One scene defines D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Dont Look Again (the title omits the standard apostrophe), which chronicles Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour on the ascension of his stardom. It’s the lengthy shot from behind Dylan as he performs on stage surrounded by darkness, a single highlight bearing down on him.

One scene additionally defines Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary When We Had been Kings, which chronicles the 1974 “Rumble within the Jungle” when Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for the world heavyweight championship. It exhibits Ali in his nook simply earlier than the struggle’s second spherical begins. He’s staring down his opponent, primed to beat him mindless, then elevating his arms to rally the large crowd earlier than plunging again into the struggle.

These are iconic moments of two males performing for enormous audiences, one who hardly acknowledges the group and the opposite who weaponizes it. When these documentaries depict Dylan and Ali, they’re extra than simply influential figures: they’ve turn into gods, males who can command the eye of whole international locations.

They’ve reverse reactions to their glorification, nonetheless, and the movies take reverse approaches of their depictions of males elevated to godlike standing: Dont Look Again paperwork in actual time Bob Dylan’s reluctance to be deified, whereas When We Had been Kings recounts after the very fact Muhammad Ali’s embrace of his legend. Each movies, although, embody the wrestle documentaries face in depicting their topics genuinely, and the inherent legend created by placing a determine on digicam.

As Dylan and Ali embark on their journeys overseas, they don’t seem to be merely well-known folks venturing into a brand new atmosphere. They’re the linchpins of whole ecosystems. In every single place they go, an orbit follows them: media and followers, brokers and promoters, and never least of all of the documentary crew making the movies that bear witness to this spectacle. To all those that circle them, our central figures can’t merely be folks; they need to inhabit prescribed roles. They have to be stars, prophets, liberators, kings. Dylan and Ali, in these movies, are made to carry out always and to enact the legend thrust upon them. They reply to this stress very in a different way.

Bob Dylan: The Reluctant Deity

Bob Dylan in Dont Look Again dodges his cultural significance at any time when attainable. At this level in historical past, he was dubbed “the voice of a era”, a prophet who used the previous follow of people music as an engine for the period’s social change. A reporter we see dictating a narrative over the telephone describes Dylan’s efficiency as “not a lot singing as sermonizing”. This was a label he was uncomfortable with, each creatively and personally. He even refuses to establish as a people musician all through the movie.

Nonetheless, everybody desires one thing from this exalted herald. Reporters need to study the motives behind his work. English musicians need his recommendation on emulating him. Others need the glory of merely associating with him. Dylan exhibits various levels of respect to all these folks, however he’s all the time cagey about discussing his work.

His responses are both blithe, sardonic, or aggressive when pressed to clarify his music. At a press convention early within the Dont Look Again, he tells a reporter that his actual message is “Preserve head and all the time carry a lightbulb.” Dealing with an identical press convention on the finish of the movie, clearly worn down by weeks of all the time having to be “on” for everybody, he launches a tirade at a Time reporter concerning the untrustworthiness of the media. When a university pupil involves interview him for his college newspaper, Dylan topics him to a prolonged Socratic toying, making him the item of ridicule for these within the room.

The frequent picture of Bob Dylan has him hunched over, sporting sun shades indoors, as if blocking connection. In its imagery, which finds him amidst countless crowds offstage and alone in a highlight onstage, Dont Look Again suggests a reversal of the standard settings of efficiency: it’s offstage that he’s all the time performing, and it’s only when he’s on stage, alone along with his music, free from the badgering of all of the individuals who need him to be one particular person or one other, that he can actually be himself.

Muhammad Ali: A God Personified

The place Bob Dylan evades his deification, Muhammad Ali eats it up. If there’s a single characterization When We Had been Kings offers Ali, it’s that he’s a showman. Any time a digicam rolls, he turns into a grand orator, half activist, half comic.

All through the movie, Ali appears incapable of standing nonetheless. Whereas speaking, he bounces round, shadow boxing, dancing by means of life. He hypes himself with lyrical passages delivered with the cadence of a Southern preacher. “I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I’m so imply I make medication sick,” he says.

Certainly, Muhammad Ali performs to the group in all places he goes, whether or not within the ring in entrance of 1000’s or on a desolate highway in entrance of solely a dozen. He embraces his legend always. In a single scene, whereas in his coaching ring, he desires to show a degree. “You need me to point out you that is my nation?” he says to the cameras. He turns to the small crowd current and begins chanting “Ali bomaye!,” which means “Ali, kill him!” in Lingala. Immediately, the group picks up the mantra and magnifies it. The mantra follows Ali in all places throughout his time in Zaire. 

