On July 31, D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” – a groundbreaking 1965 documentary about Bob Dylan – will play at the Plaza Theatre. The movie is screened through Film Love, a film series that brings rarely seen avant garde and experimental films to the public.
Andy Ditzler has been curating the Film Love series for over 20 years. The series started in 2003 when Ditzler was looking for a copy of a movie and couldn’t find it in video stores. Turns out, the only way to screen the film was with a projector.
“I had to find some projectors. I had to find people who knew what they were doing. I had to spend some money renting the prints,” Ditzler said. “I said, if I’m going to go through all that, I’m not going to project these in my living room. Let’s show them, because there will probably be a few other people interested.”
According to Ditzler, that first iteration of Film Love attracted over 100 people, all packed into the Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery watching 1950s Beat generation movies. From there, Film Love took off, with Ditzler showing films like “Empire,” Andy Warhol’s eight-hour underground documentary featuring footage of the Empire State Building; “Jaguar,” the ethnographic film from French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch; and numerous other experimental and underground films at different venues all over Atlanta.
“Often, I was having to take a micro cinema around in my van,show up, and basically convert whatever space I had access into a cinema for the evening,” Ditzler said. “Whereas the Plaza is already set up for this, so that’s a great thing.”
“Dont Look Back” is presented as part of an ongoing series of films that Ditzler is hosting at the Plaza. The film, directed by the pioneering documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, follows Bob Dylan on his 1965 concert tour in England, right around the time he was toying with the idea of going electric.
The film isn’t as hard to see as some of the other films Ditzler has screened over the years, but he knows the experience of viewing the movie on a big screen will be far different from that of watching it at home.
“It’s a fascinating document of Dylan,” he said. “I’m not sure, really, that he allowed a movie maker to get that close to him ever again.”
In addition to its fascinating subject, Ditzler chose “Dont Look Back” because of what it meant for the art of filmmaking. Pennebaker was one of the pioneers of cinéma vérité, a style of documentary filmmaking where a camera crew would follow a subject and try to capture real events as truthfully as possible (think of a fly on the wall). He was also a contemporary of Robert Drew, a filmmaker who pioneered the advent of using lightweight 16 mm cameras and sound recorders to sync sound in film.
Drew’s film “Primary,” which followed John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail – and which Pennebaker worked as one of multiple cinematographers – was the first in which this technique was used, allowing the camera to follow and get up close and personal with its subject. Using this same technique, Pennebaker was able to capture as intimate a portrait as possible of Dylan on tour.
“That is a technological revolution that leads to an aesthetic revolution in filmmaking,” Ditzler said.
“Dont Look Back” is one of the more “accessible” films that Ditzler has shown, but for Ditzler, access can mean a lot of different things. In the streaming era, it’s easy to feel like the entirety of film history is available to you at the click of a button. But dig a little deeper and you’ll realize that movies are always disappearing from different services, or preserved in formats that don’t capture the magic of how they’re supposed to look.
If this is true for old Hollywood films, it’s doubly true for the experimental set that Ditzler wants to highlight.
“Experimental film history and avant garde history have to be among the least profitable sort of enterprises,” Ditzler said. “That includes the digitization of it in a good enough copy to do it justice.”
For Ditzler, the question of access doesn’t just mean, “Is the film readily available?” It also means “What is the way that this was meant to be seen?” Right now, you can watch “Wavelength,” an experimental film from the Canadian artist Michael Snow, on YouTube. But does that accessibility necessarily equal value?
“Because you can click on a button and see Michael Snow’s ‘Wavelength’ on YouTube doesn’t mean that you’re getting anything of value about ‘Wavelength’ at all,” Ditzler said. “It looks crappy. Then you scroll down, and read comment after comment about, ‘This is nonsense, why are you making me watch this?’ and so forth. It’s all just very depressing.”
With Film Love, Ditzler aims to project these works in the best way possible, so that when audiences see something like “Wavelength,” they understand something intrinsic about the work that can’t be understood by seeing it any other way. The audience experience means a lot to Ditzler – after all, Film Love arose out of his own desire to watch these movies.
As much as he is a curator, Ditzler still considers himself part of the audience. Curation takes more than a modicum of expertise, but Ditzler is more interested in curation as a community-focused activity. He helps the audience by getting them excited about the film through his own enthusiasm, teaching them how to watch experimental and avant garde films, and helping them sift through their own thoughts about the film in a discussion afterwards.
“All of that speaks to this idea that cinema is capable of creating a community,” Ditzler said. “It’s capable of creating a community grounded in the experience of projected light onto a screen that is ephemeral.”
The film title “Dont Look Back” is intentionally spelled without an apostrophe. This article has been updated to reflect the proper title.