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B A:
B D M S
Doris Hambuch
United Arab Emirates University
Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou
Zayed University
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
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0319–051x/21/48.1/119 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association
“An exhibitionist only on stage,” David Yae writes about the 1965 Warhol Screen
Test, “Dylan knew the camera loved him, but at that moment he did not love it
back” (32). A great number of lm appearances followed Bob Dylan’s experiment
with Andy Warhol, most recently the Netix original Rolling under Revue: A Bob
Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019). Other screen representations include Festival
(1967), Dont Look Back (19 67), e Concert for Bangladesh (1972), Eat the Document
(1972), Renaldo and Clara (1978), e Last Waltz (1978), e Other Side of the Mirror
(2007), Bob Dylan: Revealed (2011), and Trouble No More (2017). Arguing that lm
became the third most important component of Dylan’s work, aer writing and
music, we claim that his collaboration with Scorsese was best suited to facilitate his
dependence on an audience: “I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself ”
(Chronicles 16), Dylan writes early on in his memoir. is suggests that he was, in
fact, an “exhibitionist,” and not only on stage: “I needed to play for people and all the
time” (Chronicles 16). e compatibility between Dylan and Scorsese, we argue, rests
in their shared fascination with storytelling, and in their conviction that the bridge
between fact and ction is removable and sometimes redundant.
In “Markin’ up the Score,” the opening chapter of Chronicles, Dylan recalls the
signicance of an encounter with the wrestler Gorgeous George early in his career
(Chronicles 43). He remembers how he played as a teenager in the lobby of his
Minnesota hometown’s main event building, when the celebrity’s wink and brief
remark presented an inciting moment. In the next paragraph, he questions not only
the fact itself, but also the relevance of its truthfulness: “Whether [Gorgeous George]
really said it or not, it didn’t matter,” Dylan writes; “It’s what I thought I heard him
say that mattered, and I never forgot it” (44). Scorsese, for his part, reveals in an
interview with Raaele Donato that “you can go back and stage the past. You want
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to record the battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war? Stage it. It is a
natural impulse and so is recording. ey go hand in hand. at’s why for me there
was never ever a dierence between ction and non-ction” (Donato 200). e com-
pliance between the musician and the lmmaker on their poetic licence with reality
culminates in e Rolling under Revue, which adds ctitious interviewees to exist-
ing documentary footage, while also featuring scenes from Dylan’s own Renaldo and
Clara. e Rolling under Revue thus blends a great number of genres, including the
mockumentary, and seems best t to reect what Yae emphasizes throughout his
thorough Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (2011), that the singer/poet1/actor/
director/painter2 “contains multitudes” (Yae xvii), a nod to Walt Whitman, whose
inuence Dylan himself highlights in his memoir (Chronicles 103) as well as in e
Rolling under Revue.
Scorsese’s rst experience with music documentaries was as a co-editor of Michael
Wad lei gh’s Woodstock (1970); Dylan appears in this lm very briey, although he
did not participate in the festival. Scorsese went on to experiment with re-authoring
techniques in his own e Last Waltz (1978). e team for this lm included writer
Mardik Martin, editors Jan Roblee and Yeu-Bun Yee, and cinematographer Michael
Chapman. Dylan is the last guest in their documentation of e Band’s farewell
concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, following many other famous musi-
cians such as Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. At the time Scorsese was
working on e Last Waltz, Dylan was directing his Renaldo and Clara (1978), c o-
written with Sam Shephard. In contrast to the former, the latter was not received well
at all. Yae explains that Dylan’s “mostly unloved” lm “in the spirit of Fassbinder,
tried to achieve a collective correlative”3 (34), and failed. ree decades later, it would
go on to contribute to the mosaic that is e Rolling under Revue. Our analysis of
the cooperation between these two New York-focused artists includes three main
aspects. e making of music and lm mostly depends on collaboration; yet, despite
successful work with their various teams and with each other, both Scorsese and
Dylan remain the kind of auteurs who are adamant about their own ideas on their
respective creativity. eir preference of ctionalized facts leads to considerations of
their “romantic” as opposed to “realist” inclination. A connected reliance on emo-
tions and the subconscious as opposed to the rational needs to be discussed, nally,
in the context of spirituality.
