Orders From the D.A.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s landmark portrait of Bob Dylan, DVD label Docurama called upon the filmmaker to revisit his astonishing archive from Dylan’s ’65 tour of England — the songwriter’s last as an exclusively acoustic performer. Initially uninterested in making a prospective sequel, Pennebaker discovered a new entry point into the music after watching over 20 hours of unreleased footage of a young Dylan mesmerising huge crowds all by himself. "I realised that was a part of what took place that I hadn’t really done much with in Don’t Look Back because I didn’t want it to be a music film,” Pennebaker explains. "I wanted it to be a character film, like Ibsen or something, but when I saw this, I knew I’d missed something.” Among many highlights, the resulting Don’t Look Back: 65 Tour Deluxe Edition features Pennebaker’s insightful commentary and a whole new, Dylan-approved "outtake film” (as the filmmaker dubs it), entitled Bob Dylan 65 Revisited. Just as Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (which relied heavily on Pennebaker’s archives) suggested, Pennebaker confirms that a wealth of rare Dylan footage still exists. The Holy Grail of unofficial releases, however, remains Eat the Document, which captures Dylan’s first electric tour in 1966 and, even though he filmed it as well, Pennebaker can only partially speak to its status. "It’s not up to me, it’s up to Bob,” he says. "He’s of several minds of it. What interests him is it’s not more Don’t Look Back, which he regards as a marvellous film but he’s really sorrowful that it’s about him. That bothers him and [Eat the Document] is where he tried to correct the problem but he didn’t like it and it disappeared. Sooner or later though, everything will come out; that’s the rule of evolution.”