Extra than simply reveling in his fame, Muhammad Ali understands the social significance of the struggle. He highlights the significance of the world’s most athletically gifted Black males combating for a world championship in Africa, in a struggle organized by Black folks and held in entrance of a Black viewers. He’s an emblem of Black excellence, a beacon to unite Africans and Individuals. He grabs maintain of his legend and directs it in direction of a worthy trigger. Embracing his deification makes his victory rather more important than only a boxing championship.

How Documentaries Glorify Our Gods

The stances of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali in direction of their deification are simply as important because the stances of the movies themselves. They’re very completely different stylistically and within the contexts of their manufacturing, and because of this, Dont Look Again stays agnostic concerning the legend of Bob Dylan whereas When We Had been Kings actively promotes the legend of Muhammad Ali.

Dont Look Again is a piece of direct cinema, a documentary fashion emphasizing a “fly on the wall” aesthetic. It minimizes filmmaker intervention and strives primarily to look at and doc occurrences as they occur. There are not any interviews, narration, or context offered.

We don’t get textual content playing cards to introduce us to essential figures as they seem; all we get is a single little bit of textual content firstly to provide us the setting: “London 1965.” Moderately than being explicitly advised a narrative about Bob Dylan’s UK tour, we’re dropped straight into the vehicles, inexperienced rooms, and lodge suites with him and his companions and given occasions unfiltered. We should determine issues out for ourselves.

Pennebaker’s digicam was small and moveable, and the one different crew current was one man, normally Jones Alk, with a microphone. There was no staged lighting. There was no staged something. As such, Pennebaker’s filming course of was as nonintrusive as attainable, in order that he may comply with together with Dylan’s internal circle and seize moments as they occurred with out having to plan scenes.

Dont Look Again captures Bob Dylan’s tour in actual time. There is no such thing as a retrospective reflection. As an alternative, we’re rooted firmly within the current, watching occasions unfold in sequence with little accomplished by the filmmaker to state their significance. In brief, Dont Look Again depicts Dylan’s tour from the within. It exhibits us precise occasions unfiltered and doesn’t body Dylan in a method or one other. On this approach, we see the legend of Dylan develop round him, from all these outdoors his circle who see him as a prophet and a visionary. Dont Look Again solely depicts that deification, it doesn’t take part in it.

When We Had been Kings tells the story of the Rumble within the Jungle from the skin. It could have originated within the custom of direct cinema; director Leon Gast initially went to Zaire to shoot a music pageant that accompanied the struggle. Nonetheless, when the struggle was delayed six weeks following George Foreman’s harm, he turned his cameras to Muhammad Ali and captured a trove of footage. By the point the precise movie was produced, 20 years after the struggle, it had turn into a standard documentary, trying again on the struggle as a historic occasion moderately than documenting it because it occurred.

Interviews are later added, not with main sources like Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, however storytellers of the occasion within the writers Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, and cultural figures like filmmaker Spike Lee. Moderately than utilizing a restrained fashion that presents footage unfiltered, When We Had been Kings employs frequent montage enhancing, usually to make a selected level.

In a single memorable occasion, the movie fades between footage of the struggle simply earlier than Ali knocks out Foreman and a close-up of South African singer Miriam Makeba performing, delivering on an earlier story from Plimpton {that a} witch physician had advised Ali a succubus would destroy Foreman, equating Makeba and the African tradition she represented with the succubus.

When We Had been Kings thus delivers its perspective on the Rumble within the Jungle from after the very fact, and that perspective unquestionably glorifies Ali. This glorification is most obvious within the movie’s ending. First, Spike Lee explicitly affirms Muhammad Ali’s legacy and calls him a “true hero”. Then, we return to a scene of Ali shadow boxing with the digicam, holding on a freeze body of his energetic face earlier than going right into a montage of photographs from all through his life as a sentimental track performs.

When We Had been Kings ends as Mailer and Plimpton every give their anecdotes about Ali. On this ending, the movie’s standing as a tribute to Ali couldn’t be clearer. Nonetheless, the movie’s glorification of Ali extends past these most express cases. In its evaluation of the struggle, it frames Ali as invincible, because the interviewees break down the genius of his strategic strikes and primarily paint his victory as inevitable, regardless that he was the underdog. “He was like a sleeping elephant,” actor Malick Bowens says. “You are able to do no matter you need round a sleeping elephant. However when he wakes up, he tramples all the pieces.” In Dont Look Again, we see the world round Bob Dylan deify him; in When We Had been Kings, the movie itself does the deification.

Filmic Deification of Muhammad Ali

This deification that happens each in and thru these documentaries bears appreciable risks. In each movies, we see warnings of the dangers of turning males into gods, but in each movies, it occurs to the central figures anyway.

When We Had been Kings explicitly deifies its central determine, designed primarily to have a good time Muhammad Ali’s legacy. But, the movie additionally delivers a extra express warning about turning folks into gods. Essential to the movie is its setting in Zaire, not simply because holding the struggle there shined a cultural highlight on the Black diaspora, but additionally due to the nation’s political scenario on the time.

