The film felt like a symbolic representation of the turmoil of the 1960s, at home and abroad, and thoughtful commentators stretched for suitable comparisons. After Dark’s Martin Last compared the marauding Angels to the American soldiers in Vietnam, and to the Soviets who trampled the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Others, like Newsday’s Joseph Gelmis, saw parallels between Altamont and other killings unexpectedly recorded for posterity, comparing Hunter’s death to the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on national television.
For Time magazine’s Jay Cocks, whose review did as much as anyone’s to establish the tone of Gimme Shelter’s reception, the arrival of the film marked the end of an era: “The Age of Aquarius ended with the flash of a knife early last December on a tumble-down raceway near Altamont, Calif.” The Hells Angels were more than just the assassins of youthful idealism; they were representatives of a terrifying nihilism, intent on tearing down in an instant what others had struggled to achieve at enormous cost. “The scene at Altamont is the Armageddon between American counter-culture and unculture,” argued the Village Voice’s Haskell, “the apocalypse in which the four horsemen of our melting-pot unconscious—Freud, Adler, Jung, and Mammon (or Sex, Power, Religion, and Money)—are suddenly in plain but hopelessly knotted view.” Altamont marked the collision of eternally opposed forces, of the battle between love and death, or between empathy and fear. The documentary doubled as a passion play, with Meredith Hunter cast against his will as the suffering Christ sacrificed for the sins of the masses.
The finished product was truth that masqueraded as fiction, a real-life story that reminded many critics of a recent fictional masterwork about a murder caught unknowingly by cameras. “For anyone who saw Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up,’” Louise Sweeney wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, “in which a photographer discovers in the darkroom that he’s unintentionally filmed a murder, it’s a grim reminder that reality can be stranger than fiction.” The Village Voice’s Haskell similarly described the film as “‘Blow-up’ with a real murder and real us having to sit in judgment.”
The references to Antonioni were about more than just the murder-mystery framework; much of the critical response was searching for language with which to indicate that it had seen something that seemed simultaneously realistic and impossible. Reaching for a similar comparison, Michael Lydon would liken the final scene of Gimme Shelter to “the mad consummation of Fellini’s 8 1/2.” Here, real life expanded to the carnivalesque dimensions of Fellini, or the enigmatic shrug of Antonioni. The comparisons were high praise—the Italian filmmakers were two of the acknowledged masters of 1960s cinema—and also a veiled critique. They treated the Maysleses’ truth as a kind of advanced fiction, in which the unfiltered march of unscripted events could only be understood as a heightened metaphor. They betrayed a certain lack of confidence in the Maysleses’ own ideals, silently expressing the belief that all this, while real, was still somehow less than genuine.
And the fact of bearing witness to murder made the audience, many critics believed, accomplices after the fact. “We are the patrons,” argued Haskell, unspooling the thread that linked us to Meredith Hunter, “who buy the tickets to see the movie that paid for the concert that featured the Stones who hired the Angels who killed the black whose death is the box office attraction for us.”
The New York Times’ Vincent Canby argued that a concertgoer’s description of Altamont’s “ugly, beautiful mass” was equally applicable to the whole film, but then hedged his bets: “It’s true, that is, if you can regard it simply as a neutral record of fact. I’m afraid I can’t.” The film was “touched by the epic opportunism and insensitivity with which so much of the rock phenomenon has been promoted, and written about, and with which, I suspect, the climactic concert at Altamont was conceived.” Canby found the film ultimately deflating. The youth culture was broken, but not for the reasons the Maysles brothers and Zwerin enumerated. Instead, Altamont demonstrated that culture’s moral failings. Gimme Shelter, Canby concluded, “is not a concert film, like Woodstock. It is more like an end-of-the-world film, and I found it very depressing.”
No one was to maintain a moderate view of the Rolling Stones’ front man. To some, he was the epitome of the rock star as huckster, selling death as a lifestyle to a nation of unwitting addicts. If you watched closely enough, you could see Satan’s horns underneath the omnipresent Uncle Sam top hat. “When Jagger sits impassively watching the murder replay and murmurs his soft disapproval,” wrote Gail Rock of Women’s Wear Daily, “it is the pusher watching the junkie go down.”
