Movie Lounge: Bob Dylan on Quest

The movies about Bob Dylan that matter are the ones that preserve his capacity for strategic opacity. Not the celebratory retrospectives or the approved documentaries but the films in which Dylan is present and elusive at the same time, which is to say the films where he is most himself.

The Movie Lounge has returned to two of these films more than once: D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967) and Dylan's own Renaldo and Clara (1978). They document different phases and operate in different registers, but they share a common subject — a person committed to remaining unknown while remaining in public view.

Don't Look Back

Pennebaker's film follows the 1965 UK tour, the last before Dylan went electric at Newport. The footage is cinema verité, handheld and observational, and Dylan is filmed in hotel rooms and backstage spaces and on stage with the same approach: no commentary, no narration, just the camera running.

What Pennebaker captures is a performer who understood the camera's presence and used it. Dylan in the hotel room scenes is performing for the lens even as the ostensible subject is Dylan being informal. The sequences with Joan Baez show a relationship in the process of changing. The sequence with the journalist Horace Judson shows Dylan conducting a formal disagreement with measured aggression.

The film is fifty years old and it still has charge. Something in it refuses to become archival.

Renaldo and Clara

Dylan's own film is nearly four hours, made from footage shot during the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and 1976. It was cut in editing from a longer assembly. It combines concert footage with dramatic sequences in which Dylan and others play roles, sometimes their own names, sometimes not.

The film was released to poor reviews and has not been commercially available in standard release for decades. Viewing it requires effort. The effort is worth making.

The concert footage is extraordinary. The Rolling Thunder Revue shows are among the best documented performances of Dylan's career, and the film captures the visual intensity of the shows — the white face makeup, the crowded stage, the circus atmosphere that the tour was designed to create.

The dramatic sequences are harder to evaluate. Dylan himself has been inconsistent in characterizing them. Whether they constitute a coherent work or a series of interesting fragments may depend on the viewer.

The common thread

Both films document Dylan at points of maximum pressure. In Don't Look Back, the pressure is the imminent change of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, the acoustic folk audience about to be left behind. In Renaldo and Clara, the pressure is the post-accident years and the attempt to generate something new from the Rolling Thunder context.

In both, Dylan's response to pressure is not to become transparent. The films reward the viewer who accepts opacity as a mode of engagement rather than treating it as a problem to be solved.

More at the Movie Lounge.