By now, movie audiences are quite familiar with knife slayings (“Psycho”), slow motion sequences (“Bonnie and Clyde”), cinema verite (“Faces”), and rock festivals (“Woodstock”). “Gimme Shelter”, the documentary film about the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont, makes judicious use of all these cinematic conventions, but is like none of the above films. Rather, it is like waking up on a Sunday morning in 1963 and sitting down to watch the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald on national television while a rock ’n roll album blares forth in the background. It is all that, and it is devastating.

Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zworin followed the Rolling Stones on their tour of America last year, in hopes of being able to get a film together.. Thus, “Gimme Shelter” opens with the band doing “Jumping Jack Flash” in New York. When the song is over, we cut to an editing room where Jagger, Richards, and the Maysles brothers have been viewing this film. The film keeps coming back to the

editing room, using it as a frame of reference for the rest of the movie. Jagger and Richards remain cool and passive while watching themselves, and their passivity eventually becomes “Gimme Shelter’s” viewpoint. The Maysles and Miss Zworin have included all that happened at Altamont — both good and bad — but they have avoided all extraneous editorializing. This is cinema-verite, and we are left to make our own moral judgments.

The film moves steadily towards Altamont; indeed the concert provides the very structure of the entire film.' Each time the film cuts away from the Stones’ New York concert, it cuts to some seemingly unrelated event (a radio broadcast, a press conference) which ends with an ominous reminder of the upcoming Altamont festival. This cross-cutting continues until the Stones do “Street Fighting Man”. Then, as the band plays, and the audience goes wild, a radio announcement of the upcoming Altamont concert is mixed over the soundtrack. Both tracks continue as the film cuts to a shot of hundreds of pairs of headlights knifing their way through the darkness towards the Speedway. This is followed by a series of shots which follow shadowy figures as they climb over hills, gather around bonfires, and set up the stage for tomorrow’s concert. Despite the high energy level of the music, the shots carry ominous premonitions of disaster, as well as a steadily mounting sense of tension. That tension snaps instantly with the next sequence, as the song ends and we cut

to a long tracking shot, from a helicopter, of the miles and miles of cars clogging up a two lane road on the day of the concert. We are there; and that mile-high, soaring tracking shot is the perfect visual equivalent for the elation we feel — after a forty five minute build up — at having finally arrived.

Then the crowds arrive, and the film introduces us to them in much the same way that “Woodstock” did. Flower children, freaks and just plain folks spread out blankets, roll smokes, and talk about what a good time it’s gonna be. But on stage it’s chaos, and the film keeps cutting to shots of the Hell’s Angels sitting on their bus, or encircling the stage. Things really turn ugly when the Airplane comes on to do their set. Right in the middle of “The Other Side of This Life” the Angels start to beat up people with pool cues. Marty Balin gets knocked out when he tries to help one of the victims, while Grace, striving to retain her ever-present cool, chants “Easy, easy, please be kind.”

According to the classical rules of drama, the climax of a play occurs not with the final action of theplay, but at the “turning point” - the moment when the rising action stops, the falling action begins, and the outcome of the play becomes inevitable. The Maysles seem to have been conscious of this, and they have turned the Airplane’s

sequence into the climax of the film. From that point on it’s strictly downhill. And, as “Gimme Shelter” plummets towards its final act of incredible violence, the entire style of the film changes. Up until the Airplane’s set, the film is loose and open, filled with tracking shots, pans, and huge overhead shots of thousands of people grooving to the Stones. Immediately after the Airplane, when the Stones come on, the film almost self-consciously narrows itself down and zeroes in on its target: camera shots are static, and the huge vistas of human landscape never reappear. In their place the film offers us a single overhead shot of the stage, and the few hundred people who are crowded around it. The film’s previous visual sense of liberation is replaced by one of imprisonment. As the camera refuses to move away from the miniature circus of horrors in front of us, we begin to feel trapped, helpless to do anything but watch the violence unfolding before our eyes. Like the people who went to Altamont, we stop being spectators, and turn into victims.

The killing of Meredith Hunter, when it finally occurs, has a near-cathartic effect. The blood flows, and we are finally released and allowed to go home. We see the stabbing twice: once on screen, and once in slow motion on a movieola. Jagger watches it too, and when it is over he gets up to leave. The camera moves in on his face, and the frame freezes. He seems to be caught in a rare moment of self-awareness and moral ambiguity; the frozen image perfectly reflects our own confused emotions.

Structurally, that’s the last scene of the movie; what follows is a stunning epilogue. “Gimme Shelter” plays on the soundtrack, and we see a series of shots of people walking towards the Altamont Speedway. Several people are either carrying or wearing various objects: flags, blankets, T-shirts. The shots don’t seem to make any sense until we notice that all the objects are the same color: red. That’s right, red — the international symbol for Marxism and distress. And that’s how it ends: red banners flying while the title song plays on in the background and thousands of people go on their way to witness a murder. “Gimme Shelter” indeed.

John Kane

Baez & Harris Carry On

Joan Baez can sing, and does so effectively at times. Most often, however, her strident sweetness is boring, which is also the outstanding characteristic of Carry It On, a documentary that has been made about her and her draftresisting husband, David Harris. More annoying, though, is the moral superiority and holier, more radical than thou attitude which are flaunted throughout, attitudes whose practice is supported by concert and record receipts from Joan’s thousands of peace creep fans, who will surely take Carry It On to heart. Hence my pique.

