Bob Dylan A Series Of Dreams

[Bessie Murrillo]

Andplease do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

In a wonderful rhythmical song,Dylan leads us, common peaple, through the mysterious ways of life where you can stay down wounded or overcome and climb to the top.Of course he does not have any intention to do so,to show us the way,he his only a passive observer who already gone the distance and just had a series of dreams about a life draged by the wind to a path he never choose but even so you can still feel the folding wind energy comming maby from another world and you anxiously want to be part of it.

You get all the answers if you fist watch the movie Bombay beach! A perfekt song to end and complete the movie. A question that arise is if the movie makers did the movie with the song in mind or if they found that the song is the perfect way to end it?

This week, I\u2019m working on a book chapter concerning Bob Dylan\u2019s music videos, an eclectic and odd collection of work. But as I work on this chapter, I\u2019ve come to notice that there\u2019s very little writing on these videos out there on the internet. So today, I thought I\u2019d contribute what\u2014based on the increasingly useless Google\u2014might be one of the few attempts to comprehensively rank Dylan\u2019s music videos. Plus, I love thinking about these, and it\u2019s fun to do so casually on a day when I'm not writing about them in an academic parlance.

These are both collage-style videos made to accompany archival tracks. They\u2019re cool! Visions of Johanna was directed by John Hillcoat, of all people! But they\u2019re not necessarily worth discussing in the same breath as the balance of the videos.

Bringing in these videos would just be too much to wrangle. Plus, every Wilburys video is essentially a variation on the same theme (Hey, look! The Traveling Wilburys!) so they\u2019d all sit clumped in the middle of the list.

Speaking of \u201Cnot a Bob Dylan video\u201D, there would be no reason to consider this in a ranking, but I just need to mention\u2013for the sake of comprehensiveness\u2013that Bob did make a brief and silent cameo in this video. It\u2019s bizarre in its incongruity, but it\u2019s delightful.

Now this isn\u2019t necessarily \u201Ca Bob Dylan video\u201D so much as a Mark Ronson one, but it\u2019s really cool. This is one of a variety of videos designed to draft off the iconography of Dylan, this time showing a faceless Dylan stand-in moving semi-magically through the iconography of the man\u2019s life and times, from Greenwich Village to the \u201866 world tour to the motorcycle crash to Rolling Thunder and beyond. It\u2019s really well done, and it\u2019s sort of thrilling to see the decades stream by in one sustained flow, but it also feels a little tangential to \u201Cthe Bob Dylan video project.\u201D

There\u2019s not much of an argument that this is a music video\u2014it\u2019s the opening scene of a movie, D.A. Pennebaker\u2019s Dont Look Back\u2014but there are those who credit it as a forerunner of what we now call the music video, so it\u2019s worth nodding at. Also, it\u2019s just cool.

Dylan has collaborated on four videos with Australian director Nash Edgerton (brother to Joel). This one initially seems perfectly promising, a man arriving home to his rundown apartment. But within moments it\u2019s clear he\u2019s been holding a woman captive\u2014and she\u2019s escaped. The remainder of the video is a brutally graphic brawl between the two of them, one that climaxes when she hits him with her car, then hops out to begin making out with him. How unpleasant is this video? It\u2019s competently made, but it\u2019s just ugly from top to bottom.

This video was co-directed by Larry \u201CRatso\u201D Sloman, a frequent hanger-on of Dylan\u2019s over the years. When he got his crack at a video, Ratso presented a more or less random assemblage of imagery\u2014Hitler; the atomic bomb detonating; a Picasso. In between, we occasionally get glimpses at Bob in his Miami Vice finest\u2014white tee under cream blazer\u2014but it\u2019s all about the montage, and the montage is nothing.

A lot of Dylan\u2019s \u201880s videos are pretty low concept\u2014just stick Bob on a stage and hit record\u2014and this one most of all. There are some real iMovie-type video effects, but that\u2019s about as lively as things get.

This one is a tie-in with the largely forgotten movie Gods and Generals, and in between battle shots from the film (free production value!) we see Bob in Civil War drag walking among the dead and wounded, offering sympathy, and finally posing for a portrait photo. It\u2019s a dreary affair, though there\u2019s something perversely compelling in the obviousness of Bob\u2019s wig, and the intensity of focus he brings to the role.

This video has an exciting pair of directors in legendary documentarians Albert and David Maysles. Accordingly, this is a documentary-style video, just capturing Bob and his musicians in the studio. There\u2019s nothing to dislike here\u2014there\u2019s just not all that much to like, either, give or take your interest in \u201880s recording studios.

