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The 10 Greatest Rockumentaries of All-Time
Not very many rock concert documentaries are chosen to serve as the opening night attraction of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival. Then again, not many “rockumentaries” feature one of the world’s greatest living directors chronicling one of the world’s greatest living rock bands.
Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited film about the Rolling Stones, kicked off the German fest with a bang, premiering at the event prior to its April release in the United States.
As evidenced by his acclaimed documentaries on The Band (The Last Waltz) and Bob Dylan (No Direction Home), Scorsese has a unique affinity for fusing contemporary rock music and cinema. He has a particular connection with the Stones, too; their music has appeared in his work dating as far back as 1973’s Mean Streets and as recently as 2006’s The Departed (perhaps it’s time to give “Gimme Shelter” a rest) and has driven some of the moviemaker’s most memorable sequences.
Shine a Light, a more modest achievement than Scorsese’s previous forays into nonfiction music moviemaking, doesn’t attempt to offer a comprehensive overview of the Stones’ long career—such an enterprise would likely even surpass the Dylan doc’s exhaustive 207-minute running time. Instead it largely focuses on the band’s 2006 concert at New York City’s Beacon Theater, featuring guest appearances by figures as varied as Bill Clinton and Christina Aguilera. Scorsese captures the energy of a Stones concert perfectly, and his accomplishment reminds one of the scarcity of truly exceptional rockumentaries in today’s cinema. If the 1960s and ’70s represented the apex of the rockumentary, 21st-century music films tend to be little more than promotional puff-pieces with film grammar derived from decades of music videos. Today’s rockumentaries seemingly serve only to satisfy the specific musical cravings of core fans and are rarely cinematic triumphs in their own right. Whatever you may think about anyone from U2 to Miley Cyrus, 3D spectacles devoted to their live shows aren’t likely to stand the cinematic test of time.
With that in mind, MM decided to highlight the 10 best, or at least most culturally significant, rockumentaries of all time, with the one condition that they are all currently available on DVD for your home viewing and listening pleasure. This rules out some notable titles—Robert Frank’s controversial Stones documentary, Cocksucker Blues (1972), and Steve Binder’s dynamic R&B revue, The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), are two prominent omissions as a result. But the following 10 should certainly keep your home theater speakers busy for quite some time.
Don’t Look Back (1967)
Director: D.A. Pennebaker
Docurama, $19.95 ($49.95 for box set)
There were certainly other nonfiction films devoted to popular music prior to this groundbreaking work by D.A. Pennebaker, but to honestly examine the evolution of this documentary subgenre, it’s an inarguably logical decision to start here. Though Bob Dylan was only just starting to “go electric” around the time the film was shot, so it’s as much a “folkumentary” as anything else, Pennebaker’s verité study of Dylan’s famous 1965 U.K. concert tour established the template for the observational rockumentaries that would follow. It alternates performance footage with interviews and conversations of a semi-revealing quality (this is Dylan, after all) and includes appearances from Joan Baez and Donovan. The film is not only a fascinating portrait of one of the past century’s most enigmatic musical artists, but also a memorable snapshot of a specific cultural era and artistic movement. The Docurama DVD box set, which even includes the legendary “Subterranean Homesick Blues” clip, is a treasure for Dylan fans. It contains a 168-page book, a second disc of previously unseen outtakes and a wealth of supplementary features.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Oliver Summers on 4/14/08 at 6:12 pm
Wow, this is a really daring list you got here. Way to go out on a limb and list some movies that maybe, oh, not everyone in the world has already seen. And you got paid to write this. What, did you enter “rock docs” into Google and copy the first list you came across? “Derivative” would be too kind a word to use for this list. How about “unnecessary.”
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This story was published in the Spring 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Shining a Light on 10 Great Rockumentaries
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