N D H (): A
A
Aer the production and co-direction of the documentary series e Blues (2003),
Scorsese went on to rene his skills at creating new stories from existing material
with No Direction Home (NDH, 2005), for which he “conducted none of the interv iews
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and shot none of the footage” (Yae 40). No Direction Home accompanies Dylan’s
print memoir Chronicles (2004), whose rst part appeared a year before the lm’s
release. Neither the lm nor the book are organized in a chronological way, though
the former provides many more dates than the latter. Both jump back and forth in
time, reecting the postmodern aesthetic of a pastiche;4 both remind the audience to
perceive the main subject as an unreliable narrator. In the Chronicles’ rst chapter,
Dylan emphasizes his impatience with interview questions about his biography. He
gives details about his own reinvention in an interview with Billy James, the head
of publicity at Columbia Records, concluding that his only accurate answer had to
do with his originality: “at part of things was true, I really didn’t see myself like
anybody. e rest of it, though, was pure hokumhophead talk ” (Chronicles 7-8).
e lm refers to an interview with Oscar Brand, host of the radio program Folksong
Festival, during which Dylan claims to have been raised in New Mexico (NDH, part
1, 59:15). is reference follows an amiable assessment of Dylan’s imagination by Izzy
Young, the owner of the Folklore Center in New York.
Dylan appears conicted about Young’s habit of keeping a diary, stating that
“his questions were annoying,” but, appreciative of Young’s support, he “tried to
be considerate and forthcoming” (Chronicles 20). Reading from his notebook in No
Direction Home, Young laughs about the creativity with which Dylan invented bio-
graphical ction: “I should have gured out right away, he was bullshitting me. I was
a set-up, a very easy set-up. But I’m proud of it. Because the guy wrote good songs”
(NDH, part 1, 57:58). In the interview with Donato, Scorsese weighs the power of
words against that of images. In reference to an interview passage in which Dylan
states that it did not matter what he said (NDH, part 1, 24:23), Scorsese commends
the interviewer, Dylan’s manager Je Rosen, on capturing compelling facial expres-
sions: “In a way those interviews allowed us to open up the lm,” Scorsese explains,
“because there was a truth that Je Rosen got at with Dylan. A truth, as opposed to
the truth. Because like many of us [Dylan] keeps reinventing himself ” (Donato 207).
As much as Rosen’s friendship with Dylan contributed to the eect Scorsese points
out here, it also has to be credited to Michael Borofsky, who lmed the interviews, as
well as to some of the no fewer than ten directors of photography employed for this
and for the other interview sequences with friends of Dylan.
Dylan is lmed in what looks like a Rembrandt light studio, set up with its neces-
sary black background and harsh right-side shadow. e 180-degree rule is followed
until, towards the end of the lm, two breaks underline Dylan’s transformation, his
symbolic move to the other side. e narrative time ends at the 1966 performance
in Newcastle, England. Returning full circle to the opening excerpts from “Like
a Rolling Stone,” backed by the group then known as e Hawks, later e Band,
the closing scene from this controversial concert follows a title card that informs
us about the motorcycle accident that occurred a few months later. e subsequent
information that Dylan recovered from this accident to continue his career leads up
to an envisioning of audience anticipation. e nal scene, poetically executed by
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Scorsese, is a tracking shot: an associative, ctional clip showing a close shot of a
motorcycle driving away from a theatre in London. Aer Scorsese cuts to a point-
of-view shot, the motorcycle passes a long lineup of people extending for more than
four blocks. is closure points out Dylan’s tendency to disappear, as suggested in the
Basement Tapes song that should serve as title for Todd Haynes’s experimental ction
lm I’m Not ere (2007). It also foregrounds a conicted attitude towards audience
reception. While Dylan, as established in the introduction, depends on listeners, he
does not seem compelled to please them. As he explains in his memoir, he prefers to
create, and, if necessary, change, his ideal audience (Chronicles 154-55). No Direction
Home illuminates the alienation of his folk audience.
e switch from acoustic to electric performance started in 1965 and is marked in
the lm by the Newport Folk Festival, in Rhode Island, the event at which Dylan had
been introduced by Joan Baez two years before. At the 1965 edition, he is announced
as someone with “a limited amount of time” (NDH, part 2, 49:57). Dylan’s follow-
ing performance of “Maggie’s Farm,” backed by a blues band, is intercut with Baez’s
reections, as well as the rst break with the 180-degree rule, where Dylan suddenly
appears on the le side of the screen, questioning the meaning of audience interfer-
ence (NDH, part 2, 53:01). Back on the right, he denies that his music was the actual
reason for the audience’s hostility (NDH, part 2, 53:20).