Like When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky, this video is co-directed by Markus Innocenti, and it functions as something of a companion piece\u2014monochrome, a simple focus on Bob doing his work\u2014but there are a few touches that elevate it, including the evocative empty-theater backdrop, and an eerie effect created by using an actress to recreate a picture of Elizabeth Taylor. There\u2019s an incongruously bizarre moment in which Bob watches a woman hang from a trapeze that dangles from a tree only for her to run off, leaving him despondent. It doesn\u2019t all hang together, but there\u2019s enough there to like.

This video is sort of an illustration of the cover of World Gone Wrong\u2014Bob, wearing the top hat that he sports on that album, strolls down a street, meeting and entertaining passersby, while intercut we see him singing the song through various distorted effects. It\u2019s simple, but it\u2019s watchable.

One of the few videos on this list to not feature Bob at all, this one is helmed by Foxcatcher director Bennet Miller, who shoots Scarlett Johansson in a variety of idyllically romantic contexts through an 8mm lens. It\u2019s all rather lovely, even if it doesn\u2019t build to anything in particular.

Bob Dylan\u2019s first MTV-era video (it premiered two years after the network did) is another low concept affair\u2014Bob and his band perform in a restaurant after closing time; a woman holding a broom watches them appreciatively. There\u2019s a pleasant atmosphere to the proceedings, and for an early example of the form, it\u2019s low-key pleasant.

Another tie-in video, this one attached to Curtis Hanson\u2019s Michael Chabon adaptation Wonder Boys, for which Bob wrote this song, winning an Oscar for his trouble. As movie tie-ins go, this is a pretty good one. Bob represents something like the spirit of Michael Douglas\u2019s character, being dropped into scenes from the movie alongside the actors (Robert Downey Jr, Tobey Maguire, and Katie Holmes), while we cut periodically back to Bob capering in the dark in front of a diner clad in a straw boater. It\u2019s got more momentum and imagery than a lot of these videos, even if it\u2019s largely culled from another source, and Bob\u2019s performance is committed and lively, which you certainly can\u2019t say for every entry on this list.

From director John Mellencamp, we have a pretty straightforward late-\u201980s music video: a group of high-powered operatives sit around a baroque table presumably discussing world-shaping events, and who is their entertainment? Bob Dylan, of course. Bob\u2019s outfit is really remarkable\u2014seemingly a long-sleeved white T under a short-sleeved white T\u2014enlivening what\u2019s otherwise a bit of a one-note video.

Another Nash Edgerton project, with Bob this time starring in a noir pastiche. There\u2019s guns, molls, double crosses, the works. It\u2019s all appealingly shot as a tribute to classic gangster fare, but if I\u2019m being honest, it\u2019s also a little indistinct\u2014there aren\u2019t many images that linger in the mind, with the whole thing just fading into a generalized noir haze by the time it ends.

This is pure, uncut chaos, and I love it. One of the few Bob Dylan videos that feels like a classic MTV video, we see several threads braided together\u2014a man experiencing various trials while driving around a convertible; Bob chauffeuring a pig in a limo. It\u2019s joyous, even if it\u2019s impossible to get your hands around before it slips into some new image and idea.

Bob collaborated with his son, Jesse, on this one, with Jesse getting his first directing credit before going on to direct movies like American Wedding and Kicking & Screaming (the Will Ferrell one). Bob is styled to evoke the \u201865/\u201966 firebrand, even if, by 1990, that guy was pretty definitively in the past. This isn\u2019t the album version of the track, but rather what sounds to be a live recording. It\u2019s thrilling.

On the one hand, this is a pretty low-concept video\u2013it\u2019s a montage of footage mostly culled from Dont Look Back, and Dylan\u2019s own directorial efforts, Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara. We see imagery from the movies streak by with various effects applied, all while the song\u2019s lyrics appear on the screen.

So what\u2019s exciting about that? Well, if you\u2019ve been immersing yourself in this stuff like I have, it\u2019s very exciting to consider that in 1991, Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara were basically impossible to see. So you\u2019re getting glimpses at footage most people aren\u2019t familiar with at all, and it\u2019s depicting Dylan at a couple of creative peaks. The song, which describes exactly what the title says\u2014a series of dreams the singer has experienced\u2014is a beautiful match for this central idea that Bob is dozing on a train during the \u201865 tour, dreaming the \u201866 and \u201875 tours. It\u2019s corny, it\u2019s cheesy, it\u2019s one for the Dylan heads. I\u2019m a corny, cheesy Dylan head. I think this video is really effective.

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