November 16–23, 2000
movies
After the Fall
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Looking for Shelter: Albert Maysles, holding camera, with brother David, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts |
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It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the Rolling Stones’ 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway has become legendary. As the death knell of ’60s idealism, as the Stones’ payback for flirting with disaster, as the ultimate example of the cost of rock star arrogance, the concert — as documented in Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s film Gimme Shelter and Stanley Booth’s book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones — has become something more than myth, a cosmic capstone to an entire era, proof that peace and love only work when you don’t have pissed-off bikers with leaded pool cues running the show, that we can’t all just get along.
On the phone from the Chicago offices of Home Vision Cinema, which releases a restored version of Gimme Shelter to video and DVD this week, Albert Maysles (whose brother David died in 1987) says his impressions of the film, and of Altamont, have been surprisingly unchanged in the three decades since. "One thing always keeps returning," he says, "the feeling [of] all these kids, all that energy and promise. So many of them doped out on bad drugs, I’m sure, and what’s going to happen to the promise that might have been."
What happened, of course, was that Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old black man who’d been taking heat from the Angels for coming to the concert with his white girlfriend, pulled a gun for reasons that will never be quite clear, and one Angel retaliated by stabbing Hunter in the head and back as the Stones tried to go into "Under My Thumb." (Shelter positions the killing after "Under My Thumb," but Booth’s book, recently returned to print, makes clear that the Stones played the song only after the scuffle had apparently been subdued. From the stage, they had no idea a man had been killed several feet away, and continued to finish their set.)
The version of "Under My Thumb" captured in Gimme Shelter (whose remastered sound is nothing short of a revelation) bears little resemblance to the domineering anthem the Stones recorded in 1966. The band plays the song as a slow rolling blues, while Jagger’s boasts come out flat and unconvincing. Rather than ending on a note of triumph, Jagger closes the song with a reassurance that turns into a supplication: "It’s all right, I pray that it’s all right."
There’s a profound sense of danger in the Stones’ Altamont performance, and just as profound an inadequacy to their response. When, in Gimme Shelter, Jagger is confronted with the editing-room footage of Hunter’s stabbing, the only response he can muster is "It’s so horrible." You can read the sense of dread in his face, and just as clearly the sense that he’ll never really know what happened, or what his part was in it.
In an essay included with Shelter’s DVD, Village Voice critic Amy Taubin says the film shows Jagger "realiz[ing] he’d failed to give the devil his due." But though the power of Gimme Shelter (and the 1969 Rolling Stones) is so awesome as to inspire such colorful fairy tales, it’s important to let the film do its work, and not collapse blame onto one party or another. (Even the devil deserves his day in court.)
"Everything is rather complex," Maysles explains, "and it’s the duty of the documentary filmmaker to get the complexity rather than oversimplify it. There are various ways to oversimplify, by narrating, by interviewing people when you don’t have to, when you can film the experience itself. When you’re capturing what reality provides you, in this case a fully dramatic episode, then you’re doing well by the subject."
Even as complex as Gimme Shelter is — and, structurally speaking, it’s one of the most complicated movies, documentary or not, of the last 30 years — it still omits certain wrinkles, like the fact that one of the reasons the Stones were forced to shift locations at the last minute was that their preferred venue demanded the rights to all concert footage. In fact, the film was sharply criticized on its release for "exploiting" the tragedy of Altamont, and for unjustly exonerating the Stones (who were paying some of the Maysles’ bills). The New York Times’ Vincent Canby took aim in an article headlined "Making Murder Pay," while The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael took it a step further, calling the film a "cinema vérité sham," and implying that none of Altamont’s four deaths would have happened had it not been for the pressures placed on the event by the film crew.
Maysles scorns Kael’s review, and points out that several factual inaccuracies were edited out (without comment) when it was reprinted in Deeper Into Movies. (In a wide-ranging piece on the anti-Shelter accusations, Salon’s Michael Sragow quoted Kael’s reaction to Maysles’ criticisms: "Tough shit.") Moreover, he points out that such ethical criticisms of the film have by and large dwindled over the years; the reviews for the film’s theatrical re-release (which seems destined to bypass Philadelphia) have been uniformly laudatory.
"I think many critics are so feature fiction oriented that they don’t understand what a good documentary is or what it’s trying to do," Maysles explains, pointing out that feature-length documentaries were all but unknown at the time. "One of the things that makes documentary more interesting now than at any time in history is that we’re at a time, with postmodernist thinking dominating the philosophical scene, where we tend to think, very cynically, that you can’t know anything for sure. That undermines what is really good about a good documentary. A really good documentary is telling the truth — not the truth, but you can say it’s authentic, and the facts have been gotten straight. That’s what can be said about Gimme Shelter."
Is it the truth or just an enduring and seductive fiction? The question’s hardly irrelevant, just unanswerable. There certainly is truth in it, although some raise factual concerns and others (like Taubin and critic Greil Marcus, who was at Altamont) claim the film’s biggest failing is that it doesn’t fully capture the power of a live Stones show. (If it was any more powerful than what’s on screen here, it’s a truly frightening prospect.) If those questions have dwindled in importance, perhaps it’s a vindication of Gimme Shelter’s accuracy, or just an acknowledgement that legend always triumphs in the end. If Altamont really did spell the end of the ’60s, it’s because only a myth has the power to kill another myth.