e chorus line “It’s all over now” from his acoustic encore “Baby Blue” underlines
the eect of this turning point, which signalled a break with Baez and the folk scene’s
political activism, as well as a rejection of the responsibility expected from someone
considered the voice or spokesperson of a generation. It might further be read as
simply a rejection of the connement associated with a single category. As will be
explored later, versatility is another important common ground between Dylan and
Scorsese. A number of farcical interview excerpts from 1965-66 highlight Dylan’s
very personal rebellion, ending with an explicit negation of the wish to “be the leader
of singers with a message” (NDH, part 2, 1:24:03). Chronicles and No Direction Home
present this transition as unavoidable, but also dwell on the pain involved in it. Maria
Muldauer, for example, remembers how she tried to cheer the distressed Dylan up by
asking him to dance at Newport. His reply was that he couldn’t because his “ hands
are on re” (NDH, part 2, 1:00:04). Whether this re relates to the res of hell is a
question for the last section of this study.
e freedom to choose between styles, genres, and categories comes with the risk
of alienation. A certain box may impose connement, but it also oers shelter. e
refusal to settle in that box means losing the chance to make a home there. It may
mean, as in the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone,” to be “like a complete unknown” in a
new box, as well as in the old. It always means to be “without a home.” e remaining
part of the chorus, “no direction home,” thus makes the perfect title for a collabora-
tion between two artists who both reject “compromise.”5 Marc Raymond reminds us
in his discussion of Scorsese as cultural historian that “tales of his previous days as a
tortured rebel genius allowed the myth of his ‘outsider’ status to continue unabated”
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(Raymond 187). As the preceding discussion has shown, both “tortured rebel genius”
as much as he may reject this term, just like that of the “spokesman”and “out-
sider” are tting labels for Dylan as well. ey are also the conditions that allow for
his extreme versatility, which is at the centre of the next section.
M: F S T
Dylan uses the word “metamorphosis” to describe a profound experience during
what in the literary context is referred to as “writer’s block” or what in the world of
sports is called “choking.” In Dylan’s memory, this experience took place at a concert
in Switzerland, while on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, when he “fell
into a black hole” (Chronicles 152). We will return, in the context of spirituality, to
the words he used to describe his way out of this hole: “I just did it automatically out
of thin air, cast my own spell to drive out the devil” (153). At this point, we wish to
foreground the subsequent reections that relate more to the realm of theatre and
cinema:
Nobody would have noticed that a metamorphosis had taken place. Now the energ y was
coming from a hundred dierent angels, completely unpredictable ones. I had a new
faculty and it seemed to surpass all the other human requirements. If I ever wanted a
dierent purpose, I had one. It was like I’d become a new performer, an unknown one in
the true sense of the word. In more than thirty years of performing, I had never seen this
place before, never been here. If I didn’t exist, someone would have to have invented me.
(Chronicles 153; emphasis ours)
ere are theories that everyone is a performer of dierent roles throughout life:
“All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, “and all the men
and women merely players” (II.vii. 139-40). It is to be expected, however, that the
dierences between individual roles are more striking for those who make acting a
profession.
Dylan had little success as an actor in ction lms, not only in h is own Renaldo and
Clara, already mentioned in the preceding section, but also in Richard Marquand’s
Hearts of Fire (1987) or in Masked and Anonymous (2003) by Larry Charles, the latter
of which he co-wrote under the penname Sergei Petrov. ese projects neverthe-
less testify to his fascination with the art form. In a study of Dylan’s place within
American culture, Noel King names numerous local and foreign directors as con-
tributors to Dylan’s cinephilia: Tod Browning and Sam Peckinpah are listed next to
Fellini, Buñuel, Godard, and Kurosawa (King 42), and we have already mentioned
his admiration for Fassbinder in the context of Renaldo and Clara. Working on the
script for this lm, Shephard documents a special interest in the French New Wave,
along with an admiration for Children of Paradise (1945), 6 as responsible for Dylan’s
directorial vision (King 43). Arguably, Dylan’s foray into lm has its roots in music,
in the observational documentaries Festival (1967) by Murray Lerner and Dont Look
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Back (1967) by D.A. Pennebaker, both of which are credited several times as sources
in No Direction Home. Dylan’s rst performance of a ctional lm character, in Sam
Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), relates to his writing of the lm
score.7 How do these performances connect to audience reception on the one hand,
and to the fact/ction division on the other?
