After looking at the Beyonce concert documentary, and
thinking on and off this month about The Irishman, I feel like I need to give
Martin Scorsese another look-over. With how much he’s dominated the larger
conversation about where the cinema industry is going, and how vindicated his
statements have grown in such a short time (the artistic quality of the MCU is
still arguable, but its effect on the industry isn't), I don’t want my
last thoughts about the man this decade to be filled with disappointment and a
want to highlight what has made the man so enduringly fascinating as a
storyteller. So let’s look at the other movie he made this year, a documentary
about Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue.
The film’s structure and content plays into Dylan’s
continually enigmatic presence as a musician in how, despite the aforementioned
labelling, its status as a documentary is intentionally in question. In-between
footage of Dylan and co. performing on stage, it features numerous bits of
interview footage (both contemporaneous and new), philosophical detours, and a
rather cheeky vein of fabrication throughout. Playing like a follow-up to I’m
Not There, it embraces the slipperiness of its subject and takes hold of his many different personas to, while not adhering to historical truth, speaks some definite emotional truth.
As fun as it can get to see Sharon Stone recounting her
‘past’ with Dylan, centred around a KISS t-shirt, or hear Bob Dylan dismiss the
notion that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a “father figure” (which given the
man’s connections to NAMBLA makes for one of the most cutting lines put to
screen all year), the film’s approach to its partly-real-life story is one that
looks at the mythology placed on art by the observer and even by the artist
themselves.
During the performance scene from Patti Smith, gracing the
frame with her poetic punk styling, the film emphasises how the stories behind
or even in front of songs can add to their lasting impact. To reiterate that
point, we even get a scene with Dylan and Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, the subject
of one of Dylan’s most enduring pieces of music. The film doesn’t so much
dispel the myth as much as it points out what creates that myth, the layers of
context and artifice that generate further meaning beyond the notes.
Not that this film needed to try all that hard to highlight
its own artistry as, both as a concert film and as a documentary, the
production at large is exquisite. Aside from the newer interview footage, most
of the film’s content is made up of pre-existing footage shot for Bob Dylan’s
Renaldo And Clara, which he filmed alongside the tour itself. It’s basically
the leftovers of another film entirely, and one that did not get a lot of love
back in the day and even now, and Scorsese exposes his inner cinematic chef in
how he turns those leftovers into a veritable feast.
The restoration of the audio and visual archives is frankly
staggering in how crisp they turn out, letting the grainy film stock and
intimate instrumentation ring through in equal clarity. To say nothing of
Dylan’s performance all on its own, which was honestly a revelation for me
because, for the longest time, my understanding of Bob Dylan as a musician was
of someone who was far better equipped with writing lyrics than actually
delivering them. One need only listen to his contribution to the original We
Are The World for that impression to be understood.
But here, backed with his all-star band and smattered in
white face paint, the production reason to highlight this specific moment of
his career becomes clear: This is Dylan at peak performance, and even though
no-one then or now knew the precise reasoning for this tour in the first place,
there’s even less argument about the need for its existence and its
remembrance.
It is a frenzied and blurred look at not just a crucial
moment in Dylan’s career but a crucial moment in American history as a whole,
with the Nixon administration looming large over the mood and tone of the
original footage. It’s the kind of cinematic alchemy and re-contextualisation
of the past that, quite frankly, I’ve come to expect from Scorsese after all
this time. And as a figure who continues to play a key role in not only the
continuation of cinema’s future but the preservation of its past, this is a
feature that shouldn’t be overlooked, even in the face of Scorsese’s other
work.
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