gimme shelter (1970)

Altamont Speedway 1969, December 6. Or the day the countercultural era of the sixties died along with the stabbing of a concertgoer at a free festival headlined by The Rolling Stones. The convulsive Gimme Shelter has often been held up as a textbook definition of cinema verite filmmaking, and perhaps rightly so, and filmmakers Albert and David Maysles also quite clearly created a work of strange fascination. View it as a seminal film made by the three documentarians (the Mayles brothers with key collaborator Charlotte Zwerin) acting as benevolent caricaturists – and the Stones cast as the prodigal sons of a rock revolution gone to seed.

Much has been made at the time when the film was released that it pandered to the Stones and was protective towards the rock heroes. Sure enough, and in spite of the many clouded interpretations of the film, Gimme Shelter did provide snapshots of a band at the absolute top of their game: euphoric performances of classics like “Street Fighting Man”, animated by Mick Jagger’s narcissistic stage antics that inspired such testosterone-fuelled mania; the slow lunging swirl of “Love In Vain”. From the performance sequences pulled together from Altamont, it felt almost as if the band gained strength from the chaotic circumstances and played a truly incandescent set.

A sense of ludicrousity ensued in the way the film captured, in sketchy fragments split between the stage and the crowds, the homicidal glee set loose by the Hell’s Angels, Mick pleading helplessly for calm while an electrified “Sympathy For The Devil” all the more fanned the flames of pandemonium it seems. Better (or weirder) still are the aftermath scenes of stonefaced Charlie Watts and Jagger watching playbacks of the concert (and stabbing) footages in the editing room, glimmers of unfathomable remorse stagnating into indifference.