Filmmaking facilitates the idea of a continued, more rounded interaction with
audiences beyond a performer’s death. Records and albums preserve the lyrics and
music, but only moving images can add the visuals of a performance. Dyla n’s work, as
stated here repeatedly, depends on audience interaction. e Rolling under Revue
(RTR) reveals this fact in a conversation with violinist Scarlet Rivera’s ctional driver.
e anonymous driver, maybe a nod towards Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1978), indulges
in his personal observations on the bond between stage performers and their audi-
ence based on his attendance of the previous evening’s concert. Almost halfway into
the lm, Dylan participates in a Roma holiday celebration that coincided with his
birthday, and therefore was “like going home” (RTR 55:30), a creative response to the
earlier lm. is scene cuts to Rivera’s driver musing about the vibes between musi-
cians and their listeners at live concerts. Calling that interaction “a show all by itself,”
he remembers the vibes as so strong that they were almost visible, and goes as far
as to dene the spectacle as “love aair” (RTR 1:00:00). Although cinema audiences
may also react to a show, they rarely reach any of the respective artists directly; such
interaction remains exclusive to stage performance.
e Rolling under Revue dwells on many dierent forms of theatre, and its con-
nection to cinema, while No Direction Home only briey mentions travelling circuses
via archival photographs in the recreation of Midwestern culture during Dylan’s
childhood. e Rolling under Revue, in contrast, opens with a silent, black-and-
white lm clip that shows the disappearance and reappearance of a woman under
the cover of a chair. e scene is reminiscent of George Méliès’s vaudeville work,
which Scorsese represented in Hugo (2011).8 When the rst half of the lm title, e
Rolling under Revue, appears, the word “conjuring” is used above, and revue turns
into “Re-Vue” (RTR 00:45) within seconds. Aer the subtitle appears on a subsequent
title card, Dylan’s performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man” is intercut with archival
Bicentennial footage, which includes a marching band.
During the Rolling under tour (1975-76), Dylan sported his most colourful
stage presence, wearing a hat with owers and feathers, whiteface that oen thins
due to sweat as a show progresses, and a ying scarf. Rivera’s outts, also in the
stage foreground, likewise support an atmosphere of fantasy, a certain carnival con-
text. Scorsese elaborates on Dylan’s interest in the theatrical with images from old
lms involving masks, as well as with scripted references to Japanese Kabuki and
Italian Commedia dell’arte. At one point, it is implied that actual masks were used
during the concerts, and Dylan complains that they “didn’t have enough masks on
that tour” (RTR 32:16), a complaint topped with wisdom on the fact/ction division:
“When someone is wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth” (RTR 32:24). To
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the initiated, this is one of the many tongue-in-cheek remarks that turn the entire
extravaganza into a comedic, oen satiric reply to the tragic No Direction Home.
