One scene defines D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Dont Look Back (the title omits the usual apostrophe), which chronicles Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour at the ascension of his stardom. It’s the long shot from behind Dylan as he performs on stage surrounded by darkness, a single spotlight bearing down on him.
One scene also defines Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, which chronicles the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” when Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for the world heavyweight championship. It shows Ali in his corner just before the fight’s second round starts. He is staring down his opponent, primed to beat him senseless, then raising his arms to rally the massive crowd before plunging back into the fight.
These are iconic moments of two men performing for huge audiences, one who hardly acknowledges the crowd and the other who weaponizes it. When these documentaries depict Dylan and Ali, they are more than just influential figures: they have become gods, men who can command the attention of entire countries.
They have opposite reactions to their glorification, however, and the films take opposite approaches in their depictions of men elevated to godlike status: Dont Look Back documents in real time Bob Dylan’s reluctance to be deified, while When We Were Kings recounts after the fact Muhammad Ali’s embrace of his legend. Both films, though, embody the struggle documentaries face in depicting their subjects genuinely, and the inherent legend created by putting a figure on camera.
As Dylan and Ali embark on their trips abroad, they are not merely famous people venturing into a new environment. They are the linchpins of entire ecosystems. Everywhere they go, an orbit follows them: media and fans, agents and promoters, and not least of all the documentary crew making the films that bear witness to this spectacle. To all those who circle them, our central figures cannot merely be people; they must inhabit prescribed roles. They must be stars, prophets, liberators, kings. Dylan and Ali, in these films, are made to perform at all times and to enact the legend thrust upon them. They respond to this pressure very differently.
Bob Dylan: The Reluctant Deity
Bob Dylan in Dont Look Back dodges his cultural importance whenever possible. At this point in history, he was dubbed “the voice of a generation”, a prophet who used the old practice of folk music as an engine for the era’s social change. A reporter we see dictating a story over the phone describes Dylan’s performance as “not so much singing as sermonizing”. This was a label he was uncomfortable with, both creatively and personally. He even refuses to identify as a folk musician throughout the film.
Nevertheless, everyone wants something from this exalted herald. Reporters want to learn the motives behind his work. English musicians want his advice on emulating him. Others want the glory of merely associating with him. Dylan shows varying degrees of respect to all these people, but he is always cagey about discussing his work.
His responses are either blithe, sardonic, or aggressive when pressed to explain his music. At a press conference early in the Dont Look Back, he tells a reporter that his real message is “Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb.” Facing a similar press conference at the end of the film, clearly worn down by weeks of always having to be “on” for everyone, he launches a tirade at a Time reporter about the untrustworthiness of the media. When a college student comes to interview him for his school newspaper, Dylan subjects him to a lengthy Socratic toying, making him the object of ridicule for those in the room.
The common image of Bob Dylan has him hunched over, wearing sunglasses indoors, as though blocking connection. In its imagery, which finds him amidst endless crowds offstage and alone in a spotlight onstage,Dont Look Back suggests a reversal of the usual settings of performance: it is offstage that he is always performing, and it is only when he is on stage, alone with his music, free from the badgering of all the people who want him to be one person or another, that he can really be himself.
Muhammad Ali: A God Personified
Where Bob Dylan evades his deification, Muhammad Ali eats it up. If there is a single characterization When We Were Kings gives Ali, it is that he is a showman. Any time a camera rolls, he becomes a grand orator, part activist, part comedian.
Throughout the film, Ali seems incapable of standing still. While talking, he bounces around, shadow boxing, dancing through 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 mean I make medicine sick,” he says.
Indeed, Muhammad Ali plays to the crowd everywhere he goes, whether in the ring in front of thousands or on a desolate road in front of only a dozen. He embraces his legend at all times. In one scene, while in his training ring, he wants to prove a point. “You want me to show you this is my country?” he says to the cameras. He turns to the small crowd present and begins chanting “Ali bomaye!,” meaning “Ali, kill him!” in Lingala. Instantly, the crowd picks up the chant and magnifies it. The chant follows Ali everywhere during his time in Zaire.
