I saw Dont Look Back on the big screen at the Plaza Theatre as part of D.A. Pennebaker's 100th birthday celebration. Andy Ditzler, curator of Atlanta's Film Love series, warned that Dylan was a "slippery" subject and Pennebaker's apostrophe-less cinéma vérité portrait wasn't as straightforward as it seemed.
It was a rare chance to see the 1965 British acoustic tour, mere months before Dylan infamously went electric at Newport Folk Festival. Pennebaker's handheld cameras and sync-sound dropped us into hotel rooms, backseat night drives, and smoke-thick press scrums, building a portrait not of what happened but of what slipped away.
It was a different fanfare than what the film debuted to in 1967. Dont Look Back initially struggled to find distribution until picked up by a San Francisco theatre owner who specialized in adult entertainment. Pennebaker famously quipped that he barely knew Dylan when he started filming. "The filmmaking is the research," he said. "You don't ever research, because you want to have everything come to you in a life way." Most people in our theater probably knew more about Dylan than the director himself had in 1965. As the lights dimmed, the audience sat transfixed for a convergence of two revolutions—when cinéma vérité went electric.
The first thing we see is not a stage but an alleyway. Dylan drops cue cards for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" while Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth murmur in the background. The proto music video feels casual, almost tossed‑off. But it's a prophecy, or a "sermon," as a journalist later says. The words flutter and fall, impossible to hold. Pennebaker recalled years later that no one held on to the legendary cards. They were lost to the elements. Dylan slips out of reach.
There's something voyeuristic about the entire experience, as if we're witnessing moments never meant for public consumption. Britain greets Dylan like he’s a visiting comet. The airports buzz with screaming fans, BBC reporters demand explanations, and upper-middle-class politicians invite him to their mansions. Onstage, he is incandescent as he strums familiar songs into something mystical. Offstage, he shrinks and bristles from the weight of his persona. You can see why Pennebaker hesitated to call himself the director. "It was more directed by the people who were in it." But the film's real genius lies in how it builds a portrait out of disappearances. Two figures become its unspoken ghosts: Donovan and Joan Baez.
The specter of Donovan
Donovan haunts this film without ever really being in it. The young Scottish musician is invoked constantly—by journalists, by other musicians, always with that undercurrent of rivalry. The British press had crowned him the "new Dylan" and you can feel the tension of that comparison straining through every conversation.
When Donovan finally appears, it's in a dim hotel room, strumming "To Sing for You" with nervous fingers. The song trembles more than it plays. Dylan then takes the guitar and offers "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (at Donovan's request), enunciating the end of each line with quiet, devastating finality.
What makes this scene so unsettling is its deliberation. Donovan doesn't look humiliated, but like he's playing along with some predetermined script. There's something theatrical about the whole encounter, as if both men know their roles in this performance. Pennebaker lingers on Donovan's face not to capture defeat, but to document the moment when a real person dissolves into symbol.
The irony deepens when you learn that the two had spent considerable time together off-camera—sharing dinners and collaborating on those famous cue cards for the opening sequence. But that friendship gets edited out of existence, leaving only this single, loaded moment where Donovan becomes an echo whose presence only amplifies the weight of the original.
Joan Baez, a fading heartbeat
If Donovan represents the phantom of imitation, Joan Baez embodies the whisper of intimacy. Early in the tour, she radiates serene warmth. She makes goofy faces while sitting cross‑legged on hotel beds and sings ethereally as "Bobby" types away with yet another cigarette in his mouth. There's a tenderness between them that feels genuine, unguarded.
But something shifts as the film progresses. Dylan becomes more distant, more absorbed in his own performance of being Dylan. As Baez begins to drift from the frame, you realize you're watching a breakup in real time, though neither participant wants to acknowledge it directly.
The late‑night hotel scenes grow starker without her cheerful warbles. They harden into echo chambers filled with press hangers-on and Dylan's increasingly sharp wit. Her departure is never explained, but it's felt in every empty armchair. She represents not just lost love, but an abandonment of earnest folk tradition in which Dylan believed music could change the world through sincerity alone.
By film's end, both ghosts have done their work. Baez disappears entirely, and we learn later that they wouldn't perform together again until a decade later, during the Rolling Thunder Revue. She becomes the ghost of who Dylan was expected to remain.
Dylan withdraws behind the shades
Dylan's confrontations throughout the film with earnest student journalists, Time magazine reporters, and anyone else demanding explanations serve as exercises in self-preservation. He's protecting something fragile from being pinned down and categorized. Pennebaker later observed that Dylan treated these encounters like "some sort of comic show of misperceptions." He deflects every attempt to reduce him to soundbites, refusing to explain himself to those who don't already understand. We watch him read aloud from a newspaper article claiming he smokes eighty cigarettes a day. "I'm glad I'm not me," he smiles wryly. In a moment of startling self-awareness, Dylan recognizes that the public version of himself has become someone he wouldn't want to know.
At one point, someone calls him "the disappearing American" for how quickly he vanishes after shows. We realize something's missing from Dylan by the film's end. And it wasn't just the apostrophe in the title of Dont Look Back. That missing punctuation feels like a deliberate refusal to make things conventional or easy. As Pennebaker later admitted, "I got tired of everything looking like everything else. And I thought, Fuck it." Like Dylan himself, even the film's title resists standard expectations. Watching this in a packed theater made the solitude even starker. Laughter at the early press‑conference jabs gave way to uncomfortable silence as the film spiraled inward.
Dont Look Back isn’t just another music documentary of the defiantly undefinable singer. This is Pennebaker’s ghost story unfolding in hotel rooms, in the spaces between songs, and in the people who disappear before the credits roll. The film refuses to explain its own melancholy take on fame. By the time we see this footage, Dylan had already transformed multiple times—married, electric, booed at Newport. By the time his car disappears down the street, you realize that version of Dylan is already gone, heading somewhere the camera couldn't follow.
Works Cited
Ayd, Justin. "Through Pennebaker's Lens: Bob Dylan Dont Look Back." Walker Art Center, Nov 16, 2018.
Itzkoff, Dave. "No Direction, No Restriction: D.A. Pennebaker Looks Back at a Dylan Documentary." The New York Times, May 19, 2016.
Mettler, Mike. "D.A. Pennebaker on 50 Years of Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back, Part II." Sound and Vision, Nov 27, 2015.
Polito, Robert. "Dont Look Back." Criterion Collection, 2021.
Simmons, Michael. "Making Bob Dylan's Dont Look Back: 'There was a story there – I could feel it in my bones.'" MOJO, 2019.
Williams, John. "D.A. Pennebaker, Pioneer of Cinéma Vérité in America, Dies at 94." The New York Times, Aug 3, 2019.