While the latter ends by exposing a vulnerable, disoriented artist about to suer a
major accident, the new lm picks up a decade later and highlights the artist’s ongo-
ing live performances with precise tour dates during the end credits.9
e corpus of texts for No Direction Home, featured in the PBS American Masters
series, includes biography, American history, cultural heritage, history of folk music,
and literature. e Rolling under Revue adds to this ctional interviewees and
digitally invented footage, thus erasing any claim to historicity. Michael Meneghetti
writes that even in Scorsese’s early work with documentaries,
the traditional problems of historiography (weighing evidence, examining traces, deter-
mining the truth of events, etc.) […] have in eect been replaced by an ethnographic
experiment: ‘the emotions’, closely observed by the lmmaker and camera, function in
this account as intermediaries to the historical past. (204)
is statement supports Scorsese’s remarks about Dylan’s facial expressions dis-
cussed in the preceding section. e reliance on expressed emotions is based, in the
spirit of romanticism, on the belief that it is impossible to represent reality without
bias. Documentary t heory has long debated to what extent it is et hical to make certain
scenes or individuals subjects of lms (Nichols 157). is debate reveals manipula-
tion on the director’s part; furthermore, there is the question of authenticity altered
by the presence of the lm crew on the subject’s part. Scorsese refers to this dilemma
in the interview with Donato:
You can be easily deceived when you’re making a documentary, because many people
nd it very easy to “play” reality, or realism, for the camera. ey adopt a kind of doc-
umentar y personality. is happens more and more, because people are much more
comfortable in front of cameras now than they were 40 years ago, and it’s easier for them
to develop tricks, defenses. But it’s those moments where the defenses are down, where
they get so comfortable t hat they really let themselves show, that are so precious. (Donato
203)
e choice of the word “defenses” exposes the lming process as intrusive. Yet, as
Scorsese observes, the embrace of such intrusion has increased steadily, and more so
with the rise of social media. Another keyword here is “comfortable.” While social
media acionados tend to be comfortable with themselvesor, at least, with their
altered selvesas both subject and director, Scorsese speaks of comfort between a
subject and a professional crew. One might speculate that this latter relationship cor-
responds more to that between an audience and live performers.
Expectations on both sides of the creative process would then play a crucial role
for the outcome of a collaboration. As Meneghetti ventures, “the possibility of impos-
ture” is more of a threat to someone working in “direct cinema,” oen compared
to the tradition of Rouchian cinéma vérité.10 Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967),
as it were, with “Dylan’s notorious evasiveness and dissembling” (Meneghetti 207)
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would support Yae’s claim that at this time, Dylan did not love the camera back.
Pennebaker’s comment for No Direction Home, however, explains the discomfort as
genre-related: “He saw that he had re-invented himself as the actor within this movie.
And then it was ok ” (NDH, part 2, 37:37). e title of Dylan’s directorial debut (1972),
in collaboration with Pennebaker and Howard Alk, further cements the former’s
skepticism towards the documentation of facts. Pennebaker laments the develop-
ment of this project in an interview with Frank Verano, in which he speculates that
Eat the Document was “sort of making a joke out of the idea of ‘the document’that
‘the document’ was not really as important as I had tried to make it in the rst lm”
(Verano 254).
A documentation that follows the mandate of realism and that attempts to take
things seriously would get in the way of the spontaneous and playful kind of cre-
ativity that turns an interaction between stage performers and their audience into a
“love aair.” Such rigid approaches to realism also run counter to a certain freedom
of interpretation: “A folk song might vary in meaning,” Dylan writes in Chronicles,
“and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who’s
playing and who’s listening” (Chronicles 71). We argue that it is this attitude that
enables and provokes the fascination with lm. While the magic of the live spectacle
depends on the stage performance, lm is the best possible way to preserve at least
some of this magic and allow future audiences their own interpretations. It is also the
best medium to capture the transformations of a “shape changer”11 such as Dylan.
Scorsese, for one, has “liked [Dylan’s] presence in all dierent incarnations he’s had
over the years” (Schickel 6005 Kindle). Incarnations in question might, symbolically
speaking, range from a stone that gathers no moss to a cloud that is ying high.
Whether the latter’s sense of levitation is chemically or spiritually induced is at the
centre of the following section.
T R T R (): N
D
In his report on the pre-premiere of No Direction Home at the thirty-fourth Telluride
Film Festival, Greil Marcus provides a graphic description of Dylan as he performs
“Like a Rolling Stone” during the Newcastle concert in 1966. is performance
works like a frame for the lm, with a few shots at the very beginning and at the
end, but it reoccurs throughout in stark contrast to the composed Dylan from the
Rosen interview described in the rst section of this article. During the Newcastle
concert scene, Marcus sees the performer like “a dervish possessed by a god you do
not want to meet” (Marcus 50). e Irish musician Liam Clancy, who has the honour
of explaining that Dylan’s name change was inspired by Dylan omas (NDH, part 1,
23:12), also uses the word “possessed ” at the end of the rst part of the lm, when he
remembers Dylan as “constantly moving” but also as able to express “what the rest of
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us wanted to say, but couldn’t say” (NDH, part 1, 1:50:11). e lm sympathizes with
an auteur’s courage, but also with his arrogance to make or enact decisions at the risk
of unpopularity. In e Rolling under Revue, the ctitious lmmaker Stefan van
Dorp, played by Bette Midler’s husband, comedian Martin von Haselberg, exhib-
its traits ascribed to Dylan himself. Dylan’s comment that van Dorp “was trying to
make enemies where there weren’t any. And he was successful at that” (RTR 1:17:18)
presents an ability to laugh about oneself, which is important to remember for the
discussion of links between ridicule and oence.
