Cannes Film Festival Has Had Its Musical Moments From The Stones To The Spice Girls
deadline.comIn 1971, the Cannes Film Festival opened with a screening of Gimme Shelter by Albert and David Maysles, an immersive, vérité depiction of two weeks in the touring life of the Rolling Stones.
If that was all it did, it might have been forgotten by now. But by a terrible freak of chance, the filmmakers followed the band to the most notorious concert of their entire career — the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, CA, where the Stones, along with Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, were set to perform a free concert for 300,000 people on Dec.
6, 1969. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” Albert said later. “We just had a childish faith that having seen the Stones and getting along with them, there might be a feature film there.”At the apparent suggestion of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead (who were originally set to perform at the festival but ended up steering clear due to serious concerns about violence), the Stones had the bright idea to hire Hell’s Angels to police it, a calamitous decision that would lead to chaos and even murder.
Gimme Shelter juxtaposed the devilish high of the band’s performance with Mick Jagger’s ashen face as he later watches — and rewatches — blurry footage of the incident on a Moviola.
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