no direction home
Tim Herrick
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
BY ROGER EBERT / September 20, 2005
It has taken me all this time to accept _Bob Dylan_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Bob%20Dylan&C
lass=%&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) as the extraordinary artist he
clearly is, but because of a new documentary by _Martin Scorsese_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Ma
rtin%20Scorsese&Class=%&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) , I can finally
see him freed from my disenchantment. I am Dylan's age, and his albums were the
soundtrack of my college years. I never got involved in the war his fans
fought over his acoustic and electric styles: I liked them all, every one.
Then in 1968, I saw "_Don't Look Back_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Don't%20Look%20Back&ToDate=
20051231) " (1967), _D.A. Pennebaker_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=D.A.%20Pennebaker&Class=%&F
romDate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) 's documentary about Dylan's 1965 tour of
Great Britain. In my review, I called the movie "a fascinating exercise in
self-revelation," and added: "The portrait that emerges is not a pretty one."
Dylan is seen not as a "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies,"
I wrote, but is "immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor,
overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright."
I felt betrayed. In "_Don't Look Back_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Don't%20Look%20Back&ToDate=
20051231) ," he mercilessly puts down a student journalist, and is rude to
journalists, hotel managers, fans. Although _Joan Baez_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Joan%20Baez
&Class=%&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) was the first to call him on her
stage when he was unknown, after she joins the tour, he does not ask her to
sing with him. Eventually she bails out and goes home.
The film fixed my ideas about Dylan for years. Now Scorsese's "No Direction
Home: _Bob Dylan_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Bob%20Dylan&Class=%&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=200
51231) ," a 225-minute documentary that will play in two parts Sept. 26-27 on
PBS (and comes out today on DVD), creates a portrait that is deep,
sympathetic, perceptive and yet finally leaves Dylan shrouded in mystery, which is
where he properly lives.
The movie uses revealing interviews made recently by Dylan, but its subject
matter is essentially the years between 1960, when he first came into view,
and 1966, when after the British tour and a motorcycle accident, he didn't tour
for eight years. He was born in 1941, and the career that made him an icon
essentially happened between his 20th and 25th years. He was a young man from
a Minnesota town who had the mantle of a generation placed, against his will,
upon his shoulders. He wasn't at Woodstock; Arlo Guthrie was.
Early footage of his childhood is typical of many Midwestern childhoods: the
town of Hibbing, Minn., the homecoming parade, bands playing at dances, the
kid listening to the radio and records. The early sounds he loved ran all the
way from Hank Williams and Webb Pierce to Muddy Waters, the Carter Family and
even Bobby Vee, a rock star so minor that young Robert Zimmerman for a time
claimed to be Bobby Vee.
He hitched a ride to New York (or maybe he didn't hitch; his early biography
is filled with romantic claims, such as that he grew up in Gallup, N.M.). In
Greenwich Village, he found the folk scene, and it found him. He sang songs
by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others, and then was writing his own. He
caught the eye of Baez, and she mentored and promoted him. Within a year he was
... Dylan.
The movie has a wealth of interviews with people who knew him at the time:
Baez, Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, Liam Clancy, Dave Von Ronk, Maria Muldaur,
Peter Yarrow and promoters like Harold Leventhal. There is significantly no
mention of Ramblin' Jack Elliott. The documentary "_The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TI
TLESearch=The%20Ballad%20of%20Ramblin'%20Jack&ToDate=20051231) " (2000)
claims it was Elliott who introduced Dylan to Woody Guthrie, and suggested that he
use a harmonica holder around his neck, and essentially defined his stage
persona; "There wouldn't be no _Bob Dylan_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Bob%20Dylan&Class=%&FromD
ate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) without Ramblin' Jack," says Arlo Guthrie, who
is also not in the Scorsese film.
