Film Politics

fancy opticals (an idea handled infinitely better, by the way, in Peter Whitehead's Tonight Let's All Make Love in London ).

Its practitioners have always claimed that direct cinema's presentation of experience remains faithful to the complexity of experience itself. That faithfulness derives, so the argument runs, from an "innocent" approach to the world, an attempt to capture involuntarily and without predisposition the nature of a chosen subject. Albert denies that he is guilty of any "contrived attempt to take the talent of the Stones and then structure events or a movie around it in some kind of fake way. The life of the tour, which is what the film represents, is a natural happening . . . [the film] raises a lot of questions about what America is all about, but in a way that's not a lecture or anything of that sort."

WHAT'S most refreshing about the Maysles' naivete is its sustained self-serving obtuseness. Of course Altamont was a complex event, and it is charitable of the Maysles to help us deal with that complexity by ignoring a number of its main actors, the better to appreciate the intricacies of the remainder. I'm sure. But once you've excised John Jaymes of Young American Enterprises, Sam Cutler, the Dead with their bright ideas, once you've reduced Belli to a harmless comic figure, and the Stones to unwitting spectators of their own spectacle, who's loft but the Angels, and what's left but another melodrama, one in which beefy Alfred Jarrys play the villains, and everyone else the innocents. A self-defined outlaw gag, but not the kind of outlaws that sign million dollar contracts, the Angels are denied appeal. Though Grace Slick says, "People get weird and we need the Angels to keep people in line"; though a member of the Dead says, "Beating on musicians? Doesn't seem right"; though the Stones and their entourage hired the Angels as guards because they were cheap and because they added a little genuine street-fighting class, no tribunal will acquit the Angels on the grounds that they were just following orders (the man charged with Hunter's death was acquitted, but for other reasons).

Like the Altamont myth on which it feeds, Gimme Shelter is the product of slick, tabloid sensibilities, which is not to say that the filmmakers may not be sincere. But what remonstrance is possible to someone capable of saying, as Albert did, that "I think we would have been disappointed if everything had stopped just at Madison Square Garden." It not for the Angels, and if not for Meredith Hunter, described to me by David Maysles as being dressed in a "nigger zoot suit, straight out of the nineteen-fifties, you wouldn't believe him if you saw him in a fiction film," the Maysles would have had just another promotional film on their hands. But above all credit is due the American press, without whom the entire shadow-play would not have been possible.