A will, a wake, a coronation. Calling Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz a concert film is about as accurate as calling Moby Dick a manual on whaling. It is an exercise in taxonomic containment that betrays its profound nature, its boundless ambition, and its status as an almost inexplicable cinematic object. Here, Scorsese is not documenting an event; he is orchestrating a sacred representation, a baroque epitaph for an entire era, staging the death and transfiguration of an idea of music, community, and, ultimately, America.

To understand the work, one must first understand the demiurge. In 1976, Scorsese was not a music documentary filmmaker. He was the feverish chronicler of asphalt and guilt, the author of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. He was a director obsessed with tribe, ritual, violence, and the impossible redemption of his characters. His arrival at The Band was no accident. He sees in them, and especially in their charismatic leader and narrator Robbie Robertson, another of his street gangs: a brotherhood forged in the fire of countless seedy clubs, united by an unwritten code and now facing a showdown. The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day is not just a location; it is the ring of Raging Bull before its time, the profane church where the last mass is celebrated. Scorsese does not just place the cameras; he uses them like brushes, transforming the stage into a Caravaggio-esque canvas. Each musician is struck by blades of light that sculpt their faces, isolating them in a dense, almost material darkness. The use of 35mm film, entrusted to an elite group of cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács, tears the event from the news and delivers it to the epic. We are not watching a news report, we are watching an opera where sweat glistens like sacred dew and amplifier cables are the pulsating veins of a dying organism.

The film alternates performances with a series of interviews that are the real narrative and meta-textual engine of the work. Here emerges the fundamental dialectic of The Last Waltz: that between myth and reality, between the official story and the unspoken truth that shines through the tired faces. Robbie Robertson, eloquent, charming, almost an executive producer of his own legend, constructs the story of a strategic and glorious retreat. Sixteen years “on the road,” he says, were enough. It is a lucid, almost literary narrative. But one need only observe the other members to perceive the cracks in this facade. Levon Helm, the southern, earthy soul of the group, chews his words with a melancholy that borders on resentment. His eyes betray a weariness and a different story, a story of dispossession that he would later recount in his autobiography, This Wheel's on Fire. Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the latter with the lost look of a poet who has seen too much, appear as tragic figures, ghosts wandering around their own funeral banquet. Scorsese, consciously or not, captures this disintegration. The film thus becomes an almost “Rashomon-esque” work: the chronicle of an end told from multiple points of view, even if only one—Robertson's—holds the microphone.

But it is on stage that the mythology takes flight. The event is not just The Band's farewell concert; it is a gathering of the gods of rock Olympus. Each guest is not just a “guest star,” but a living chapter in the history from which The Band emerged. Muddy Waters, the patriarch, the Big Bang of electric blues, appears with the dignity of a king and unleashes a telluric “Mannish Boy” that seems to shake the foundations of the venue. He is the father returning to claim his descendants. Then comes Van Morrison, a demonic Irish leprechaun who, in “Caravan,” seems possessed by a Bacchic spirit, kicking the air in an ecstatic trance before collapsing offstage. Neil Young offers a fragile and moving version of “Helpless,” with a detail that has become nerd legend: a conspicuous white smudge of cocaine on his nose, removed in post-production with an expensive and pioneering rotoscoping technique (the infamous “coke-nail”). Joni Mitchell, ethereal and perfect, sings “Coyote,” bringing an almost supernatural grace to that den of weary wolves.

Each performance is a microcosm. Eric Clapton's solo in “Further On Up the Road” is a chivalrous duel with Robertson, a passing of the torch between titans of the six-string. But the climax, the apotheosis, is the arrival of Bob Dylan. The phantom of the opera, the man who transformed The Hawks into The Band. His appearance is that of a reluctant messiah, almost annoyed, but once on stage, he unleashes a biblical energy. His “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” is a storm, a reminder of those electric and controversial days that forged their shared legend. The final apotheosis of “I Shall Be Released,” with all the guests on stage, takes on the contours of a gospel hymn, a collective prayer that does not ask for salvation, but simply for farewell. A liberation, in fact.

To contextualize “The Last Waltz” is to understand its borderline position. The year is 1976. The utopia of Woodstock has long since dissolved into the nightmare of Altamont and the disillusionment of the decade. America is still licking its wounds from Vietnam and Watergate. Rock music is changing: on the one hand, the iconoclastic fury of punk is about to explode, on the other, the synthetic patina of disco music and the corporate gigantism of stadium rock. The Band, with its roots aesthetic, its almost fictitious and timeless Americana, with its vocal harmonies that sound like the wood of an old porch, represents a world that is fading away. “The Last Waltz” is not a funeral for a band, but for a sound, an ethic. It is the last glimmer of an authenticity that, paradoxically, is celebrated with sumptuous and highly controlled cinematic artifice. It is as if Scorsese had taken Faulkner's dusty prose and rewritten it with Visconti's grandiloquence.

The genius of the film lies in this intrinsic contradiction: it is a celebration of authenticity constructed in a completely artificial way. It is a document that lies shamelessly in order to tell a greater truth. The truth of an ending. The truth that every community, even the most solid, is destined to fracture. The last image of the film, after the credits, is not a musician or a cheering crowd. It is an empty shot of the Winterland stage, now deserted, which Scorsese films in the studio, unable to do so on the night of the concert. A final illusion. A sleight of hand that reveals the very nature of cinema and rock ‘n’ roll: creating worlds, building myths and then, with the same skill, making them disappear in a cloud of smoke, leaving us alone with the echo of the music and the poignant awareness that, as the final caption says, “This film should be played loud!”. An imperative that is also an epitaph.