Dylan's new friends in music all admired the art but were ambivalent about
the artist. Van Ronk smiles now about the way Dylan "borrowed" his "House of
the Rising Sun." The Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac's On the Road,
influenced Dylan, and there are many observations by the beat poet _Allen
Ginsberg_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Allen%20Ginsberg&Class=%&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20051231) ,
who says he came back from India, heard a Dylan album and wept, because he
knew the torch had been passed to a new generation.
It is Ginsberg who says the single most perceptive thing in the film: For
him, Dylan stood atop a column of air. His songs and his ideas rose up from
within him and emerged uncluttered and pure, as if his mind, soul, body and
talent were all one.
Dylan was embraced by the left-wing musical community of the day. His
"Blowin' in the Wind" became an anthem of the civil rights movement. His "Only a
Pawn in the Game" saw the killer of Medgar Evers as an insignificant cog in the
machine of racism. Baez, Seeger, the Staple Singers, Odetta, Peter, Paul and
Mary all sang his songs and considered him a fellow warrior.
But Dylan would not be pushed or enlisted, and the crucial passages in this
film show him drawing away from any attempt to define him. At the moment when
he was being called the voice of his generation, he drew away from "movement"
songs. A song like "Mr. Tambourine Man" was a slap in the face to his
admirers, because it moved outside ideology.
Baez, interviewed before a fireplace in the kitchen of her home, still with
the same beautiful face and voice, is the one who felt most betrayed: Dylan
broke her heart. His change is charted through the Newport Folk Festival: early
triumph, the summit in 1964 when Johnny Cash gave him his guitar, the
beginning of the end with the electric set in 1965. He was backed by Michael
Bloomfield and the Butterfield Blues Band in a folk-rock-blues hybrid that his fans
hated. When he took the new sound on tour the Hawks (later the Band),
audiences wanted the "protest songs," and shouted "Judas!" and "What happened to
Woody Guthrie?" when he came onstage. Night after night, he opened with an
acoustic set that was applauded, and then came back with the band and was booed.
"Dylan made it pretty clear he didn't want to do all that other stuff," Baez
says, talking of political songs, "but I did." It was the beginning of the
Vietnam era, and Dylan had withdrawn. When he didn't ask Baez onstage to sing
with him on the British tour, she says quietly, "It hurt."
But what was happening inside Dylan? Was he the jerk portrayed in "_Don't
Look Back_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Don't%20Look%20Back&ToDate=20051231) "? Scorsese looks
more deeply. He shows countless news conferences where Dylan is assigned
leadership of his generation and assaulted with inane questions about his role,
message and philosophy. A photographer asks him, "Suck your glasses" for a
picture. He is asked how many protest singers he thinks there are: "There are 136."
At the 1965 Newport festival, Pete Seeger recalls, "The band was so loud, you
couldn't understand one word. I kept shouting, 'Get that distortion out! If
I had an ax, I'd chop the mike cable right now!' " For Seeger, it was always
about the words and the message. For Dylan, it was about the words and then
it became about the words and the music, and it was never particularly about
the message.
Were drugs involved in these years? The movie makes not the slightest mention
of them, except obliquely in a scene where Dylan and Johnny Cash do a
private duet of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and it's clear they're both stoned.
There is sad footage near the end of the British tour, when Dylan says he is
so exhausted: "I shouldn't be singing tonight."
The archival footage comes from many sources, including documentaries by
Pennebaker and Murray Lerner ("_Festival_
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Festival&ToDate=20051231)
"). Many of the interviews were conducted by Michael Borofsky, and Jeff Rosen
was a key contributor. But Scorsese provides the master vision, and his
factual footage unfolds with the narrative power of fiction.
What it comes down to, I think, is that Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minn.,
who mentions his father only because he bought the house where Bobby found a
guitar, and mentions no other member of his family at all, who felt he was
from nowhere, became the focus for a time of fundamental change in music and
politics. His songs led that change, but they transcended it. His audience was
uneasy with transcendence. They kept trying to draw him back down into
categories. He sang and sang, and finally, still a very young man, found himself
a hero who was booed. "Isn't it something, how they still buy up all the
tickets?" he asks about a sold-out audience that hated his new music.
