In the movie Festival (1967), Murray Lerner He assembled a documentary story of the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966. From those images, with an extraordinary sound, the assembly of The other side of the mirror. Bob Dylan Live at The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 (2007).
Without explanatory titles or voiceover, we attend Dylan’s transformation on stagethe mutation of a child of the choir to a shining pop star. From where we want to look at it, the legendary and controversial conversion of folk to Dylan’s rock is the chronicle of a search, growth and betrayal. That way in which the artist crossed the mirror, but outside the stage, he wants to tell us A Complete Unknown.
Western legends and postmodern masks
The history, mythology and masqueradas of Dylan have been present at the cinema from the beginning of his legend. We could also decipher his art rummaging in the images that have sprouted with him already around: of the films that He directed or wrote and whose extravagance buried in oblivion (Eat the document, Renaldo and Clara, Anonymous), but also in which It was directed (Pat Garret & Billy The Kid, Fire hearts) either musicalized (Young prodigious, My Own Love Song) and in which their compositions They have a remarkable weight (Easy Rider, American Beauty, The great Lebowski).
In which it is OBSERVATIONAL STUDY OBJECT (Dont look backor of Documentary anthology (No direction home); in which it becomes Multiple character (I’M not there), cartoon (Factory Girl) either silhouette (Kisses, About Llewyn Davies); in which he plays a sosias of itself (Rolling Thunder Revue) or are documents of their direct (The last waltz, Hard Rain, Bangladesh’s concert, Shadow Kingdometc…).
A transverse tour, a palimpsest on the masks of the outlaws, which called Alias In its first fictional role: the elegiac western of Peckinpah Pat Garret and Billy the Child (1973), where the subject arises Knockin ‘on Heaven’s Door.
It is not easy to break through that labyrinth that, as a succession of dreams, is part of the most emblematic genres, times and formats of American cinema from the 60s to today. As well see Todd Haynes in I’M not there (2007), It is a prism that opens in abyss to innumerable escape points.
Esteta and philosopher of postmodernity, Haynes put the suspicions already intuited from the monumental Renaldo and Clara (1978), four-hour film between document and fiction, lax rewriting rock The children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné)that Dylan and his troupe rolled (improvised) during the circus tour Rolling Thunder Revue and that they presented in Cannes and then bury her. Today it cannot be seen, and, from his images, Dylan himself next to Martin Scorsese, forty years later, the unpayable managed false documentary Rolling Thunder Revue. Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019).
I’M not there It is perhaps The definitive film-ensay about Dylan’s identitythe transgression of the biopic in the heart of Hollywood. The most fascinating thing is that Haynes connected with Dylan through Jean-Luc Godard.
Dylan the director and the influence of Godard
All the underground films directed by the Minnesota poet, both Eat the document (1968) as Renaldo and Claraas well as Anonymous (Larry Charles, 2003), who co -wrote and starred in, breathe A clearly Godardian quality (overlooked) in its form of film collage and confidence in symbolic systems.
The Dylanology of Haynes’s film, conceived as a kaleidoscope that deconstrured the Dylanian myth from the appointment and representation of his visual iconography, was also based on the hidden film ANDat the documentthe first film directed by Dylan during the 1966 tour through England.
Arising from an ABC television assign Dont look back (1967)seminal work of Direct Cinema that established the Dylanite iconography when capturing it in the electrical conversion process.
Eat the document portrays in color the Place of Transgression and Nightmare fed with drugs to which Dylan arrived after leaving the crisis that Pennebaker had portrayed in black and white. Martin Scorsese He turned around that feeling his four -hour documentary, as if all testimonies (visual and oral) of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) They were centrifugal lines towards the spiral of those images of subversion and dementia, which rescues for the general public.
The portraits of Scorsese and the failed films
Definitely The filmmaker who has invested the greatest passion and dedication in unraveling the musician’s entreline. It all started in The last waltz (1978)The farewell of The Band that culminated with a historical interpretation of Dylan, and perhaps the best filmed concert, for which the New York filmmaker did not repair the means to catch every detail of what happens on stage, so that each musical gesture finds its translation in film motion.
He Dylan Christian period (1979-1981) He left his audiovisual invisibility in the film Trouble No More (2017)directed by Jennifer Lebeau and Ron Kantorwhich expressed very graphically the mutation between the performer and the evangelist with the intervention of Michael Shannon.
The 80s were certainly hard for the musician, and the film territory was a faithful reflection of it with the bankrupt Fire hearts (Richard Marquand, 1987)where he played an old and forgotten rock star, a figure that would rescue in the eccentric fable
Anonymous with better results, along with Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, precisely those who had starred The great Lebowski (1999)without a doubt one of those worship works that, together with Young prodigious (2000, Curtis Hanson)They used the Dylanita songbook as a spiritual and narrative vehicle. The latter earned the best original song for Times have changed.
Last year the full recording clip appeared unexpectedly on YouTube The man in meexactly the shot that is heard in the album New Morning and that Coen brothers use almost as hymn in the adventures of El Note. A high -carat jewel that neither the most conspicuous Dylanophiles suspected that it existed.
There is still much to dig up, many mirrors to look out, to solve the Dylan enigma. “Who are you?” James Coburn asked him In his first cinematographic appearance. “That is a good question,” said Bob ‘aka’ Dylan. Like all unanswered questions.
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