More than just reveling in his fame, Muhammad Ali understands the social significance of the fight. He highlights the importance of the world’s most athletically gifted Black men fighting for a world championship in Africa, in a fight organized by Black people and held in front of a Black audience. He is a symbol of Black excellence, a beacon to unite Africans and Americans. He grabs hold of his legend and directs it towards a worthy cause. Embracing his deification makes his victory much more significant than just a boxing championship.
How Documentaries Glorify Our Gods
The stances of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali towards their deification are just as significant as the stances of the films themselves. They are very different stylistically and in the contexts of their production, and as a result, Dont Look Back remains agnostic about the legend of Bob Dylan while When We Were Kings actively promotes the legend of Muhammad Ali.
Dont Look Backis a work of direct cinema, a documentary style emphasizing a “fly on the wall” aesthetic. It minimizes filmmaker intervention and strives primarily to observe and document occurrences as they happen. There are no interviews, narration, or context provided.
We do not get text cards to introduce us to important figures as they appear; all we get is a single bit of text at the beginning to give us the setting: “London 1965.” Rather than being explicitly told a story about Bob Dylan’s UK tour, we are dropped directly into the cars, green rooms, and hotel suites with him and his companions and given events unfiltered. We must figure things out for ourselves.
Pennebaker’s camera was small and portable, and the only other crew present was one man, usually Jones Alk, with a microphone. There was no staged lighting. There was no staged anything. As such, Pennebaker’s filming process was as nonintrusive as possible, so that he could follow along with Dylan’s inner circle and capture moments as they occurred without having to plan scenes.
Dont Look Back captures Bob Dylan’s tour in real time. There is no retrospective reflection. Instead, we are rooted firmly in the present, watching events unfold in sequence with little done by the filmmaker to state their significance. In short, Dont Look Back depicts Dylan’s tour from the inside. It shows us actual events unfiltered and does not frame Dylan in one way or another. In this way, we see the legend of Dylan grow around him, from all those outside his circle who see him as a prophet and a visionary. Dont Look Back only depicts that deification, it does not participate in it.
When We Were Kings tells the story of the Rumble in the Jungle from the outside. It may have originated in the tradition of direct cinema; director Leon Gast originally went to Zaire to shoot a music festival that accompanied the fight. However, when the fight was delayed six weeks following George Foreman’s injury, he turned his cameras to Muhammad Ali and captured a trove of footage. By the time the actual film was produced, 20 years after the fight, it had become a traditional documentary, looking back at the fight as a historical event rather than documenting it as it occurred.
Interviews are later added, not with primary sources like Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, but storytellers of the event in the writers Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, and cultural figures like filmmaker Spike Lee. Rather than using a restrained style that presents footage unfiltered, When We Were Kings employs frequent montage editing, often to make a specific point.
In one memorable instance, the film fades between footage of the fight just before 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 doctor had told Ali a succubus would destroy Foreman, equating Makeba and the African culture she represented with the succubus.
When We Were Kings thus delivers its perspective on the Rumble in the Jungle from after the fact, and that perspective unquestionably glorifies Ali. This glorification is most apparent in the film’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 camera, holding on a freeze frame of his energetic face before going into a montage of photos from throughout his life as a sentimental song plays.
When We Were Kings ends as Mailer and Plimpton each give their anecdotes about Ali. In this ending, the film’s status as a tribute to Ali could not be clearer. However, the film’s glorification of Ali extends beyond these most explicit instances. In its analysis of the fight, it frames Ali as invincible, as the interviewees break down the genius of his strategic moves and essentially paint his victory as inevitable, even though he was the underdog. “He was like a sleeping elephant,” actor Malick Bowens says. “You can do whatever you want around a sleeping elephant. But when he wakes up, he tramples everything.” In Dont Look Back, we see the world around Bob Dylan deify him; in When We Were Kings, the film itself does the deification.
Filmic Deification of Muhammad Ali
This deification that occurs both in and through these documentaries bears considerable dangers. In both films, we see warnings of the risks of turning men into gods, yet in both films, it happens to the central figures anyway.
When We Were Kings explicitly deifies its central figure, designed mainly to celebrate Muhammad Ali’s legacy. Yet, the film also delivers a more explicit warning about turning people into gods. Critical to the film is its setting in Zaire, not just because holding the fight there shined a cultural spotlight on the Black diaspora, but also because of the country’s political situation at the time.
