In 1965, a 40-year-old film-maker from Evanston, Illinois, Donn Alan “DA” Pennebaker, accompanied Bob Dylan on a British tour. He just let his cameras roll and roll. The result was two of the most important films about rock ever made. One was Martin Scorsese’s Dylan two-parter No Direction Home, which drew extensively on Pennebaker’s footage. The other was Pennebaker’s own Don’t Look Back. The latter is now out on DVD for the first time, accompanied by 65 Revisited, a film recently spliced together from unused footage.

Don’t Look Back is an astonishing piece of work for two reasons. First, it caught Dylan just as he was tiring of being the lone folk/ protest singer with an acoustic guitar and was about to invent high-intelligence electric rock. Second, the style of the film transformed our view not just of Dylan, but of the whole world of popular music. After Don’t Look Back, there could be no more Elvis in Girls! Girls! Girls! or Cliff Rich-ard in Summer Holiday. There were to be no more arch fictions now that music and life on the road were the stars. “It kind of doesn’t matter whether it’s a good film or a bad film,” Pennebaker muses. “That’s history, and it kind of became history because of Dylan. I don’t think my fantastic film-making turned it into history.”

He is being too modest. The film is full of brilliantly captured moments of high drama. Dylan’s performances are, it need hardly be said, spine-tingling. But there is also the savage exchange between Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and hotel staff complaining about the noise. There is the brutal confrontation with the earnest science student. There is Dylan singing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue for Donovan. And there is the interview with a Time magazine journalist in which Dylan tears apart the man’s entire raison d’être. The man makes the fatal mistake of asking Dylan: “Do you care about what you sing?”. It produces a world-class put-down: “How could I answer that question if you’ve got the nerve to ask me?” Pennebaker got all this on celluloid because he used the camera in the most basic way: as an eye. “Scorsese and I both came out of the same place – New York, at a time when people were trying to imitate the Italian film-makers. We filmed in the streets because we didn’t have any sets. We used whatever we had. That’s what drew me into film-making. I was sure I could do it all by myself, and that really pulls you on.”

He believes in film as a unique way of capturing history. He is, for example, particularly proud that his 1993 documentary about the Clinton presidential campaign, The War Room, was called in by Downing Street as a how-to-do-it guide. “They studied it for a week,” he says. “Not because they were interested in the film-making; they didn’t give a shit about the film-making. They wanted to know how Clinton did it. That’s wonderful. I take that as a tribute.”

The history of Don’t Look Back is, of course, Dylan’s. Pennebaker compares the documentary significance of this with the publication of Byron’s letters from Pisa: “It was a historic moment that not many people recognised. It was when the raised middle finger became the credo of the artist. Before that, artists weren’t very sure of themselves. I don’t think they took that stand, which was, for Byron, ‘F*** you’.”

Crucially, there was a high degree of collusion between Dylan and the camera. Pennebaker rejectsthe “fly-on-the-wall” label, as everybody knew the camera was watching, and much of the film is plainly a camera-conscious performance. Dylan’s baffling encounters with the press are staged as drama. “The fly is always looking for fly paper,” Pennebaker says. “I didn’t have that problem.”

In spite of which, the film, once completed, seemed to have nowhere to go. There were financial squabbles, and immense problems in getting any kind of distribution. It looked too “ratty”, and people were not ready for its poor lighting, the seemingly random editing, the lack of clear narrative line and the sheer strangeness of the combination of bizarre, haunting songs such as It’s Alright, Ma and Subterranean Homesick Blues, and these innocent but adoring English kids. “When I look at those songs, I really believe it will never happen again. They were the key; they were what held that dour English audience bound to their seats.”

In the end, Don’t Look Back opened at a porn cinema in San Francisco. “The guy told me it was just what he was looking for – it looked like a porn film, but it wasn’t,” Pennebaker says. “It was the rattiest-looking theatre you ever saw, but it always had a line outside. It played there for a year.”

Pennebaker is insistent that it was the moment and the artist that made the film. Dylan was plainly running out of patience with his acoustic stardom, hence his savage air. But there are also frequent flashes of tenderness and concern for the fans. The man was on a knife edge, swinging between violently contrasting moods. Joan Baez appears repeatedly to calm him, and Grossman, the watchful money man, never seems to leave his side. 65 Revisited brings in another character: Nico, who made her name singing with the Velvet Underground. She is a strange presence, strange even to Dylan, who wrote the ambivalent She Belongs to Me about her.

Pennebaker pulled off a similar coup with David Bowie in his 1973 film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. But he pulled out of filming the Rolling Stones at the Altamont festival, a disastrous occasion that resulted in murder: “I could smell the bad things happening, months before the event. And, basically, Mick Jagger is an actor – he’s pretending. Not that the performances weren’t very filmable.” The best subject, he says, is passion, and “a moment in life when people make a decision to go round a corner”. Then the magic happens, as it does in Don’t Look Back. “These films get you something to look at that tells you where you are, and people kind of want to know that.”

www.bryanappleyard.com

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010