Towards the end of the second part of No Direction Home, record producer Bob
Johnston makes his belief clear that the lm’s subject could not be held responsi-
ble for his actions: “He can’t help what he is doing,” Johnston says; “I mean, he’s
got the holy spirit about him. Anybody looking at him can see that” (NDH, part 2,
1:04:05). According to this assessment, one would have to assume divination was
responsible for Dylan’s art, and the transformations could be seen as depending on
the nature of respective spirits. Dylan himself supports this view, for example, in
the reference to the Locarno concert mentioned in the preceding section. In the sen-
tence quoted above, he claims to have driven out his own “devil”; a bit further, his
memory is slightly more abstract: “I’d gotten a cosmic kick in the pants” (Chronicles
162). Scorsese selects scenes with two dierent poets, Allen Ginsberg in No Direction
Home (NDH, part 2, 23:15) and Anne Waldman in The Rolling under Revue (RTR
1:03:00), that identify Dylan as “shaman,” and he expresses his own fascination in
the interview with Schickel: “It’s interesting how a man like that had such inuence,
which disturbed him” (Schickel 5962 Kindle).
Dylan’s choice of terminology at times points to the question of mental stabil-
ity. Regardless of this question, at least during the phases covered by the two lms
studied here, a reliance on the subconscious needs to be addressed as another aspect
that reoccurs in the context of transitions or reincarnations, to stay with Scorsese’s
term. In No Direction Home, Dylan’s memory of his arrival in New York is accompa-
nied by a recitation from Jack Kerouac’s Poetry for the Beat Generation. e musician
remembers relating to the idea of the “world being completely mad ” (NDH, part 1,
19:36); he then explains how he felt as though he t “right into that bunch” of mad
people interesting to Kerouac. Of course, “mad” in this context has a wide range of
meanings, including “passionate,” “creative,” and “determined,” but also “insane” to
a certain degree. In Chronicles, Dylan describes a phase of mental instability prior
to the Locarno concert discussed in the preceding section: “ere was a missing
person inside myself,” he writes of the anxiety over his creative slump, “and I needed
to nd him” (Chronicles 147). A few pages further, he gets more explicit about the
need to revive his energy, stating “I had closed the door on my own self. I’d have to
go someplace for the mentally ill and think about it” (149). As shown in the previ-
ous discussion of metamorphoses, the Locarno concert would bring the unexpected
turnaround.
As opposed to, or also along with these spiritually induced changes, we need to
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draw attention to the eects of drugs: “Everybody wanted to get high with Bobby”
(NDH, part 2, 13:25), Peter Yarrow establishes early in the second part of No Direction
Home. Situating Dylan within a tradition of “American literary acts of self-invention”
(King 37) extending from Emerson to Fitzgerald, King emphasizes the signicance of
drugs for postwar intellectuals and artists by pointing out the cult status of Ed Dorn’s
Gunslinger (1968). Dylan’s memoir does not delve into any psychedelic experiences,
but Raymond reminds readers that Scorsese’s documented fondness for cocaine was
“linked particularly to his irrational decision to make e Last Waltz before com-
pleting his studio project, [Taxi Driver]” (Raymond 187). e Rolling under Revue
recalls the Beat scene’s involvement with drugs via van Dorp’s statement that LSD
was his “drug of choice” (RTR 32:50). Like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” one could easily
imagine this trickster mosaic of Dylan and Scorsese’s most recent collaboration as a
dream-like journey into the subconscious.
e use of the word “conjuring” in the introduction of the lm title, e Rolling
under Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, turns the entire lm into a
kind of magic trick, and Dylan supports this claim during interview scenes within
the rst ve minutes of the lm’s running time. ese scenes are in stark contrast
to those representing “the personal voice” (Raymond 192) in No Direction Home.
e Rolling under Revue disregards the line-of-axis right from the start, showing
the interviewee either on the right or le side of the screen, rather at random. He
oen appears in a medium rather than the intimate closeup shots preferred in the
older Scorsese collaboration. Made up like a modern vaudeville artist, Dylan speaks
haltingly, and confesses that his concept of the “revue” is “all clumsy bullshit” (RTR
04:35). For those still in doubt, because they may have found the lm mistakenly in
a documentary section, he reveals a few minutes later that “this Rolling under
thing” is about “nothing.” Insisting that he does not remember anything about it, he
adds that he “wasn’t even born” when it happened (RTR 04:40-05:04).
