The greatest challenge, however, remains the analysis of a film which emerges from factual experience and, in the way it is molded, reveals important social and aesthetic prejudices of which the filmmakers themselves may not have been aware. Joel Haycock '71, while reviewing Gimme Shelter, speaks not only of a film but of the culture it is drawn from and the systems which support it.

THE SHORT history of rock and roll festivals is circumscribed by three singular events: the Monterey Festival, the Lake Bethel Festival, and a day-long concert at the Altamont Speedway. Each event's claim to singularity is by this time a matter of commonly received opinion: as our commentators have it. Monterey marked the apotheosis of the San Francisco-based flower culture, the Bethel concert (Woodstock) was the great coming together for, in its advertisement's words, three days of Love, Peace and Music, and Altamont the death of flower-power, the death of Love, the death of Rock, depending on whom you read. How each of these affairs became elevated to the status of a major event, dwarfing even Newport in its heyday, is a question of some interest, especially since both the monied press and the so-called underground press (that press, you will remember, which grew up in opposition to the established press) subscribe to and share an interest in essentially the same apprehension of all three experiences. The difference between the Life Magazine extra on Woodstock and Rolling Stone's Woodstock issue confines itself to details of taste and description; the broad interpretative outlines are the same, though Rolling Stone's hosannas are perhaps a bit more shrill and explicitly self-promoting. This confluence of such ostensibly antagonistic perspectives extends to the Altamont concert; from Newsweek to the Berkeley Tribe , Altamont, in the Tribe's words, "... like the massacre at Song My, exploded the myth of innocence."

Both the festival at Altamont and the one at Bethel are events identified as places, or, as those not yet embarrassed about the whole charade will tell you, states of mind. The interrelationship between the two events is so directly drawn by so many people that one can't help but nurture some suspicions. The formal integrity seems extravagant-Woodstock's tacky dreams shimmer a little too loudly, while Altamont's function as some sociological reality principle is dramatically too neat. It seems like we've been treated to some show in which one character has been introduced only to be demolished by another's appearance, both acts completed to concerted applause.

After all, what distance could possibly separate two occasions whose circumstances are so similar. In each, hip producers intent on fantastic publicity hurriedly choose an inadequate location, throw up a scaffold, and invite hundreds of thousands of white middle-class kids to enjoy themselves. Michael Lang was instrumental in arranging both events, and in neither case did he worry himself with considerations such as food, water, shelter, transportation, safety, sanitary facilities, etc. Comparing the footage of Altamont in Gimme Shelter with that of Bethel in Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock , it's hard to see any difference in the crowds' composition or their activities; the former looks like any other mass concert to me, and it's photographed like Woodstock or Monterey for that matter: idyllic scenes with babies or dogs, shots of breasty women, exotic clothing, close-ups of people getting high, a freak-out, a few nude scenes, some unashamed embraces, more drugs, more exotic clothing, another breast, etc. But then there's the Angels, some clubbings, and the death of Meredith Hunter. . . .

Woodstock would hardly seem to deserve its luminous aura. There were beatings; hundreds took poison acid; at one point at least 75,000 people screamed "Jump" to some kid on top of a three hundred foot scaffolding; all "natural for a city of 400,000," said the papers. There were deaths at Woodstock also, three of them, but along with two births they were attributed to the "life cycle." A boy without a place to sleep lay down in unknown field and was run over the next morning by a tractor. Now no camera crew was present then, or when a girl died of a burst appendix before receiving medical attention, just as no photographer recorded the deaths of Mark Feiger and Richard Savlov, two kids killed at Altamont when a driver trying to find the freeway slammed his car into their campsite. No one saw some guy fall into an unlit, unfenced irrigation ditch near the Speed way either; he drowned. And of course for none of these fatalities was there upbeat musical accompaniment, nor were they the subject of Mick Jagger's attentions.

I hope all of this isn't mawkish, but the point is simply that institutional negligence (under which I would classify the callous transgressions of promoters like Lang or Melvin Belli) does not make good copy or flashy movies. When thirty-eight miners suffocate in a mineshaft which doesn't even meet the government's lax specifications, that "tragedy" is accorded the treatment the press gives to earthquakes and other natural disasters, but New York filmmakers aren't about to fly down to Kentucky or wherever and compose a film around it. Instead it's the front page one day, then the last bodies are dug up the next day on page seven, and two days later finds a press release on the official enquiry at the bottom of forty-two. Meanwhile, "the trial of Charles Manson entered its fifth month today, and our reporter is at the courthouse with the story. Bill?" "Thank you, Ted. The trial of Charles Manson entered . . ."

No, when the world goes wrong and we demand that someone pay for it, when Life Magazine needs a demon for our collective exorcism, we and Life look to the powerless (or occasionally to those that have fallen from power, reading that economic demise as testament to some moral failing). Denying one of the central facts of our social life, namely that the most chilling barbarities are fomented in committee, we isolate villains who cooperatively identify themselves by being members of the economic periphery in the first place (non-whites, "criminals," "drug addicts," the "insane," etc.). By assigning responsibility for our own uneasiness to individuals rather than to structures we reassure ourselves that the world has a human face, that if we only could root out the bad guys, vote in our own people (elect a new President), the harmony of our situation could be restored, life would attain once against its manageable shape.