Newsday’s Joseph Gelmis reached for an unlikely cinematic comparison in the hopes of defining Jagger’s culpability: “Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the wizard Mick Jagger became just Mickey Mouse when he tried to control the demons whom he had summoned.” One reviewer suggested that Jagger had proved himself to be nothing more than a mock revolutionary, who had called for the audience to cool off when “the real thing came.” (The distinction between violence and revolution had seemingly been misplaced somewhere along the way.)
Life’s Richard Schickel saw the film’s release as a blatant attempt to retire the Rolling Stones’ debt from Altamont, “since even philosopher-kings like Jagger don’t work for nothing, whatever their faithful followers like to think.” Jagger was not just crass; he was testing the fervor of his fans, Schickel believed, by rubbing their faces in his amorality: “He could, of course, have refused to permit release of the film, but before we credit him with being a champion of free filmic expression I think we must at least consider the possibility that by letting us see him in so unflattering a light, he is restating his alienation in yet another way. I think he is declaring that his hold on his cult is so powerful that it will accept anything he does or says and that the good opinion of the larger, more respectable audience is of no consequence to him. This is, of course, a heady and radical freedom for any performer to savor. And a terrible one.”
Jagger was treated as the film’s star, his performance reviewed and assessed as if every action, every gesture on display had been carefully choreographed. Critics made little distinction between Gimme Shelter and Jagger’s other star turn of 1970, in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, in which he played a dissolute rock star who takes in a gangster on the run, and flummoxes him with his mystical/sexual charms.
Numerous critics were struck by the yawning gap between the onstage and offstage versions of Jagger. He was, Variety argued, “seldom less than mesmerizing” onstage, while “a withdrawn, almost catatonic individual” offstage. The New York Times’ Canby took notice of “the camera, which cannot make up its mind whether it adores Mick Jagger or loathes him, whether it is an instrument of exploitation or a victim of it.”
John Simon of the New Leader would gaze at the Altamont crowd with the same sense of barely restrained horror as Buckley. The concertgoers were zombies and cannibals, all at once: “They stare at the Stones with an expression that could be described as stoned, zonked, glazed, but also hungry and somehow vicious—like a rabble that has just smashed the store windows and is getting ready to loot. Greedy polyp-like arms stretch out toward Jagger and the rest; when repulsed, they tenaciously, tentacularly return to the task. You feel that this crowd is a Moloch that would as soon devour its idols as listen to them.”
It came as little surprise that the perpetually ornery Simon disliked Gimme Shelter, but he did notice a resemblance between the counterculture it sought to depict and the mass culture it so thoroughly disdained: “From these films, and a few others we have seen lately, we get a curious insight into our youth culture. It clearly apes adult culture without realizing it. It has its aristocracy, the college students; its middle-class, the dropouts who take on various more or less flimsy jobs; its proletariat, the street people who hang around college towns to scrounge off students and their facilities; its warrior caste, the blacks and other militants; its artists and philosophers, the rock musicians and self-styled gurus; i
ts whores and courtesans, the groupies and super-groupies; and its madness, though manifested in different ways.” Gimme Shelter was not only a record of the counterculture’s failings, but of its illusions. In attempting to create the world anew, it only succeeded in aping the broken one it sought to escape.
Sol Stern, who had attended the concert with Kate Coleman, Frank Bardacke, and the other members of Fisherman, their living collective, contributed a thoughtful essay on Altamont in Ramparts magazine with the provocative title of “Altamont: Pearl Harbor to the Woodstock Nation.” Woodstock, Stern argued, was the comforting story preferred by both the counterculture and its chroniclers; Altamont was the distressing reality. The media had ignored the story of Altamont because it required too rapid an about-face: “The deflation of the Woodstock myth—so soon after they had helped inflate it—was apparently something the masters of the mass media were not up to.” Stern alleged that Altamont had attracted a different crowd, more rural and working-class than the expected Berkeley student elite, and that this, too, had contributed to the unrest.