What I feel for Dylan now and did not feel before is empathy. His music
stands and it will survive. Because it embodied our feelings, we wanted him to
embody them, too. He had his own feelings. He did not want to embody ours. We
found it hard to forgive him for that. He had the choice of caving in or
dropping out. The blues band music, however good it really was, functioned also to
announce the end of his days as a standard-bearer. Then after his motorcycle
crash in 1966, he went away into a personal space where he remains.
Watching him singing in "No Direction Home," we see no glimpse of humor, no
attempt to entertain. He uses a flat, merciless delivery, more relentless
cadence than melody, almost preaching. But sometimes at the press conferences,
we see moments of a shy, funny, playful kid inside. And just once, in his
recent interviews, seen in profile against a background of black, we see the ghost
of a smile
Tim Herrick
Martin Scorsese's
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
Considered by Larry Gross
Saturday September 2 - Second of the four nights of Telluride.
At 6:30 p.m. Greil Marcus, journalist and culture critic - and author of Bob
Dylan at the Crossroads, the best study of Dylan's sources in the history of
music - introduces the special previously unannounced "double secret probation"
screening of No Direction Home Martin Scorsese's three and a half hour
documentary about Bob Dylan. It's not only the most overpowering film experience
I've had at the festival, it's easily the strongest American feature film I've
seen all year.
Greil Marcus was joined in his talk by Don Delillo, one of America's best
living novelists. At one point Delillo focused on the simple four word
question-phrase-mantra repeated so many times in Like A Rolling Stone - How Does It Feel
- as a succinct summary of all of Dylan's deepest issues and I think it
probably goes for Scorsese, too.
2. No Direction Home's "official" world premiere is in a few days at Toronto.
It airs "for the public" on Sept. 26 and 27 on PBS's American Masters series.
Having unexpected screenings of things like this is part of the goodwill this
festival has built up with filmmakers all over the world-this year Scorsese
is sharing audience attention with North American premieres of work by
Hou-Hsiao-Hsien, Neil Jordan, Michael Haneke, the Dardenne Brothers, Ang Lee, James
Mangold, Lajos Koltai. Pretty decent company.
A few startling facts:
a) Of its three and a half hour length Scorsese himself "shot" almost nothing
- I believe. literally. the titles and a few minutes of transition images.
b) He was given access to thousands of feet of film, some of it news archive
footage, some of it the work of other documentary filmmakers which for one
reason or another had either never or seldom been seen and from that he fashioned
this work. Extensive footage comes from Dylan's controversial 1966 "electric"
tour of England, backed for the first time by Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko,
Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel, the nucleus of what would become The Band. It
was filmed by Donn Pennebaker for what was planned as a sequel to the black
and white classic Pennebaker had made about Dylan's first English tour, Don't
Look Back. A few weeks after the tour Dylan had his near-fatal motorcycle crash
and the sequel to Don't Look Now was scrapped.
c) Other notable contributors of footage were Murray Lerner, Jonas Mekas and
Ken Jacobs and Andy Warhol. But the personal Dylan memorabilia is remarkable -
all the stills of him as a wanna be pop performer aged 15, 16, and there is
simply amazing television. newsreel stuff, like Dylan (age 22) performing at
the April '63 civil rights March on Washington where King gave his "I Have a
Dream" speech.
d) The other huge footage source were hours of interviews Dylan did in 200,1
and again in 2003, with long-time creative colleague Jeff Rosen. Here Dylan,
referring to himself as a "musical expeditionary," is a surprisingly serene and
very funny commentator on both the personal and social-political history we
see unfolding. He is the film's virtual narrator, though through Scorsese's
editorial art, he is by no means an always entirely reliable one.
For most of its length, Scorsese's career has showed him in a conversation
with two different strains of cinematic realism. One was the Italian neo realist
traditions of socially-oriented "street" films made by masters like
Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti, and the other was the American method-acting centered
psychological realism of Kazan and Cassavetes.