Hence everybody loves murders; they have real human villains, and the good ones have "helpless" victims (women, children, old people), or at least valorous ones (police, prisoners of war). Unsafe assembly lines, malconstructed bleachers, badly-made cars can claim lives every day, though we'll hear little about it; but let some psychopath carve up a few nurses, or someone shoot a cop over in Brighton and we'll never hear the end of it. Journalism consists of the substitution of an event's dramatic elements for the event itself; newspapers and magazines are drama by other means. Let me entertain you.

GIMME SHELTER was directed by Charlotte Zwerin and the Mayles brothers, Albert and David; these last have been two of the most important film makers to come out of the direct cinema movement. The direct cinematographer is a special kind of film journalist who, rather than creating (or reconstructing) events, attempts to situate himself in the midst of them. Though he cannot transcend his subjective viewpoint, his object is ostensibly an objet trove, a "real life drama," and the structure of his film is to be determined by the nature of that object in action. Thus Albert says of Gimme Shelter that "we structure around what actually turned out to happen"; "what comes out of it is a surprise to us as well."

Given their direct cinema background the Maysles were undoubtedly uncomfortable with such disjunct segments; there they were with gobs of stage performance footage, an exclusive on Meredith Hunter's murder, and no way to integrate the two. Then someone hit on the bright idea of showing the footage to the Stones, of filming their responses to themselves, to Tina Turner, to the Altamont arrangements, and of course to the stabbing itself. Throughout Gimme Shelter the Maysles cut from a filmed event to a shot of that same film running through a viewer, and then cut to one of the Stones' vacant faces, a vacancy, you understand, which is supposed to read as shock, or grief, or incomprehension. When Jagger finally sees the murder footage, the big moment has all the spontaneity and excitement of that astronaut's first words from the moon: stagily concerned, Jagger mumbles, "Can you roll back on that, David."

The device serves two functions. First, it gives Shelter an intellectual gloss: Mick or Keith's contemplation suggests the burden of self-consciousness, a filmed discourse on the relation of self to representation, etc., etc. Naturally this is all glitter; what such a schema really does here is allow the filmmakers to cut another slam-bang rock 'n' roll number in every four or five minutes without risking a stylistic break. That way the sequences of Melvin Belli negotiating for the Stones, virtually the only explanation tendered in the entire film concerning who is responsible for what, are not permitted to drag on at "unnecessary" length, a few shots of Belli in his preposterous office deemed sufficient to reveal all, and then again, it's the Angels who are the pigs, right? But most importantly, the device is real Teen Scene stuff: given the Indochinese War, racism, a murder, or some other tragedy, the big question in all the fans' minds becomes, How do the Stones react to all this?

WELL, not very interestingly, but then what's interesting about the footage in the first place? You learn that Richard identifies with Jagger, that both of them have seen the Beatles' movies and aspire to their brand of self-conscious humor. You see the Stones at Work and at Play, On Stage and Off, but the latter sequences are brief, unrevealing, and have sound-overs to help them go down easier. You get two new Stones' songs, one called "Wild Horses," with lines like "Wild horses couldn't drag me away/ Wild horses, we'll ride them someday," and the other a derivative "Brown Sugar." And you get lots of live performances, but frankly the cloying, infatuated photography renders even these tedious after three or four songs; the Maysles seemed to have realized this, and Shelter's nadir comes when they try to jazz up their presentation of "Love in Vain" with rapturous slow-motion andYard,' with its hallowed dormitories that once housed some of our nation's great literary, philosophic and scientific minds." I found the use of the past tense particularly interesting.

The sightseers also got a firsthand look at another part of hallowed Harvard-the traffic in the Square. The ever-informative Phil launched into a lengthy oration about the jam we got tied up in. "Now this traffic is unusually heavy," he began. "It has been heavy from time to time, but more so today than usual. You'll find that this is a bad time to go through Harvard Square. . . ." But we finally got going again, and Phil directed our attention to "Holyoke Student Center." We learned about Harvard Square, particularly its various shops, and then, since it needed to be said as we all observed, Phil concluded, "The only thing that's changed has been the people."

And one thing that strikes you about the people around the Square,

Soon we were on our way again, and Phil had to struggle a bit to get through the parking lot because of a car which was poorly parked, making about a 45-degree angle with the white parking lines. A girl was getting out of the door. Phil pointed her out and derided her parking, then added, "She's probably some student taking some highly intellectual course?"

We ringed the Common and headed up Garden Street past the grave-yard and the Ed School, and Phil directed our attention to the Radcliffe Yard. "Behind that wall on the left is an institution whose students graduate with as high an honor as any man from Harvard. It's called Radcliffe School for Girls."

But Phil's big joke of the day was yet to come. Mt. Auburn Cemetery is on our tour, and Phil told us that 175 acres were used up and that five remained. "But there's one stipulation on the last five acres," Phil said. "No