It could have been titled Let It Bleed. Partially a concert film from the Rolling Stones’ free show at California’s Altamont Speedway in 1969, Gimme Shelter is also a documentary of the violence that would forever be associated with the event. With the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle gang handling security, four people were killed at Altamont; one man, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angels member as the cameras rolled. The three directors — brothers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin — shot the film over 10 days during the band’s tour. While the music inevitably rocks (it is the Rolling Stones, after all), the film’s inherent tragedy is summed up in a post-concert scene of Mick Jagger, seeing Hunter’s murder unfold on an editing machine, rewind the footage to watch it in slow motion. The 1960s had certainly come to an end.
TIME’s take: “What the filmmakers have unarguably done in these scenes is give brilliant shape and form to a nightmare.”
While Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme created focused, precise documentaries for the Band and Talking Heads, director Nathanial Hörnblowér (the pseudonym of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch) took the opposite approach for this Beastie Boys film. The band handed out 50 digital video cameras to fans at a 2004 show at Madison Square Garden and let them do whatever they wanted. What they wanted was to get close to the performers (some of the more daring videographers attempted to blag their way backstage), use conventional freeze-frames and enthusiastic (to put it mildly) zooms to cover the concert as well as film visits to the bathrooms and beer vendors. Fans produced 75 hours of footage, which was edited to fit the concert’s professionally mixed sound track; the result is 90 minutes of raucous exuberance that the New York Times compared to a “cell-phone video camera having an epileptic seizure.” Lord only knows what Demme made of it.
TIME’s take: “Bring your: Right to party and a camera.”
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
