The disaster at Altamont threw the youth prophets and merchandisers into a painful dilemma; a new gruesome reality had suddenly emerged and had to be somehow confronted and, hopefully, packaged and sold. Caught in this crunch were several veteran cinema-verite documentarians, David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, whose cameras had captured all the action, including the murder. Like the dazed, bleeding hippies the Maysles were caught in the center of violent change. Altamont became for the Maysles, as it had for the hippies, a symbolic, watershed event. Altamont was the cauldron in which the Maysles' method of film-making, both vices and virtues, were tested and magnified and it is a test which they failed.

The Maysles brothers were probably not the best representatives of cinema-verite to take this test; even before Altamont, they had one of the shiftiest aesthetics going. When accused of altering reality, they would contend they were artists; when accused of being second-rate artists, they would contend they were simply documentarians…. Critics and viewers often found themselves caught in the classic double squeeze: did the Maysles' admitted intervention in and tampering with reality serve the Truth as they claimed, or did it serve their particular, and rather unrewarding, truth?…

[Now] the Maysles with Gimme Shelter have become the exclusive documentarians of a major event with serious ramifications, and [this] tired cinema-verite debate takes an urgent turn. (p. 52)

Even if the Maysles will not publicly admit it, they sensed the need for an artist overview in Gimme Shelter. At least they have applied more manipulations to the reality of Gimme Shelter than they have to the reality of any of their previous films. The film shifts freely from three different times and places; Rolling Stones Jagger and Charlie Watts are allowed to comment on footage of both the Altamont and Madison Square Garden concerts; evaluative radio commentary about Altamont is introduced before the concert comes on screen. These are all obvious artistic organizing devices and because of them … the film can and should be judged artistically….

In Gimme Shelter there are at least four definite artistic decisions which indicate the quality of the filmmakers. They are:

(1) artificially created suspense. Gimme Shelter is structured with both ends moving toward the middle. The Altamont concert occurred in the middle of the Stones' U.S. tour, and the film freely intercuts between the finish of the tour … and the beginning…. The chronology of the tour put the Maysles in an awkward position: if they had followed chronology everything after Altamont would have been a let down. Instead, the Maysles opted for another mistake, to hype the film toward the murder finale. In so doing they create phoney suspense (since everyone knows it's coming) and get neither distance nor involvement. After an hour and a half of artificial build-up, the murder itself is a let-down, just a scrap of film with one man stabbing another. The audience has great expectations for Gimme Shelter, and the Maysles in effect prey on those expectations rather than transcending them….

(2) montage cliches. The Maysles shoot their montages as if they were laying out a special supplement for Life…. The montages fit into pre-existing categories and in no way enlarge upon the conventional myth of rock audiences. The concert audience is somehow expected to be the backboard for murder and tragedy, yet it is given little chance for resonance.

(3) parallel cutting. Perhaps the Maysles' most irresponsible artistic intervention occurs in their film juxtaposition. Many examples could be cited, but one stands out: the first section of Gimme Shelter contains footage of Tina Turner singing "I've Been Loving You Too Long" at Madison Square Garden. (p. 53)

Taken in its entirety, the scene is the most vicious, demeaning treatment of a person I have ever seen in a documentary. Seen apart from the film Tina Turner's act has a grinding, spine-chilling effect, but the act must be allowed to build in time with all attention riveted on the singer. By cutting Tina Turner off from both the attention and time span she requires, the Maysles have turned her into an obscene caricature. Such juxtaposition not only shows a bad sense of timing, but also a criminal disrespect for the raw material of the film itself—the power of music.

(4) a bogus sense of perspective. The editing table sequences in which David Maysles allows Jagger and Watts to comment on film footage does much more than permit a more dramatic chronology to the film. Maysles asks Jagger and Watts, not [anyone else] to comment on the Altamont footage; the film thereby implies that Jagger and Watts have a special perspective on the event. Yet any astute viewer of the film knows the opposite is true: the Stones had only a hint of what was actually happening. (pp. 53-4)

These failed artistic devices suggest that the Maysles sought to bring an organizing aesthetic to the film, yet were unable to successfully bring it under control. The result is a film which employs just enough artistic editorializing to accomplish its limited ends: to be "true" to the superficial reality of a time and place—the ultimate Altamount bummer. The events shown in the film certainly did happen, but the perspective given to them is misleading. Gimme Shelter makes dozens of inferences (about Tina Turner, Jagger, Hell's Angels, rock audiences) which simply cannot be taken at face value. In another time and place (and in another Maysles film) their face value might have had meaning, but in Gimme Shelter the viewer knows the face value all to well and seeks the lasting value. The shifting aesthetic shifts once too often: one cannot separate the event from the second-rate artistic vision.

The final image of Gimme Shelter is not, to my mind, the murder of Meredith Hunter, but the shot of David Maysles explaining to Jagger over the editing table, "This gives us complete freedom. We may only be on you for a minute, and then be somewhere else." Gimme Shelter shows the Maysles to be infatuated with what they can do, not concerned with what they must do.

Gimme Shelter remains a film of shallow intentions; its aesthetics seem those of possibility and opportunism rather than necessity and moral commitment. (p. 54)