Shots From the Canon #17: ‘Gimme Shelter’ (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)

Written by Amanda Wilder

Gimme Shelter is the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker. After watching it the first time, I rewound the tape and watched it again. Up until then, only in poems by poets with documentary impulses (William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) had I found the nuances of living, seen and unseen, articulated so fully. If “the project of poetry is …