By now, movie audiences are quite familiar with knife slayings (“Psycho”), slow motion sequences (“Bonnie and Clyde”), cinema verite (“Faces”), and rock festivals (“Woodstock”). “Gimme Shelter”, the documentary film about the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont, makes judicious use of all these cinematic conventions, but is like none of the above films. Rather, it is like waking up on a Sunday morning in 1963 and sitting down to watch the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald on national television while a rock ’n roll album blares forth in the background. It is all that, and it is devastating.

Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zworin followed the Rolling Stones on their tour of America last year, in hopes of being able to get a film together.. Thus, “Gimme Shelter” opens with the band doing “Jumping Jack Flash” in New York. When the song is over, we cut to an editing room where Jagger, Richards, and the Maysles brothers have been viewing this film. The film keeps coming back to the