Sunday, January 27, 2008
No Direction Home in a Three Way Mirror
I was trudging through Peter Watkins' five and half hour multi-layered film on August Strindberg and had begun a three and a half hour compilation of John Ford's official film record of the Nuremberg trials when I decided to have a return viewing No Direction Home Martin Scorsese's biographical documentary about Bob Dylan. I guess the idea was a third monolith was needed to motivate me to complete the other two I had started, and I definitely was looking for something in contrast to Strindberg and Nazis. My first choice was to go to as far as I could: a Jerry Lewis movie, but I guess I'm not French enough. Despite cool casting of old Hollywood types (Phil Harris, Peter Lorre, Hans Conreid) I couldn't get much further than the credits of The Patsy.
I wanted to know how No Direction Home would look and feel after having had two other intense experiences with Dylan on film lately, namely Murray Lerner's excellent compilation The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 and, of course, the multifaceted revolutionary film of Todd Haynes, I'm Not There. My verdict: All three films complement each other wonderfully and signifcantly. If someone wanted to connect to what Dylan was about especially from the orgins to the motorcycle crash, they could lock into about an eight hour day of these three films.
A post-I'm Not There, Other Side of the Mirror viewing of the first half of the Scorsese film impressed me by the way it was able to take three major resources and weave them together in a way only a master filmmaker could.
The first element is the never ending tour version of a sixty something Dylan giving you his recollections first hand. If he had to be introduced by an overlay title, this Dylan could be identified as the author of Chronicle Volume I. He is full of clean, succinct, sumamries of what Hibbing and New York were like as well as providing details and intimacies of what his journey felt like from the inside.
The second component are the definitive "we were there too" interviews. Many of these were made just in time or are of quality sources of those no longer with us: Paul Nelson, Dave Van Ronk, Allen Ginsburg. Along with these folks, Scorsese gives us some of the tastiest of archival footage as he covers the story chronologically.
But it is his use of Pennebaker's footage from Eat the Document that gives No Direction Home its seasoning and its power. This documentary of the 1965 Dylan electric tour of England was often bootlegged and rarely seen. It is not familiar to us in the way that the film of the 1964 tour, Don't Look Back is. Dylan is at the extreme limits of his fame and probably physically as well. He is rubbery and jittery and the music simply explodes onstage.
So here he is as three. A man looking back at his life significantly in a rear view mirror. The Rashomon treatment from his peers and past documentation. And the mercury lightning of the man at the edge captured seen by many of us for the first time. Add one master filmmaker connecting and pulling these three threads together with good choice and impeccable taste and you get No Direction Home.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:38 PM
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