‘Gimmie Shelter’ (1970) — Watch the Sixties Die Before Your Eyes

Will: She’s back!

Holly: With a vengeance!

Will: What are you avenging?

Holly: Um…

Sam: I’m here too!

Will: With a vengeance?

Sam: Nah, just normally.

Will: Hooray!

Holly: Let’s get the stone rolling.

Sam: What did we watch?

Will: Our first documentary! Gimmie Shelter, about a Rolling Stones gig that went wrong.

Holly: It was a surprise, as I thought we were going to watch the 2013 Christian drama, Gimme Shelter, starring James Earl Jones.

Will: That would have been different. Less sex, drugs, and dare I say it, rock and/or roll.

Holly: There is some sex, and a couple of drugs.

Will: Two drugs please.

Sam: STOP CORRUPTING ME!

Will: There were lots of drugs in the documentary… much of the film is just footage of young folk looking utterly zonked out of their heads.

Sam: I didn’t entirely get it.

Will: Me neither.

Holly: There was a lot going on.

Sam: But also very little. The film doesn’t give any context to the events going on — there’s no voiceover, no talking heads. It’s just a series of images, but the images felt important. It felt bigger than the Rolling Stones.

Will: It’s about the death of the sixties. What we saw was the hippie dream ending. Four months earlier you had Woodstock and the peak of this beautiful optimism, which held that the young could really create a better world and overcome divisions through love and drugs and music. In this documentary we see the dark side of that begin to take over — it’s not freedom and hope, it’s a dysfunctional, hedonistic mess.

Holly: We start off watching the preparations for the free concert at the Altamont Raceway Park in Tracy, California. Mick Jagger leans out of a caravan and tells the press that the festival serves the same purpose as the theatre — an excuse for people to get together, drink, and sleep with each other. All the while, their manager is glued to the phone offering to take money from charities.

Sam: There’s footage from their Madison Square Gardens gig interspersed throughout, and we get to hear some good songs.

Will: But most of the documentary is just footage from this Altamont gig, where 300,000 fans turned up without there being anywhere near adequate facilities or preparation. And, more importantly, Hell’s Angels bikers were hired as security for the bands, and promptly took to beating people up and causing trouble. We see footage of people going out of their heads and shit going down in the crowd, with fights breaking out left and right. Basically, it’s a shit-show. And there’s something effective about the way the documentary allows us to waft through the experience, rather than having it explained via a voiceover or through interviews. We’re left to make our own mind up.

Sam: And more nudity than I expected. So it had something going for it.

Holly: Especially for December. It was apparently -1°C on the night of the concert.

Sam: They’d certainly need some shelter.

Will: You can’t always get what you want.

Holly: Wild horses etc etc

Will: So there was also a murder. On film. That was pretty mental.

Holly: His name was Meredith Hunter.

Sam: So the Hell’s Angels were getting a bit rough with the crowd. They knocked out the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane at one point. This guy in the crowd was trying to climb on a speaker, things escalated, and he ended up getting stabbed.

Will: I find it extremely strange to think that Meredith Hunter’s death is a moment in a documentary. It’s not just a private tragedy… but a central moment within a piece of entertainment. That’s not a problem with the documentary necessarily, but I think it must have been strange for his family.

Sam: But that’s just how it felt: like a moment. There was no greater attention given to it. It wasn’t the centerpiece, or the climax

Holly: Apparently the band kept playing after they had been informed about what had happened. They were concerned that the crowd and the Hell’s Angels would become even more violent if they stopped.

Will: I thought the final few shots, showing the exhausted attendees drifting towards the sunrise the next morning, were really special. It felt like they had been through a life-changing experience, and that as they walk towards this new day, they have become different people. Not better people necessarily, but older people — with more cynicism and maturity both.

Sam: As a piece of American history, and music history, the film is interesting. But I’m not sure it’s essential. It makes a great companion to Woodstock, which also came out the same year.

Will: Agreed. It’s an important historical document, but not essential viewing for for films. So what are we watching next?

Sam: Klute?

Will: Flute?

Sam: No Klute, an early 70s thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda.

Holly: I will watch it too, so I can give you the obligatory female perspective on the script’s gender dynamics.

Will: That is your function. Very good.

Films Referenced

Gimmie Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)

Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)

Gimmie Shelter (Ronald Krauss, 2013)

The next film: Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971)