Gimme Shelter (1970)

The Maysles brothers' cinema verité masterpiece captures the Rolling Stones' 1969 Altamont Free Concert as a live requiem for the 1960s counterculture, when a Hell's Angels security detail killed Meredith Hunter within four feet of the camera. The film documents 300,000 attendees in a 10-acre racetrack, leading to a 1:1,000 police-to-crowd ratio—80 times worse than Woodstock's. Its raw, unedited violence is more jarring than the polished archival rescue of #6 Summer of Soul because it offers no distance from the tragedy. The recorded 3-minute 23-second incident of Hunter's stabbing forces viewers to confront how utopian dreams collapsed under disorganization and distrust.