Martin Scorsese's movie about the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light, has opened the Berlin Film Festival, marking "the first time a major film festival has dared to open with a non-fiction movie." Scorsese has been auditioning for this job for a long time. He worked on as an editor on such earlier rock docs as Woodstock, The Medicine Ball Caravan, and Elvis on Tour long before redefining the use of rock music in narrative movies in Mean Streets (where Robert De Niro's crazy badass Johnny Boy makes a show-boating entrance gliding into a bar to the tune of "Jumpin' Jack Flash") and perfecting the concert-documentary form with the 1978 The Last Waltz. As for the Stones, this project represents something of a return to one of their old habits — linking up with a name filmmaker to perhaps capture the "definitive" Rolling Stones experience on film — that for most of the past several years has been sublimated by Pay-Per-View TV gigs. (Classic examples include Jean-Luc Godard's studio-set Sympathy for the Devil, the Maysles brothers' end-of-the-60s Gimme Shelter, and Hal Ashby's 1983 Let's Spend the Night Together, which turned out as an accidental record of why the 1980s would not be remembered as the creative high point of either the Stones' or Hal Ashby's careers. The most notable of all these films is probably Robert Frank's 1972 Cocksucker Blues, which Mick Jagger had legally suppressed, thus giving it automatic street cred.) The new movie, which reportedly brought the house down in Berlin, was filmed over the course of two days at New York City's Beacon Theater in 2006, with guest appearances by Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera, by an all-star camera crew headed by Robert Richardson. (The performance footage is intercut with highlights from decades' worth of Stones interviews. Questioner: What do you do before going on stage? Keith Richards: "I wake up." Not at a couple of shows I've seen, you didn't. Hiiiiiii-oh!) In addition to giving audiences the chance to see the band perform some of its standard numbers on a big screen, the movie also gave Scorsese the chance to preserve one of his standard numbers: it opens with him having a high-pitched meltdown because nobody will give him a finalized song list, and without it, he can't be sure that he'll have one of his seventeen cameras pointed right where he wants it for the first shot.