King also understands Dylan’s music in the context of conjuration. In reference
to the musician’s narration in No Direction Home, King mentions “his ability to
conjure up idiosyncratic phrases that make his generic role as ‘documentary testi-
mony’ as distinctive here as are his phrasings when he performs his own songs” (42;
emphasis ours). e adjective “Dylanesque,” ascribed to the BBC announcer of No
Direction Home, appears as an apt neologism in particular because of its relation to
“carnivalesque.” Evoking Richard Poirier’s theories about the “dramatization of the
‘self as performer’” (41), King concludes that No Direction Home “dely manipu-
lates the received generic conventions of the documentary form, not so startlingly as
Chronicles reworks the conventions of autobiographical writing, but getting there”
(42). e Rolling under Revue expands on such manipulation to an extent that it
indeed moves itself out of the documentary category altogether. It would require
extended research to distinguish facts from fantasy in this lm, but the review by
Barry Hertz is proof that appreciation of the movie does not depend on such research
(He rtz).
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e closure of the “Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese” with Ginsberg’s appeal to
the viewers to gather their own community of performers to create their own com-
munal story by all means represents the intention of both featured artists. A link back
to ancient tradition is created wit h Ginsberg’s identication as “e Oracle of Delphi”
in the end credits. e cast, there, appears as “e Players,” and lists archetypes such
as “e Balladeer” (Joan Baez) and “e Minstrel” (Roger McGuinn), as well as
“e Punk Poet” (Patti Smith). Rather than with the ctional name van Dorp, von
Haselberg is identied as “e Filmmaker.” is technique corresponds to one Dylan
describes in Chronicles, where he claims not to remember actual names sometimes.
e names he then makes up, such as “e Sorceress,” “e Wrong Man,” or “Big
Ben,” “more accurately describe” the people in question (Chronicles 169). Such names
may further prevent anyone from taking oence because they distract from specics
and oer a certain universality. ere may be viewers who object to the appearance
of Chief Rolling under, for example, but when he is listed as “e Medicine Man”
in the end credits, his place in the lm receives a dierent connotation. Likewise,
the performance of a contemporary actor as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter may seem
objectionable, but it is the actual Carter who appears among “e Players” as “e
Boxer,” and in the tradition of carnival, any of the pranks originate from individuals
who include themselves in the ridicule. It is this sense of humour that allows to laugh
about oneself, which Dylan and Scorsese share as well.
C
In a conversation with Greil Marcus, Don DeLillo remarks on the extraordinary fact
that Dylan “has maintained the level of public interest that we’ve given him over
forty-some-odd years” (qtd. in King 39). It has been another decade and a half since
the conversation in question took place, and the public interest mentioned has argu-
ably increased since the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and again
since the relea se of e Rolling under Revue i n 2019, even though the “Never Endi ng
Tour” had to be interrupted due to the coronavirus pandemic. Scorsese’s career is
comparable in length and impact, except that his achievements are recognized not
with literary prizes, but with Academy Award nominations, and his winning in the
Best Director category for e Departed (2007). Such fame has, of course, to do with
the fact that both artists, born in the early 1940s and departing from New York as
inspirational centre, have been extremely prolic and versatile.12 “Everybody has
their own idea of who Bob Dylan is” (Schickel 5933 Kindle), as Scorsese points out.
Such an idea depends on which albums or writings one looks at; likewise, dierent
lms by Scorsese would lead to dierent impressions of the lmmaker. is is not
to deny that there is an underlying kind of symbolic signature. As much as themes
and genres may dier, Scorsese’s style remains as unique as the “Dylanesque” way of
verbalization, the latter at times “hokum” and “hophead talk ” (Chronicles 8) in the
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artist’s own terms.