Zaire was under the iron grip of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who provided the $10 million that brought the fight to Africa, and who installed a cult of personality in the country. When We Were King’s opening credits intercut footage from Ali’s career with images of racial unrest in the United States and the oppression of Mobutu’s regime in Zaire.
Under one interpretation, this montage links the political upheaval in the two countries. It thus implies that Muhammad Ali fights for the freedom of Zairians just as he fights for the freedom of Black Americans. Black people worldwide face a universal struggle, and Ali becomes a transcontinental figure of liberation.
Under another interpretation, however, Ali’s violence and larger-than-life persona are linked with the violence and bravado of Mobutu. Though more troubling, this interpretation has just as much textual support.
Mobutu acts as a dark mirror to Ali. Where Ali is made a god through how much he is revered, Mobutu attempts to more explicitly make himself a god, installing pictures of himself in seemingly every public space in Kinshasa, including the stadium holding the fight. In bringing the fight to Zaire to raise the country’s profile, Mobutu uses Ali’s legend to bolster his own, tying the two godhoods together.
The symbolism is not subtle when the film points out that the stadium Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fight in was probably literally built atop the blood of Mobutu Sese Seko’s enemies. Ali’s legend is the kind of legend Mobutu would like to have for himself. Where Ali inspires genuine affection, drawing a crowd of admirers everywhere he goes, Mobutu does not attend the fight he spent so much money to bring to his country. Norman Mailer suspects this is because he feared assassination. Through Mobutu and his cult of personality, we see the dangers of the deification Ali embraces, which the film bolsters.
This is not meant to call into question Muhammad Ali’s legacy or status as a “true hero”, as Spike Lee labels him. Ali, of course, used the legend that grew around him for good and stood firm for civil rights. Ali was, as he boasted, the greatest, but not because of his godliness, as When We Were Kings implies. He was a human being like the rest of us, with his flaws and foibles, and he used that humanity to achieve remarkable ends.
Though Ali directed his deification towards a just cause, that deification itself is still inherently dangerous, as Mobutu shows us. Through its embrace of that deification, When We Were Kings dances into dangerous territory.
Filmic Deification of Bob Dylan
In Dont Look Back, the dangers of deification are mostly seen through Dylan and his discomfort with his legend. Part of that discomfort may be a personal distaste for the reverence he constantly faces, but there is likely also an ideological rejection of deification present. Dylan did not want to be seen as a prophet, a messianic voice of a generation come to speak the truth of social change to his disciples. He wanted his audience to think for themselves, not follow him blindly. Hence, his reluctance to explain the meanings of his songs. He wanted the focus to be on the music, not on him.
With its sparse, direct cinema style and lack of glorification, Dont Look Back appears to be the more successful film at staving off the deification of its protagonist. Yet, even that success has its limits. The claim that direct cinema presents us with the unfiltered truth by merely documenting events without intervention is a myth. There may not be visible intervention in the form of interviews or narration, but Pennebaker still needed to decide when to roll his camera and what to point it at.
More significantly, he had to choose which bits of the dozens of hours of footage he collected to put in the film and how to edit it together. That represents a significant filter placed over the raw experience that direct cinema claims to give us. The footage chosen for Dont Look Back provides a narrative about its subject: in this case, that Bob Dylan is a highly influential figure who holds the power in all the situations in which he finds himself. There is a good deal of glorification present in that alone.
Mythology, Documentary Style
Neither Dont Look Back nor When We Were Kings truly captures their subjects in genuine form. Neither gives us access to the inner, private person. All we see of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali in these documentaries are performances. They are different kinds of performances to different audiences for different ends, but they are performances nonetheless. They are performances that turn them, to some degree, into gods.
This is not the fault of either film, as they could have done nothing to avoid it entirely. It is just an inevitable fact of documentary filmmaking. When you point a camera at someone and roll it, you shake them out of their natural, unobserved state. You demand a performance. When you display that performance on a screen for an audience, you create a legend about them and spread a constructed narrative.
Films like Dont Look Back and When We Were Kings, whether direct cinema documentary or retrospective tribute, can give us insight into figures like Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali and tell fascinating stories. Still, there is a danger inherent in what they do. In any documentary, the risk of making a person into a god exists.
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