In Gimme Shelter, the famed documentary duo of the Maysles Brothers are on the ground at the ill-fated 1969 Altamont Free Concert, and a man in the audience is stabbed to death while the Rolling Stones perform on stage. In discussing the the film, a colleague of mine asked: Are we to consider that Mick Jagger is watching the same film that we’re watching, that in Gimme Shelter we’re watching Jagger watching Gimme Shelter? Isn’t he part of the audience of the film in the same way that we’re with the Rolling Stones, not with the Altamont audience, when the stabbing goes down?

It’s an intriguing concept to parse and lies at the heart of why Gimme Shelter is so much more potent than what you might expect from a concert documentary — it’s not just that there’s footage of someone really dying in the film, it’s in how the film presents that death and lenses it through the shattering of barriers between spectator and performer.

Consider that even though the majority of the film is comprised of performances by the Stones (along with Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, and the Flying Burrito Brothers), the film never feels like it’s actually about those performances. This isn’t just the weight of history falling on the film; it’s announced from the very beginning with the framing device the Maysles use: they confront Jagger and the rest of the Stones with the footage from Altamont, and play back a phone call in which a representative of the Hell’s Angels defends their actions at the concert. (The killing was committed by one of their gang and appears to be self-defense.)

We know the end of the story at the outset, and the result is that the film has a quality of suspense and terror that pervades the whole piece. We know that every performance we see, and every scene that seems perfectly mundane, is one step closer to disaster — such as with the negotiations for the concert venue, a torturous process that eventually lands on the Altamont Speedway with the metaphysical weight more befitting, say, the Crucifixion.

The film specifically examines the role of the concert space and how the performer and the audience interact in that space. There’s a charged energy that emanates from the stage and tries to enthrall everyone it can reach. The bands have nominal control – when chaos looms, Jagger and the others continually make pleas with the audience that they will refuse to play until order is restored – but this control is revealed to be a farce. The Maysles Brothers capture the swarm of the crowd with tiny micro-vignettes of the people with their wild attire (or lack of any at all), continuously in tension with the authority radiating from the stage. The stage issues orders and commands, as when they tell people to not climb up the scaffolding, and the notion of the performer-spectator relationship here is one of barely-maintained order.

The camera pops into the fray during times of calm but is always at a remove and up on stage when the tension ramps up. Because of this, our perception as a film audience is lashed together with the perspectives of the performers. We look and see the teeming masses of the crowd — they demand their pound of flesh from Jagger. They present a perpetual threat to the artists, and in this film that threat extends to us.

A motif that runs through the film is the use of the close-up on Jagger. This rock-and-roll legend’s image should be iconic, exerting the force of propaganda. Yet every time we take a look at him, there’s always a look of confusion. He’s always a step behind in trying to process what he’s seeing, whether it’s the chaos on the ground during the concert or the jumbled confusion of the footage after-the-fact.

The film ends on a freeze-frame of that blank, despondent look, one that despairs over ever fully grasping the weight of what happened at Altamont. Yet at the same time, the question becomes: if the Maysles hadn’t been there, if they hadn’t captured the incident on film, would Altamont have the significance it does today? How much is the film a work that captures the reality of a moment in history, and how much is it something, by its own sheer aesthetic force, creating that moment in history?

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “Gimme Shelter echoes the primacy of scholarship in the Abrahamic religions through its prevalance of foreground obstructions.” In a way, Altamont did signal a bloody end to the idealism of the 1960s, an expulsion from Eden paid in blood…)