Another of Scorsese’s statements about Dylan may actually apply to the former
himself: “he had to be himself wherever it was going to take him” (Schickel 6005
Kindle). Although both artists work in team-based elds of creative expression, their
symbolic signatures referred to in the preceding paragraph are the result of their
auteur methodologies. e implied control over specic projects is evident in form
as well as content. Where dominant themes in Scorsese’s work include tribalism,
anti-capitalism, music, and reverence for cinema, Dylan’s preoccupations range, for
example, from bohemianism, to artistic abstraction, to religion in his gospel phase.
Both share a fascination with the blurring of boundaries between fact and ction.
Following the legacy of romanticism, they foreground emotional and subconscious
as opposed to rational realities, based on the belief that an unbiased representation of
reality is impossible in the end. e selection and organization of corpus material in
No Direction Home (2005) is crucial to the picture it paints of Dylan up to the tragic
motorcycle accident in the late 1960s that interrupted his live audience interaction
for about eight years.
e Rolling under Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) picks up
aer Dylan’s eight-year abstinence from touring, recovers scenes from the largely for-
gotten Renaldo and Clara (1978) directed by Dylan himself based on footage from the
Rolling under tour of the mid-1970s, and responds to the earlier lm in a comic,
satiric mode that dees the classication as documentary altogether. Peter Bradshaw
opens his enthusiastic review with a quotation from the present-day musician that
follows his rambling about the unreliability of memories. is quotation, that “life
is about creating yourself, and creating things” (RTR 06:24; Bradshaw), seems to
underlie the artistic impulse of Dylan and Scorsese alike. Sam Shepard notes in e
Rolling under Logbook about the former that “he’s made himself up from scratch.
at is, from the things he had around him and inside him” (qtd. in King 37).
Transformations, then, take place according to changes on either or both sides of the
self. ese changes include the exploration of new sources in past and present, and
collaborations with fellow musicians as well as other artists. Scorsese, for his part,
called No Direction Home “a life-saver” because he felt “creatively satised with that
picture” (Schickel 6073 Kindle).
While the work of both Dylan and Scorsese is grounded rmly in their time and
place, the United States leading up to and around the turn of the millennium, it also
has a certain universal character, not least due to the ctionalization techniques.
As Izzy Young denes Dylan’s music, “it sounds current and old at the same time”
(NDH, part 1, 1:17:04). Scorsese’s representation of this music, in turn, will keep it
alive for many future audiences. For someone who depends on having to “play for
people and all the time” (Chronicles 16), lm is the perfect way to preserve at least
some of the “love-aair” (RTR 1:00:00) between stage performers and their listeners.
It further guarantees future possibilities for new interpretations, a concern of both
artists in their challenging the concept of a single truth.
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N
1. For a careful literary analysis of Dylan’s writing, more than a decade before the Nobel recognition, see
Ricks.
2. Dylan’s rst ne ar t publication is Drawn Blank (19 94).
3. In the interview with Donato, Scorsese recal ls Dylan telling him about his fascination with Fassbind-
er’s collect ive idea back stage of e Last Waltz (Donato 203).
4. It is no surprise that the l m gained Don DeLillo’s endorsement aer the pre-premiere at Telluride
(Ki ng 35-36).
5. Lyrics and release information of all songs are avai lable from Dylan’s website, www.bobdylan.com/
songs/rolling-stone/.
6. ere is a sma ll homage to this lm in e Rolling under Revue (see Bradshaw).
7. is score included “Knock in’ on Heaven’s Door,” www.bobdylan.com/songs/k nockin-heavens-door/.
8. e clip is , in fact, from e Vanishing Lady (1893) by Méliès (see Bradshaw).
9. e popular name for these ongoing live performa nces is the “Never Ending Tour” (see Gray).
10. Erik Ba rnouw distinguishes these two t ypes of observational documenta ry dierently. He wr ites that
“the direct cinema artist aspired to invisibilit y; the Rouch cinéma vérité artist was oen an avowed
participant. e direct cinema ar tist played the role of uninvolved bystander; the cinéma vérité artist
espoused that of provocateur” (255).
11. Scorsese uses this term (Schickel 5914 Kindle), in following Clancy (NDH).
12. One could also cite a certain compatibility with patriarchal capita list struct ures (see e.g. Petridis).
W C
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