Let It Bleed: "Gimme Shelter" and the Concert Film

Something happens to people when they gather in large crowds. In the case of the audiences in Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ 1970 film about the Altamont Free Concert, this “something” is represented as a kind of infectious frenzy. Yes, drugs certainly played a part, but the mania rolling through the mass of spectators is indicative of something much greater than that. As the camera focuses on one concertgoer, then the next, the difference between person and audience becomes all the more stark. Day turns into night, the Rolling Stones take the stage, and the attendees transform from individuals to something much more awesome and deadly.

This film is not completely contained within the concert itself, nor is it restricted to footage pertaining to the Altamont Free Concert. The beginning concerns itself with the 1969 feat of social engineering, in which 300,000 people flocked to the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Members of the Rolling Stones meet with businessmen and press in order to pull off this impossible venture, everyone involved looking positively ridiculous. Even the more serious straight figures are decked out in padded tweed and massive eyeglasses with bristling moustaches resting below. But the Stones themselves are an attention-diverting spectacle no matter where they are, showing the spectator from their first appearance just how captivating they can be. The hats, the capes, the colors, the shoes, the haircuts– an alien from outer space could see these men and know that they are worthy of attention.

In the introduction to his book article Playing to the Camera, Thomas Cohen writes, “As listeners, we have been trained, when encountering a piece of music, to examine timbre or pitch relations, to imagine pictures of landscapes or seascapes, or to experience refined or intense emotions; rarely, however, are we asked to visualise the movements of the performers. On the contrary, we are often encouraged to close our eyes in order to transcend the profane world of sight and enter the realm of pure sound” (14). The concert film challenges spectators by asking us to resist the conventions of cinema, which demand focus on the visual, while also asking us to resist the conventions of music, which demand focus on the aural. The Stones are an unstoppable force of performance, which is part of why their backdrop of pure darkness is so genius. The viewer is able to absorb themselves in all elements of performance– sonic, aesthetic, and dynamic– with no effort at all.

If Mick Jagger is eye-catching in a hotel room, he’s spellbinding onstage. The film opens with footage of the band’s Madison Square Garden concert, where Jagger’s only company is his microphone as he stands in inky blackness. “Welcome to the breakfast show!” he snarks, robed in purple silk and topped with an Uncle Sam hat. Then the music kicks, beginning the song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and he starts his jerky, writhing dance moves, silly yet sensual. This opening explains a lot about the film very efficiently. At first, the camera lives in the audience, seeing Jagger and his bandmates as a concertgoer would see them: practically glowing, pulsing with sound and energy. When it switches perspective to look out at the crowd from behind the band, Jagger’s famous shag cut illuminated like a halo, it just appears to be a teeming sea of indistinguishable forms. In this moment, it is their energy that captivates. Their collective power in roaring multitudes becomes the focus of the shot, and ultimately the focus of Gimme Shelter itself.

The Maysles brothers, known for their vérité style of filmmaking called direct cinema, capture a rawness and naturalism that makes the viewer feel immersed in the film itself. This is partly due to the cameras they were able to carry, hands-free and compact, so they could literally walk around in the environments they were documenting as though the camera was a person’s perspective. The effect of their technique is utterly captivating once they arrive at Altamont: the dream of the 1960s playing out before one’s eyes, people laughing and dancing and sharing space together in the sun-drenched afternoon. One shot that sticks in my mind tracks a bubble across the sky, a delicate embodiment of beauty and lightness, the fragility of what has been created at Altamont. Gimme Shelter, despite all its gradual horror, lingers wistfully on the moments of joy and community found in the bustling quasi-commune established for the concert. We are intimately acquainted with the promise of what Jagger’s hippie paradise could have been.

Looming throughout the film, however, is the obvious threat of what’s to come. Some may enter the film knowing that it will end gruesomely, while others will simply notice the lack of control anyone has over the increasingly volatile fans. In the first sequence at Madison Square Garden, security fails to stop people from rushing the stage. As we watch the crew set up the stage at Altamont, they also continuously complain about not being able to keep fans off the set. Fights break out, violence simmers, but in the giant crowd anger appears to dissipate like steam. Yes, there was a brawl over by that hill, but here comes Jefferson Airplane! Aren’t we all just here to have a good time? Can’t we love one another like we’re meant to?

The big fight started during “Sympathy for the Devil.” An anguished Mick Jagger watches the footage back as he-in-the-moment pleads with the crowd, “Brothers and sisters! Everybody be cool now, come on.” This is one of many times we hear Jagger telling the cats in the audience to just chill out. Again, this moment is shot from the back, a wide-angle that shows a cluster of people onstage addressing the endless expanse of people before them. The enormity of this crowd is hard to fathom, since they disappear into darkness after just a few rows. The camera tracks close on a few front-row fans, alternately dancing and crying and jumping and yelling. We have to generalize these reactions to the whole crowd, a dizzying prospect. This intensity of feeling must be incredible when shared among hundreds of thousands.

Famously, the concert did not have regular security, but was patrolled by a biker gang called the Hell’s Angels. Cloaked in gleaming leather, these figures initially came rumbling down the middle of the audience in the daytime and stayed hovering around the stage. Between them and Jagger himself, who was practically a god, it seemed as though people had some authority to which they were willing to submit. Not so, it turns out; the fight started back up again during “Under My Thumb,” this time between a concertgoer and some of the Hell’s Angels themselves. The footage of the stabbing is blurry and imprecise, but jarring all the same. It resonates much like it must have felt in the moment, uncertain and sudden, did that really just happen? It’s not out of nowhere, but it’s a rapid comedown. In an instant, everything is over. The concert descends into rapid downhill motion like a car with its brakes cut. Here, in December of 1969, the dream is dead. Maybe we were bugging to think it was ever alive in the first place.

Truly a masterpiece of concert film, Gimme Shelter plays out like a real-time collapse of hope. It succeeds in distracting the viewer with not just flashy visuals and energetic audio, but genuine optimism and unity. When they immerse the camera in the crowd, we take on their perspective, high on hive-mind fan mentality. We gaze adoringly up at Jagger and the glistening instruments like angel’s trumpets. But when they place the camera onstage, the view becomes significantly different and much more ominous. This out-of-control, anonymous mass is too big to comprehend and the people meant to keep them in check are too coked-out to even try. The other shoe falls so slowly we start to forget it’s even there; but when it finally drops, its inevitability rings out with devastating volume. At the Altamont Free Concert, four people were born and four people died. We lost something much bigger, though, and after finishing the film, I can’t help but think we won’t ever get it back.