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Gimme Shelter
Gimme Shelter is a beautifully edited glimpse of late 60s life. It chronicles the (lack of) planning and execution of the free concert at Altamont in December 1969. The focus is naturally on the Rolling Stones, but it goes beyond the formulaic concert footage that one expects and receives from it.
After showing Jagger prancing around on stage, for example, it shows him watching a recording of himself. This quite effectively leaves the viewer to decipher his expression, which betrays humour, pride, enjoyment, and even embarrassment. Some of the recording studio scenes with the Stones seems a bit staged, but the introspection they show as they watch footage in Altamont's aftermath (no pun intended) is genuinely moving.
The annals of cliché teach us that Altamont marks the spiritual end of the 1960s. The film, however, cannot help but capture the palpable energy in the crowd. There are troubling moments (Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane being knocked unconscious, and of course the murder of Meredith Hunter), but the film is not as one-sided as one might expect. For every man having a gran mal seizure, there's a girl whose conspicuous enjoyment tells the camera that she's having an unforgettable night. For every death at the conert (and there were four), there was also a birth. It remains an unbridled celebration of existence, and if it also marks the death of an era, then this documentary perfectly captures the consequent mixed emotions.