Toronto 2005: Larry Gross On Socrsese's Dyaln Doc

Ten Things Worth Thinking About
Martin Scorsese's
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
Considered by Larry Gross

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) 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.