Stern believed the concert had been predicated on the belief, shared by the likes of Michael Lydon, that musicians like Jagger and Bob Dylan would soon provide the “programs and plans” for the forthcoming revolution. But at Altamont, “all the energy flowed from the stage,” with the audience relegated to passive observers. The music would never—could never—politicize a new generation, all insistence of radicals to the contrary. Altamont was the “hopeless shipwreck” of the counterculture, the exposure of all its illusions. Stern, like one of the callers to Stefan Ponek’s KSAN postmortem, compared the death of Meredith Hunter to that of Kitty Genovese, powerfully arguing that, like Genovese, Hunter had been abandoned by the counterculture who had claimed him as one of their own. The hated police, Stern observed, were the ones left to care for Hunter’s dead body.
But the most prominent critique of Gimme Shelter, spread across numerous reviews, regarded its apportioning of blame for the chaos of Altamont. The Maysles brothers, many argued, had soft-pedaled any criticism of their stars, preferring to stay in their good graces. “The Maysles [sic] treat the Stones gingerly, reverentially, and with all the uncritical good faith they withheld from the Bible salesmen in the documentary ‘exposé’ of the subject,” carped the Village Voice’s Haskell. The film veers so far from pointing the finger, argued New York magazine’s Judith Crist, that it made the Rolling Stones look even worse than a more evenhanded effort might have. The film, wrote Crist, “can be faulted for its lack of polemic, for so uninvolved a viewpoint that one almost sees it as a surface exploitation of the Rolling Stones in a scene that provided them with a shocking kind of background.”
Where some faulted the film for its defective evenhandedness, others saluted its immersion into the disturbing reality of Altamont. It showed us a “hate fest,” in the words of the New York Daily News’ Kathleen Carroll, where “the Angels stand by, like Neanderthal men, hungering for the kill. And we are left sickened by the total bestiality of it all.” Even in life, we are constantly being reminded of death. As Crist astutely noted, much of the film’s imagery was death-haunted: “The bodies of freaked-out men and women are passed overhead like corpses; the stolid faces of Angels are studied in close-up; the beautiful long-haired girls with dead eyes get their moment on camera.” The critics paying tribute to the silent juxtapositions and parallels that formed the Maysleses’ critique had come closer to understanding the purpose of their work. To assail a work of direct cinema for not bringing the hammer down definitively on the bad guys was to misunderstand its core values and its techniques.
* * *
Perhaps the most influential, and misguided, reading of Gimme Shelter came from Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who compared the task at hand to reviewing the Zapruder film, or the broadcast images of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder. She opened her inquiry by questioning how one might even approach the film. “This movie,” she noted, “is into complications and sleight-of-hand beyond Pirandello, since the filmed death at Altamont—although, of course, unexpected—was part of a cinema-verite spectacular.” Verite was almost a dirty word for Kael here, an implication that the filmmakers had been so intent on documenting the grubby underside of humanity that they had somehow—how, Kael could not say—summoned it. Kael was skeptical of direct cinema—so much so, in fact, that the original version of her Gimme Shelter review would erroneously claim that the Maysleses’ film Salesman had been cast with actors. (Kael had reversed cause and effect; Bible salesman Paul Brennan had been convinced Salesman was his big break, and had quit his job and moved to California to pursue a career as an actor. His bold move did not meet with success, and Brennan eventually had a breakdown. Later versions of the essay would silently retract the career-damaging claim.)
Kael drew a comparison with Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, another document, as she saw it, of a mass spectacle whose hollowness was self-evident to anyone not already a disciple of the gods being worshipped onscreen. Kael went on to wonder: “If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone? Is it the cinema of fact when the facts are manufactured for the cinema?” Direct cinema, as Kael noted, prided itself on its ability to render itself invisible, but here, it was impossible to forget the cameras. “There is no reason to think the freaked-out people in Gimme Shelter paid much attention to the camera crews, but would the event itself have taken place without those crews?”
