“Qui ętes-vous, Bob Dylan?” Jean-Luc Goddard
“There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity.” Narrator, I’m Not There
The Todd Haynes anti-biopic I’m Not There, screening at the Cinema this month, has polarized cinematic and Dylan scholars equally. Allegedly subtitled “Suppositions on a Film Concerning Bob Dylan,” it has been hailed as the best movie of the year by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice and the worst movie of the year in the upstart journal n+1. Dylan, America’s twentieth century Whitman, contains multitudes, but whereas Whitman merely contradicted himself, Dylan has spent much of his career actively engaged in disavowing the personas he chose for himself just as he was donning the next. I’m Not There anchors a series on the shape-shifting musical genius.
A multi-layered meditation on the semiotics of celebrity, I’m Not There is simultaneously about and not about Bob Dylan—and somehow manages to perfectly capture his aura. The Pirandellian six characters in search of an author include a cross-dressing replicant (Blanchett), a manufactured folkie (Bale), a method actor (Ledger), an aging western outlaw (Gere), a young and black Woody Guthrie impersonator (Franklin), and the French symbolist poet Rimbaud (Whishaw). At least one critic has compared, without embarrassment, the film’s incessant referencing and cataloguing as analogous to Finnegan’s Wake. That piece in Film Comment called it “an essay-poem on the myth” of Dylan. “Haynes has previously tried constructing Chinese boxes of allusion, quotation, and pastiche in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine but he masters this strategy in I’m Not There. The film’s thematic center of gravity is the tragicomic success-and-failure of Dylan as a political prophet.”
Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is a documentary that fondly reviews the life of the legendary artist and political activist who in some sense represented the old guard Dylan originally rebelled against. Seeger, who represented the apotheosis of the “political prophet,” did everything from pen the most famous slogan songs before “Blowin’ In the Wind” to introduce Martin Luther King to “We Shall Overcome.” Seeger also allegedly tried to take an axe to the sound system during Dylan’s performance at Newport in 1965—an anecdote conspicuously absent from Power of Song.
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, a captivating new documentary by Murray Lerner, depicts that performance as well as the two years leading up to it. By 1963, Dylan was already the premier star of the folk movement, and the film bears witness to the three concerts in which he shed his first skin.
D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 fly on the wall documentary Don’t Look Back, and the recent follow-up 65 Revisited present an intimate portrait of a brash young Dylan attempting to extricate himself from the stifling folk scene on tour in England in 1965. By turns funny and offensive, self-absorbed and self-effacing, Dylan births his post-folk persona in front of Pennebaker’s dangerously close lens. In addition to shooting highly personal footage of an artist in a period of (sometimes literally) violent transition, Pennebaker captured some of the last footage of Dylan before his motorcycle accident forced him into seclusion. When Don’t Look Back was released in 1967, it was the first glimpse audiences had of Dylan in almost two years. Hilariously argumentative to the point of abusive, Dylan launches an offensive against a folk community that has begun to label him a Judas, even as he creates the uber-cool character he will inhabit until the end of the decade. Cate Blanchett’s performance in I’m Not There brilliantly mirrors and twists the Dylan Pennebaker presents, giving us a character just as enigmatic, at times as annoying as a precocious child, but constantly engaging. Of the film, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote “A fast 65 minutes, 65 Revisited is best appreciated as an extension of Don’t Look Back, a kind of cinematic footnote.”
In Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Dylan attempts to parlay his celebrity into a film career. For his first album in three years, Dylan scored the music to the film; he also plays Alias, a bizarre character that joins Billy after his infamous escape from a Lincoln County jail. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” became a huge hit, and Dylan’s work led him to record and then tour with The Band. The quiet elegance of the film is echoed in I’m Not There’s western segment—which features a Richard Gere who calls himself Billy and longs for the simplicity of the Old West.
In The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese takes his first crack at dealing with Dylan by documenting the final concert of Dylan’s former backing group in 1976. The film focuses on the swan song of The Band, the group that joined up with and reenergized Dylan during his transition from acoustic to electric and his seclusion at Big Pink following his motorcycle accident. It features a raucous performance by a Bob Dylan just off his 1975 Rolling Thunder Review. Preacher hat pulled down over lank curls, Dylan rips into “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” with a rock star swagger that put the final nails in the coffin of his folk persona. If Scorsese’s 2005 No Direction Home represents the manufactured public relations persona that is Bob Dylan’s current incarnation, The Last Waltz captures the last fascinating moments of the genius.
Through the lenses of some of America’s top directors, this series captures facets of one of the most important and enigmatic icons in 20th century music and culture. Bob Dylan on Screen was made possible with the generous support of the Atkinson Forum in American Studies.