Tuesday, December 18, 2007
I'm not There: Cinema Scaled to Myth and Legend
Todd Haynes' meditative exploration of Bob Dylan is nothing less than an epic media poem that creates its own language and rules to tell its tales. It brings one to a discussion of the definition of truth. Biographical truth or rather biopicgraphical truth could not be up to the task of a film regarding Dylan. And biographical & autobiographical were covered quite well in recent years with the exhibit that the Experience Music sponsored, Dylan's first volume of memoirs, and, of course, the wonderful "No Direction Home" by Martin Scorsese covered his story from that perspective quite well.
So what kinds of truth is Haynes trying to get at here? Emotional truth is a term bandied about in How Robert Sullivan's NYTIMES magazine profile in October Perhaps this is why I felt the experience was much like a Fassbinder film when I reflected on it during my walk home. Haynes is another director god in his machine pulling levers and using film language (remember his degree is in semiotics) in visual quotation (the dream traffic sequence from Fellini's 8 1/2, or, my favorite, the wheelchaired people from Lester's Petulia, riding in an elevator.) Sullivan also mentions how the sequence in the old wild west time of Riddle is a world like the seventies westerns it is emulating.
There is a fork in the road in the film early on, or actually, a fork in the train tracks, in a box car. It comes down to whether or not the viewer is willing to have a 12 year old African American boy portray Woody Guthrie. Not the languishing late fifties Woody Guthrie with Huntington's Chorea at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, but this black youngster playing the Woody Guthrie that Robert Zimmerman played when he played Bob Dylan playing Woody Guthrie. If you look at the screen and say to yourself "Okay Todd, take me away" you will love this film. But if you don't take that ticket, I don't know what you will think of "He's Not There" Your reaction might just be to laugh, like when the 250 pound African American woman in the juror box in Woody Allen's Bananas claims to be J. Edgar Hoover in disguise. But if you are that literal, you probably wouldn't have come to see "He's not There." And I'm thinking that ultimately the audience will turn out to be kind of limited anyway. The 1pm Tuesday show I went to had one other fellow in attendance wearing motorcycle leathers, a Harley Davidson ball cap, and was carrying a paperback.
Would He's Not There play to a non-Dylan fan or someone who really doesn't know his story? Does emotional truth need to be bought into to for one to have a frame of reference for it to be truly effective? I don't know, because I am a sucker for the allusions and choices that Haynes makes and the way he intercuts any two or three of his Dylans to make its own cinematic music. I also know and love the Dylan story. I even saw a version of Renaldo and Clara in a theater back in the seventies. So take my words as someone who has been on the train (but never before with young black Woody) for some time.
And I kind of dig the way that the studio put out a brochure that serves as an official guide to the film kind of like publishing their own Cliff's Notes. I thought that a blog entry from Kevin C. Murphy's Ghost in the Machine blog (If content and spirit addressing was a web/Internet convention, the Well-executed buffet might be a neighbor) did as well a job dealing with characters and structure.
Another web find: Todd Haynes has an infectious energy when he is talking about his films. See the two IFC clips below.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:03 PM
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