Kael believed the film was guilty of excluding information that might have conveyed a more truthful sense of the musicians’ and filmmakers’ roles in Altamont. She argued that the film and the concert were substantially more intertwined than Gimme Shelter allowed for, and that by letting the Rolling Stones off the hook, Albert and David were, by extension, releasing themselves of any burden of guilt for their role in Altamont. Kael singled out the Maysles brothers’ having been hired by the Rolling Stones to shoot the show, and argued that the film’s producer, Porter Bibb, had helped to produce the festival as well. “Gimme Shelter has been shaped,” Kael argued, “so as to whitewash the Rolling Stones and the filmmakers for the thoughtless, careless way the concert was arranged, and especially for the cut-rate approach to keeping order.”
Kael was especially turned off by the figure of Mick Jagger, who troubled her as both a performer and a representative of the breakdown of the moral order of the counterculture. Jagger, she argued, “symbolizes the rejection of the values that he then appeals to.” He was a gangster in love beads, summoning the darkest impulses of what Kael saw as “the disintegrating people” at Altamont, and then cynically calling on them to maintain order, even as the Hells Angels fomented the violence.
Reading against the grain of the film, Kael argued that the Hells Angels were the “patsies” of Gimme Shelter, set up by the guilty parties as a means of obfuscating the truth. Jagger and his cronies appear in the film’s London framing scenes, looking puzzled as to how such a calamity could have befallen their lovefest, silently deflecting blame onto the bikers they had set up to fail. “Altamont, in Gimme Shelter,” she concludes, “is like a Roman circus, with a difference: the audience and the victims are indistinguishable.”
Kael seemed unsure which crime she was referencing here, or who was fundamentally to blame. If the young people summoned to Jagger and the Maysleses’ coliseum had been lured to ecstatic excess through the Stones’ black mass, what role had the Hells Angels played in the chaos of Altamont? Kael was intent on indicting Jagger for incitement, which required her to argue that the crowd, and not the Angels, had somehow been responsible for the worst of the day.
The Maysles brothers would respond to Kael with a letter to the magazine’s editors, which would not be published for decades. (At the time, the New Yorker did not publish letters to the editor.) In it, the filmmakers refuted Kael’s claims both small—they had played no part in organizing the show’s lighting�
�and large: “Miss Kael calls the film a whitewash of the Stones and a cinema verite sham. If that is the case, how then can it also be a film which provides the grounds for Miss Kael’s discussion of the deeply ambiguous nature of the Stones’ appeal?.… These are the filmmakers’ insights and Miss Kael serves them up as if they were her own discovery.” In a Variety article about the fracas, Albert Maysles called Kael to task for what he saw as her outrageous accusations: “Anyone who believes those charges will never be able to look me in the eye again, or believe what they’re seeing in ‘Gimme Shelter’ is the truth.” Zwerin, too, was puzzled by Kael’s critique: did she think all documentary filmmakers were merely lying in wait, cameras running, for a murder to occur?
Kael and many of the other middle-aged film critics reviewing the film wrote as outsiders to the “hyped syntax of rock criticism,” as Vincent Canby described it, and to the frenzied world of the counterculture. Michael Goodwin of Rolling Stone wrote from within the belly of the countercultural beast, and read the film with a notably more nuanced eye, while also introducing a take on Hunter’s death that was itself at odds with the newspaper’s own journalism.
“If you weren’t at Altamont,” he told his readers by way of introduction, “you can still get the same lesson if you see Gimme Shelter.” In its structure, the Maysleses’ work was an instantly familiar genre exercise, but not quite the one audiences might expect: “The first half of the film teases us, alternating various concert footage with dire hints of the terror to come; the second half takes us to Altamont, and from dawn to dusk—from Woodstock West to the seventh circle of our own Aquarian inferno. It’s a real horror movie.” Goodwin was not enamored of the London editing-room frame, or the slow introduction of the Altamont material, but admired Albert’s intrepid camerawork, and the pacing of the concert sequences themselves: “Once we’re at Altamont, Gimme Shelter moves with the force and inevitability of a Greek tragedy.”
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 24
