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The easy access that Sixties pioneers of cinema verite had to rock performers enabled them to make documentaries like Don't Look Back, DA Pennebaker's account of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain, and Gimme Shelter, the Mayles brothers' film on the 1969 Altamont concert at which Hell's Angels stabbed a man to death while the Rolling Stones were performing Sympathy for the Devil.
But very soon, with rock music a big industry, the concert film, that offshoot of the documentary, came to be controlled by the performers, who hired top directors to do their bidding the way Renaissance princes and popes engaged the old masters to paint portraits.
The Stones, the subject of numerous concert pictures, engaged one of the greatest living directors, Martin Scorsese (who 35 years ago featured their music in Mean Streets) to direct Shine a Light and he has made a fine, if orthodox, job of it.
The original idea was to build the picture around their Bigger Bang world tour. But Scorsese apparently persuaded them to film at a single venue and chose the relatively intimate Beacon Theatre in New York rather than those immense, stadiums that can make a concert resemble a Nuremberg rally. This ruled out the giant sets involving tonnes of equipment with which touring rock performers leave their carbon footprints on the planet.
The movie begins in grainy verite black and white with amusing discussions on the model for the set, which appears to have been created without proper agreement between Scorsese and Mick Jagger, but it proves to be a simple affair once the concert starts. It's a golden lattice screen, lit from behind, featuring a large rising sun or, more properly, in view of the performers' ages - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts are all in their sixties - a setting sun.
The concert is introduced by Bill Clinton (accompanied to the show by Hillary and Chelsea), who before going on stage remarks that the Stones in their quiet way are as concerned with the environment as U2's Bono. Clinton's Foundation is a beneficiary of the concert, but his presence is another indication, if we still need it after Jagger sent his son to Eton and accepted a knighthood, that the Stones are now part of a new establishment.
Bill knows a few things about sex and drugs (uninhaled of course) and rock'n'roll, but his exit line is: 'Thank you and God bless you all' before their Satanic Majesties take the stage.
No doubt this haggard quartet of elderly rockers (no Dorian Grays they) could have taken the leads in Last Orders or a musical version of Last of the Summer Weed, but here they are doing what they do best ('The thing is, we love what we do,' says Richards). Although they have backing from some younger singers and musicians, they're on stage throughout, performing songs from the band's 46-year career.
Their stamina is extraordinary with Jagger singing his head off while hopping around like a demented combination of cockerel, ostrich and pogo-stick champion. At the end of one number, Watts turns from his drums to a nearby camera and blows out his cheeks and exhales the way someone his age might after crossing the finishing line in the London Marathon. Scorsese has brought in eight major cinematographers using 18 cameras and their superbly edited work is dramatic and dynamic. There's nothing flashy here, no slow motion, the point being to serve the music.