Zaire was beneath the iron grip of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who offered the $10 million that introduced the struggle to Africa, and who put in a cult of persona within the nation. When We Had been King’s opening credit intercut footage from Ali’s profession with photos of racial unrest in the US and the oppression of Mobutu’s regime in Zaire.

Beneath one interpretation, this montage hyperlinks the political upheaval within the two international locations. It thus implies that Muhammad Ali fights for the liberty of Zairians simply as he fights for the liberty of Black Individuals. Black folks worldwide face a common wrestle, and Ali turns into a transcontinental determine of liberation.

Beneath one other interpretation, nonetheless, Ali’s violence and larger-than-life persona are linked with the violence and bravado of Mobutu. Although extra troubling, this interpretation has simply as a lot textual assist. 

Mobutu acts as a darkish mirror to Ali. The place Ali is made a god by means of how a lot he’s revered, Mobutu makes an attempt to extra explicitly make himself a god, putting in footage of himself in seemingly each public house in Kinshasa, together with the stadium holding the struggle. In bringing the struggle to Zaire to lift the nation’s profile, Mobutu makes use of Ali’s legend to bolster his personal, tying the 2 godhoods collectively.

The symbolism is just not delicate when the movie factors out that the stadium Muhammad Ali and George Foreman struggle in was most likely actually constructed atop the blood of Mobutu Sese Seko’s enemies. Ali’s legend is the type of legend Mobutu wish to have for himself. The place Ali conjures up real affection, drawing a crowd of admirers in all places he goes, Mobutu doesn’t attend the struggle he spent a lot cash to carry to his nation. Norman Mailer suspects it is because he feared assassination. Via Mobutu and his cult of persona, we see the hazards of the deification Ali embraces, which the movie bolsters.

This isn’t meant to name into query Muhammad Ali’s legacy or standing as a “true hero”, as Spike Lee labels him. Ali, after all, used the legend that grew round him for good and stood agency for civil rights. Ali was, as he boasted, the best, however not due to his godliness, as When We Had been Kings implies. He was a human being like the remainder of us, along with his flaws and foibles, and he used that humanity to attain exceptional ends.

Although Ali directed his deification in direction of a simply trigger, that deification itself remains to be inherently harmful, as Mobutu exhibits us. Via its embrace of that deification, When We Had been Kings dances into harmful territory.

Filmic Deification of Bob Dylan

In Dont Look Again, the hazards of deification are largely seen by means of Dylan and his discomfort along with his legend. A part of that discomfort could also be a private distaste for the reverence he continuously faces, however there’s seemingly additionally an ideological rejection of deification current. Dylan didn’t need to be seen as a prophet, a messianic voice of a era come to talk the reality of social change to his disciples. He needed his viewers to suppose for themselves, not comply with him blindly. Therefore, his reluctance to clarify the meanings of his songs. He needed the main target to be on the music, not on him.

With its sparse, direct cinema fashion and lack of glorification, Dont Look Again seems to be the extra profitable movie at staving off the deification of its protagonist. But, even that success has its limits. The declare that direct cinema presents us with the unfiltered reality by merely documenting occasions with out intervention is a delusion. There might not be seen intervention within the type of interviews or narration, however Pennebaker nonetheless wanted to determine when to roll his digicam and what to level it at.

Extra considerably, he had to decide on which bits of the handfuls of hours of footage he collected to place within the movie and the way to edit it collectively. That represents a major filter positioned over the uncooked expertise that direct cinema claims to provide us. The footage chosen for Dont Look Again supplies a story about its topic: on this case, that Bob Dylan is a extremely influential determine who holds the facility in all of the conditions wherein he finds himself. There’s a great deal of glorification current in that alone.

Mythology, Documentary Fashion

Neither Dont Look Again nor When We Had been Kings really captures their topics in real type. Neither offers us entry to the internal, personal particular person. All we see of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali in these documentaries are performances. They’re completely different sorts of performances to completely different audiences for various ends, however they’re performances nonetheless. They’re performances that flip them, to some extent, into gods.

This isn’t the fault of both movie, as they may have accomplished nothing to keep away from it solely. It’s simply an inevitable truth of documentary filmmaking. While you level a digicam at somebody and roll it, you shake them out of their pure, unobserved state. You demand a efficiency. While you show that efficiency on a display screen for an viewers, you create a legend about them and unfold a constructed narrative.

Movies like Dont Look Again and When We Had been Kings, whether or not direct cinema documentary or retrospective tribute, can provide us perception into figures like Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali and inform fascinating tales. Nonetheless, there’s a hazard inherent in what they do. In any documentary, the danger of creating an individual right into a god exists.