Gimme Shelter

Directed by: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin - 1 hour, 31 minutes - 1970 - USA - Color - 16mm - Blu-ray - 1.33:1
Starring: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Sonny Barger

The last few years of The Sixties had a lot of good candidates for end-of-an-era moments. There were the ominous events that would have qualified – race riots, the Manson murders, Nixon – and a couple of high-profile concerts that were vying to be that final coffin nail. Woodstock was the biggest, of course, and for all its joy there was a sense that things were falling apart and it could never happen again. But the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway outside of San Francisco was the disaster that caught the public eye. It took place in December 1969, so the timing was right. And the show was done as in part as a response to Woodstock – “Woodstock West” – and proved that its inspiration was a one-time-only deal. There were 4 deaths at the concert – 2 by a hit-and-run driver, 1 suffocated in a ditch, and 1 stabbed to death by a Hell’s Angel.

Gimme Shelter was initially supposed to just be a concert film. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin were going to capture the last few weeks of the Rolling Stones tour. The first half of the film features performances at Madison Square Garden, recording sessions in Alabama, and show a band at their peak, playing with absolute confidence. The film is told from the editing room, structured as flashbacks as the directors and the band review the footage they have. It would have been impossible not to acknowledge Altamont from the start, as the movie’s audience already knew what transpired, and the looming disaster adds a sense of dread to the early performances. The second half of the film covers the Altamont show. The camera’s focus shifts to the audience, the promoters, and the show in the process of falling apart. The bands’ performances are incidental background music, until they need to stop playing to tell everyone to cool it, man, and to ask the Hell’s Angels to please stop beating people with lead-weighted pool cues. The rest I’ll leave for you to see.

Trailer
IMDB page
“Gimme Shelter: Rock-and-Roll Zapruder” by Amy Taubin
“The ‘Demonic Charisma’ of Gimme Shelter” by Godfrey Cheshire