Movie Monday

This weekend, Jim and I watched Scorsese's No Direction Home Bob Dylan in two installments. It is an excellent documentary. In anyone else's hands, perhaps even Ken Burns' it would have been more linear, just the story of his life. Scorsese, with his wild eye, had the insight to hinge the whole thing on Dylan's "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965. This single performance forever divided Dylan's fans into two camps: the ones who would grow with him and the the ones who would believe that he sold out. We get footage early on in the film of both Dylan's beginnings in acoustic folk music and bits of the draining, plugged-in tour that followed that historic festival.

Of course, the film takes us along the big events in his early career, and we hear from the people who played with him or knew him such as Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow, Suze Rotolo, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Liam Clancy, and many others, as well as the legend himself.

There are some great black and white shots of Dylan at the piano, at the typewriter, with his guitar; and then Scorsese jumps to Dylan in the back of a car, stunned as they pull away from a British concert post-July ’65 where the fans had booed and heckled. During the concert, he's cool, probably stoned, and takes it all without becoming defensive or angry. He is called "Judas" and "traitor" and a "liar." He says to crowd, "Oh, I don't believe that," turns to Robbie Robertson and says, "Play it f***ing loud."

We see how the fans wanted him to be something that he wasn’t anymore, and that he couldn’t do the act, couldn’t stay in one place just because they wanted him to. At press conference after press conference, he is asked the same impossible-to-answer questions about his songs. Art is not meant to be explained away like a scientific theory. It’s just there. Dig it or don’t. He didn’t seem to care and wasn’t about to beg anyone to listen or understand.

The film is really about the transformation he makes from earlier protest songwriter and acoustic performer to the more complex artist that he went on to be. He had to push into whatever was next and just keep creating, and if he lost some fans or gained some fans along the way, so be it. In today’s world of pop music and the fashioning of bands with certain looks or sounds to maximize the number of “units” sold, it’s refreshing to look back at an artist who created simply because he had to. He was following a candle at the end of a tunnel that only he could see. And the rest of us got to benefit from his visions.

Scorsese captivates with his choices and lays out a great story. I’ve been listening to Dylan these last two days. And I’m not even really a fan.