the first few mornings of the 70s framing and mounting what came before.