But for the first time, in No Direction Home, Scorsese has made a great film
where he is conversing primarily with himself and his own body of work. The
biggest influence on No Direction Home - besides the music of Dylan, obviously -
is the fact of The Last Waltz. There, the story of the band's career,
narrated mainly by Robbie Robertson, was punctuated by musical numbers that continued
to "tell" and enrich the story. That ended with the band on stage with Dylan.
This film begins with a performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" on stage in
England a decade earlier, featuring Dylan on stage with the band. By referring so
explicitly to his earlier film in the opening frames of this one, Scorsese
alerts us that this film, in a certain curious sense, is every bit as much his
story as it is Dylan's.
Scorsese has had a recurrent obsession with filming "performance". Sometimes
this has meant literally dramatizing theatrical performers - Ellen Burstyn as
a saloon Chanteuse in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Liza Minelli and Robert
DeNiro doing forties and fifties jazz classics in the underrated New York,
New York, Rupert Pupkin's stand up act in King of Comedy. But Scorsese has taken
the metaphor of performance much further.
The boxing matches in Raging Bull are like "numbers" in a musical. They
violently compress, space, time and sensation, and in those scenes, Jake La Motta
seems transfigured to reach almost a different order of reality. Even the
now-legendary "you talkin' to me" riff in Taxi Driver is really all about Travis
Bickle rehearsing his lines like a performer, for what he hopes will be his
bloody willfully "staged" apotheosis.
The performer, for Scorsese, is the one who wants above all else to become
someone else and, in so doing, inadvertently discloses the fragility and
uncertainty of all identity. Dylan the shape-shifter, the master of constant
self-reinvention, is revealed over and over again in No Direction Home to have an
intense need he satisfies through his music, to always be becoming someone else.
This is represented sometimes in the determination voiced by Dylan over and
over again to make a kind of music he had never heard before, and that no one
else was making. Gradually he becomes, in many ways, the most interesting
Scorsese hero of them all.
The story starts with Dylan (then Robert Zimmerman) willfully rejecting his
provincial Midwestern roots in Hibbing, Minnesota -- fascinated by film icons
like Brando and Dean, the rockabilly sound of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash,
than gradually discovering the socially conscious folk music tradition embodied
by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. But his decision to make his mark as a folk
singer by moving to Greenwich Village bohemian scene, circa 1959, has an
unforeseen and highly advantageous complication.
This is also the era of the beatnik and the film shows how folk music scene,
as well as Dylan's creativity, is enriched and complicated by the rebellious,
mystical drug friendly rhetorical styles of writers like Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg. A moment where the 62 year old Dylan recites some Kerouac by heart
is pretty unforgettable .
And none of the many fascinating supporting characters in this story who
comment on Dylan as hustler, lover, or creative genius - including Joan Baez, Dave
Van Ronk, Bobby Neuwirth, Al Kooper, and Maria Muldaur - moved me as much as
Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg quoting Dylan's lyrics from "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall"
almost as a proud guru-father-mentor figure, suggesting Dylan was poised in
the early '60s to change the direction of American culture, and the whole
national soul really, in a way that the Beats never were able to do. Ginsberg sort
of casts himself as John the Baptist to Dylan's cultural Messiah and its
surprising how convincing this is.
When Part One (two hours in length) of No Direction Home ended with footage
of Dylan's triumphant appearance onstage at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival with
Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Oscar Brand, and Peter Paul and Mary, the
only thing I could compare the stunning emotional effect to was the conclusion of
Part One of Lawrence of Arabia: Lawrence and his army of rag tag Bedouins
taking Aquaba from the Turkish oppressor. Dylan, we have learned by this point,
has completed one stage in an intricate journey of self-creation and become the
troubadour-folksinger-songwriting voice of his generation railing against
injustice-just as Lawrence has proven by a succession of heroic acts of bravery
to his Arab colleagues that he is uniquely capable of shaping his own destiny
"that truly for some men nothing is written unless they write it themselves."
