The most important shot in Gimme Shelter is not the stabbing. Nor is it the explosion of primal violence that tears through the veil of the concert. The definitive shot, the black heart beating at the center of the film, comes in a sterile editing room. Mick Jagger, wrapped in a fur coat that now looks like an inappropriate stage costume, watches himself on the small screen of the moviola. He is watching, for the first time, the exact moment when his rock carnival became a sacrificial ritual. His face, usually a rubber mask of androgynous arrogance, is motionless, almost catatonic. It is the gaze of Orpheus turning and seeing Eurydice vanish forever into the underworld. At that precise moment, the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin are not simply documenting the end of a concert; they are filming the consciousness of an era watching itself die, forced to replay the tape of its own failure.

This is the meta-textual genius that elevates Gimme Shelter from a simple rockumentary to a thanatological watershed. Unlike its contemporary and antithetical counterpart Woodstock (1970), which celebrated the utopian triumph of counterculture in a riot of mud, rain, and brotherhood, the Maysles' film is the autopsy of that same dream. If Woodstock is the Homeric epic of “flower power,” Gimme Shelter is its Greek tragedy, complete with a chorus of Hells Angels serving as avenging Furies and a tragic hero, Jagger, whose hubris lies in believing he can summon Dionysus without paying the price. The film unfolds like a perfect chiasmus: it begins with the controlled, almost corporate triumph of Madison Square Garden, where the Rolling Stones are rock gods boxed into an arena, masters of their electric liturgy. And it ends with the descent into the Hades of Altamont, an open, formless space, a non-place where every structure, musical and social, collapses.

The most fitting parallel is not with cinema, but with literature. The journey from New York to Northern California is a dark and distorted echo of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The Stones, like Marlow, travel up the river of their own fame, pushing further and further west, further and further into the wild, in search of a “free” event that will be the final catharsis of their tour. Altamont becomes their inner station, a place where civilization—represented by the fragile scaffolding of the stage and Jagger's feeble pleas into the microphone (“Brothers and sisters... why are we fighting?”)—dissolves in the face of atavistic violence. The Hells Angels, hired for five hundred dollars' worth of beer in an act of naivety bordering on criminal idiocy, are not rock ‘n’ roll's bodyguards; they are the embodiment of its repressed Id, the brutality that lay hidden beneath the surface of free love. They are Kurtz's savages, loyal not to an ideal but to a primal code of tribal violence. And “the horror... the horror” is not a phrase whispered in the jungle, but is stamped on the face of every viewer who realizes that the party has ended in blood.

The Maysles, pioneers of Direct Cinema, apply their philosophy of “uncontrolled truth” with terrifying consistency. Their camera is not a compassionate eye, but a ruthless, almost entomological witness. It frames the lawyers negotiating the rights to the tour with the same coldness with which it captures a brawl in the crowd. This apparent neutrality is, in fact, the most powerful of aesthetic positions. By rejecting omniscient narration, the film forces the viewer to come to terms with the chaos, to seek meaning in a mosaic of fragments: the dog wandering on stage, the naked couples writhing in the mud, the terrified face of a girl, the blade that glitters for an instant. It is an aesthetic reminiscent of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, a “Ascent to Calvary” where Christ is an effeminate rocker singing “Sympathy for the Devil” while around him a diablerie of sweaty bodies, evil drugs, and collective paranoia rages. The choice to include that song in the montage of the massacre is one of the most chilling editorial decisions in the history of cinema, an ironic counterpoint accusing the band of playing with fire, of flirting with a darkness that ultimately devoured them.

The film also serves as a valuable document of the collapse of an entire performance aesthetic. Throughout the 1960s, rock had been a ritual of collective liberation. But at Altamont, the ritual is reversed. The performer is no longer the shaman who leads the tribe, but the sacrificial victim who barely manages to escape the altar. The distance between stage and audience is bridged not by a communal embrace, but by a violent invasion of the field. Jagger, who had built his entire career on ambiguity and Luciferian provocation, finds himself playing the part of the high school principal trying to quell a brawl. His performance, so powerful in arenas, becomes impotent and almost pathetic in the face of harsh reality. It is the epiphany of the Lacanian Real that bursts into the symbolic fantasy of rock, a gash that reveals the impotence of art in the face of life, or rather, death.

There is a moment, before the disaster, when the film seems to allow itself a glimmer of hope. It is the sequence shot at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, where the band records “Wild Horses.” In that closed room, the music is pure, distilled, an acoustic melancholy that seems to come from another universe compared to the noise of Altamont. It is a lyrical interlude, an oasis of controlled creativity that makes the subsequent fall even more dizzying. It is the dream before the nightmare, the last breath of innocence before history—with a capital H, made up of racial tensions, the Vietnam War, and the murders of the Manson Family that hung in the Californian air in December 1969—presented the bill. Meredith Hunter, the African-American boy killed a few steps from the stage, is not just a victim; he is the tragic symbol of all the contradictions that the hippie counterculture had clumsily tried to ignore.

In the end, we return to that editing room. Jagger watches and rewatches the frame. The Maysles force him to watch it a second time, in slow motion, as if to certify the event, to make it undeniable. That fixed gaze says it all: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of guilt, but above all the cold realization that an era has come to an end. Not with a bang, as Eliot sang, but with the clatter of a moviola. Gimme Shelter is not just a film about a concert gone wrong. It is the death certificate of the dream of the 1960s, a cinematic essay on the precarious nature of every utopia, on the ease with which a gathering for peace and love can turn into a bacchanal of death. An epitaph engraved not on stone, but on 16mm film, which continues to spin endlessly, showing us the exact moment when the music stopped.