Last year when Joan was invited to participate in a tour of the underground coffeehouses that antiwar activists and G.I.s use for helping soldiers get organized and informed about draft resistance and desertion, she refused on the grounds that if G.I.s were against the war, they wouldn’t be in the army in the first place. This elitist assumption that everyone is free, as are the wealthy and famous Harris family, to do as they morally please, is the basis of Carry It On, and for the couple’s incessant preaching about God, nonviolence, and “being free”.

God told Joan to withhold her war taxes and David to resist the draft. He also told them to accept the state’s punishment for these acts. But while the Internal Revenue Service just takes Joan’s taxes directly from her bank account, dealing with her managers and lawyers, what about people who don’t give concerts and can’t hire frontmen to handle the hassles? As for any young man who prefers jail to the draft, will he have movie, concert, record and book royalties to pay his lawyers, and a famous folksinger to publicize his case?

Outside of the director’s assumption that Joan Baez is an interesting performer (an arguable proposition, but certainly not supported by Carry It On), the most pathetic section of the film is the one showing David’s apprehension by the FBI. The agents knock at the door, are courteously admitted by Joan, who politely offers them coffee, they affably decline and chivalrously escort David to the waiting car. On the way his friends crowd around him, seeking a last word of inspiration. They have placed a “Resist the Draft” sticker on the Federal men’s bumper.

The film’s glorification of this event is bizarre, as the deferential, diplomatic etiquette, the petty sabotage of the bumper sticker, and the transformation of David into a Christlike martyr (the “Last Supper” atmosphere of his home followed by the crowd of admirers/ worshippers who follow him to the car for a last blessing) are all ultimately powerless to save him . from incarceration. This reveling in the impotence of nonviolence is sadly out of time in an age of repression, ignored by the film, where sudden bullets speak for nof-sopolite policemen, and the etiquette seldom offers the Black Panthers a chance to show hospitality and offer coffee to them. In such times, the chivalrous personal privations of the Harris’s provoke small sympathy from those who know the leaden taste of political repression.

Finally, Joan and David stress the personal aspect of the “Revolution” — it means doing things for yourself, they say, don’t follow leaders. Well, we can agree at least on that. Why, then, a movie about these two stars — Joan of the Arc-lights and Jesus Christ Harris — or, as the advertising copy quaintly puts it, “America’s First Family of Resistance”?

The answer, as with every other movie, is box office, and Joan has proved she’s good for it. She’ll carry it on, alright — all the way to the bank.

Honest Bob Singer

FILM CLIPS

President Richard M. Nixon, who became so excited after seeing Patton that he invaded Cambodia, recently saw the weeper Love Story. In speaking to the press about the film and its use of such no-nos as “bullshit” and “goddam”, Dick said, “I know those words. I’ve used them myself. I know that it’s the “in” thing to do today.” There was no comment however, on whether or not seeing Love Story means Tricky Dicky will never have to say he’s sorry for war, poverty, racism, etc.

Filming has begun on Frank Zappa’s first theatrical film, 200 Motels, which Zappa will co-direct with Tony Palmer.

The film, which will be very loosely based on the adventures of a band on the road, has a score by Zappa which will be performed by the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Zappa calls the flick, which will combine live action and animation sequences, “an electro-sociological-musicaldocumentary.”

Elaine May, who used to do stand-up comedy with Mike Nichols, is suing Paramount Pictures in an effort to block the spring release of the film A New Leaf, which she wrote and directed. Miss May claims that the film has been taken away from her and re-edited so that its original meaning is completely lost. Paramount is the studio that has Robert Evens as senior vice-president, and Evans, you may remember, is the man who said in the Time fan-magazine article on Ali MacGraw that, “we (Paramount) aren’t going to allow directors to have the privilege of final cut anymore.” Final cuts is the whole ball game; whoever has it decides what goes into a film and what doesn’t. For years directors in Hollywood have been fighting for final cut rights; only recently have they been granted them. Now Bob Evans is taking them away, and Elaine May, an extremely talented woman by the way, seems to be his first victim. Nice work Bob.

Marlon Brando, the crackeijack actor of all time, no matter how many shitty flicks he makes, has been cast in the title role of The Godfather, which will soon begin shooting at Paramont studios in Hollywood. (Sources at Paramount denied the rumor that Bob Evans would cut the Godfather role out of the movie before it was released, as part of his final cut privileges.)

Paul Williams, director of The Revolutionary, will film Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty Brick Lost-Bag Blues, adapted from the Michael and Douglas Chrichton comic novel about college students who deal to stay in the bread. Thus far, only Barbara Hershey (of Last Summer) has been signed to appear in the film.

Sam Peckinpah, director of The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Houge, has begun shooting The Straw Dogs in Cornwall, England. Dustin Hoffman has the lead role. Hoffman’s latest picture,

Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me?, should be out this summer. It’s a comedy about a rock composer suffering from paranoia, written by Herb Gardner, author of A Thousand Clowns.

Please Pass the Ketchup Division: A new artifical blood for motion picture use which is non-toxic and completely cleanable has been developed by 3M Company. Pilot quantities of the blood stimulant, which is composed of microscopic plastic globules in a viscous water-based vehicle, have been evaluated by studio make-up men who report that the new stuff should save studios a fortune in cleaning bills since it comes out in the wash.