The analogy in theme, between Scorsese's achievement and that of Lean and
Bolt holds up in another key regard. Both films show a self-mythologizing hero
whose charisma and sheer creative power, give him influence over others that he
is never entirely comfortable with. One of the great things about Lawrence, as
opposed to all other biopics, is that we see the hero's personality spell
over and reshape the lives of other memorable characters. As Ginsberg, Baez, Van
Ronk et al. discuss Dylan, the same thing take happens here.
In No Direction Home, as in Lawrence of Arabia, Part Two is partly about the
undoing of the man who triumphs in the first part of the film. The Dylan of
Part Two feels trapped in the role of the genius-messiah-shaman supposedly
gifted with all the artistic, political and spiritual answers, even as the centre
does not hold in the wider society of the mid-sixties. The bitter replaying
of"Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," to footage of JFK's assassination, has Scorsese doing
in less than two minutes almost what Oliver Stone took three hours to do.
Scenes displaying Dylan's contempt for press demands that he come up with
soundbites to sum up all the problems of youth and an American society that was in
ever more savage conflict, are as funny, refreshing and needed as they were
forty years ago.
But there is a darker side to all of this. Dylan "going electric" in 1965 at
the Newport Folk Festival, and adopting the baroque lyric-wrting voice
symbolized by his only number one radio hit, "Like A Rolling Stone," and the even
wilder lyrics of the Blonde on Blonde album, involved willfully cutting himself
off from the folk music culture that had initially inspired and sustained him.
This, of course, was much to the enrichment of that popular cultural form that
we know now and forever as rock and roll, but it took a strange personal toll
on Dylan that Part Two of the film recounts. To become the true visionary he
was, he unwittingly had to slay his earliest creative father-figure, turning
his back to some degree on the socially conscious folk tradition of Woody
Guthrie. That one of the final moments in the film is a wonderful duet between him
and Johnny Cash in Dylan's dressing room, a private acoustic rendition of
Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," suggests that Dylan's almost
nihilistically angry rejection of the role the media and his fans had created for him was
itself a bit of pose, that he never stopped loving beautiful acoustic music
and ballad-making with its folk-country sources, no matter where else he roamed.
In the film's closing scenes of the 1966 British tour, when crowds of once
faithful followers attack him for becoming a despicable neurotic who has sold
out folk music, Dylan seems alternately anguished and spookily enthusiastic
about the new creative opportunities all this audience hostility may be affording
him. Another chance to play another part, try on a new mask and slip away and
become someone else.
The growing pressure on Dylan, the film conveys, was intense.
His 1966 motorcycle crash signaled a long withdrawal from the public stage.
Scorsese ends his version of the Dylan saga there.
Caveats. Very few. No direct mention of drug problems. Although Part Two
footage of Dylan exhausted, nervous, and telling a friend at that his hands are on
fire, suggests a lot without being explicit. The more conspicuous omission in
the story is Sarah Dylan, the mother of his five kids. Since she's absent,
the classics from Blonde on Blonde she inspired, especially "Sad Eyed Lady of
the Lowland" are absent, too. But we are given so much in this film, it seems
perverse if not downright crazy to complain about what's missing.
I suspect that for most who've followed Scorsese's work, the core of his
achievement is Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Waltz and
Goodfellas. Whether No Directions Home surpasses all of them in its sure-handed
storytelling, dazzling thematic richness and consistent emotional power, will be
debated and pondered by film-scholars and Scorsese-philes for years to come. But
as far as I'm concerned, its centrality for comprehending Scorsese's whole
enterprise will be beyond dispute. Here he places all of his obsessions and
concerns in a much broader historical, cultural and intellectual context than he
has ever been able to create before. So, if No Direction Home sometimes feels
like a magisterial summing-up, it also feels very fresh and new.
mcis...@umich.edu
Tim Herrick wrote:
> Ten Things Worth Thinking About
> Martin Scorsese's
> Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
> Considered by Larry Gross
Nice review. Thanks.