k, if it definitely humiliates the copyright geek fans in kairos wank
tune over dylan's copyright originality, dylan himself has only
managed to get to the heights of this mooee in counted occasions, such
as renaldo and clara or brownsville girl. therefore, todd haynes is a
superior entelechy, like so many of the semiotic turn, something
dylan, let alone his fanboys, could never stomach. here goes, jim
hobermoon:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0747,hoberman,78422,20.html

ike a Complete Unknown: I'm Not There and the Changing Face of Bob
Dylan on Film
by J. Hoberman
November 20th, 2007 3:50 PM
photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007

I'm Not There is the movie of the year--but to whom does Todd Haynes's
Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it really made?

The great attention-grabber of last month's New York Film Festival,
I'm Not There is as notable for its stunt casting as its elusive
subject. It's Six Actors in Search of the Great White Wonder. Half a
dozen performers of assorted age, race, gender, and prominence play
the variously named protagonist--who is introduced by a stand-in for
the poet Arthur Rimbaud as a corpse on a slab: "God rest his
soul. . . . Even the ghost was more than one person."

I'm Not There shows a showbiz life falling apart and reconstituting
itself multiple times, but it's not anything like The Bob Dylan Story.
His name is never uttered.

On first viewing, there seems to be no particular form. This is a
dense film with an all-over free-associational structure. The
characteristic means of advance is two steps forward, a dipsy-doodle
step back, and a flying leap into the future. As Haynes's 135-minute
phantasmagoria rolls on toward closure, the oldest of its Dylan
figures hops a freight train along with the youngest--so it must be yet
another one who crashes his motorcycle by the tracks. Meanwhile, the
flaming electrified Dylan of 1966 dies of a drug overdose, floating
over London as the actual Dylan "posthumously" croaks the movie's
haunting title song--a 1967 "Basement Tape" session which, until this
movie, existed only as a bootleg.

How to explain the film's jokes and allusions? The glimpse of the
street musician Moondog on Sixth Avenue? The meaning of veteran folkie
Richie Havens singing "Tombstone Blues" on the porch of a
sharecropper's shack? The tortuous Black Panther explication of
"Ballad of a Thin Man"? Small wonder that one enthusiastic Film
Commentator has compared I'm Not There to Finnegans Wake.

This isn't the first time that Haynes, who studied film as semiotics,
has taken pop stars or pop music for a text. He established his
reputation in the late '80s as the co-author of Superstar, a Super-8
tour de force that wrung maximum pathos from the tale of Karen
Carpenter by using a cast of Barbie dolls. A decade later, Velvet
Goldmine--probably the most cerebral rock 'n' roll movie ever made--
proposed glam rock as a Dionysian religion with a David Bowie-like
androgyne as its cynical high priest.

I'm Not There is doggedly pop-modernist in its layered, nonlinear,
post-Citizen Kane structure and strategically applied Dylanology. The
viewer is invited to search for the author's footnotes as well as the
subject's fingerprints. Quotation merges with invention. A tarantula
crawls through it. Original recordings mix with covers. The title is
made literal by Haynes's subtitle: The Lives and Time of Bob Dylan.
The lives are his. The time--however chronologically skewed--is ours.

Heath Ledger as Robbie
photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007
Bob Dylan may not be one to ever look back, but his past has never
been more present. I'm Not There is part of the larger, ongoing Dylan
revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen.

A discreet fellow, to the business born (his father was the accountant
to Dylan's legendary first manager, Albert Grossman), Rosen opened the
vaults to issue the multi-CD "Bootleg Series" in the early '90s and
produced the 2004 Scorsese-signed documentary No Direction Home; he
encouraged the publication of Dylan's memoirs and the unfortunate
Twyla Tharp ballet; he not only facilitated I'm Not There but the
release of several archival documentaries.

Thus, as Haynes's film opens at Film Forum, D.A. Pennebaker will
premiere an hour's worth of outtakes from his 1967 Dylan portrait,
Don't Look Back, at the IFC Center, and the Walter Reade will run
Murray Lerner's The Other Side of Mirror, a straightforward
documentary of Dylan's mid-'60s appearances at three consecutive
Newport Folk Festivals.

Is it all too much? Following the New York Film Festival press
screening of I'm Not There, I walked to the subway with a post-'60s,
European-born film programmer. She could appreciate I'm Not There as a
Todd Haynes film, but the Dylan minutiae was a baffling source of
irritation.

Can one communicate the significance that Haynes takes as a given? The
best sense may be found in a two-page story written by a man who very
likely never heard of Dylan. In "Everything and Nothing," Jorge Luis
Borges writes of an artist who has "no one inside him" and whose
words, "which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated
turn," suggested "a dream someone had failed to dream." To understand
that dream and Dylan's importance to his audience of dreamers, catch
The Other Side of the Mirror.

Something Dylan always resisted making, The Other Side of the Mirror
is a pure performance film. But it is also a three-act drama. In 1963,
a 22-year-old lad turns up at Newport as a mysteriously accomplished
folk revivalist. The movie opens during an afternoon workshop with
solemn Bob performing his original iron-mining dirge, "North Country
Blues," on a stage crowded with other folkies. Chanteuse Judy Collins
stares fixedly into space; old time banjo-picker Roscoe Holcomb--
himself a former coal miner--looks baffled. Not for the last time is
somebody wondering: Who is this nasal-voiced kid, and where did he
come from?

Later, a beaming Joan Baez introduces her protégé, and together they
bellow Dylan's protest ballad "With God on Our Side." (Roscoe seems
even more puzzled.) Lerner cuts to a nighttime version of the Dylan-
Baez duet; someone declares that this curly-haired boy "has his finger
on the pulse of our generation." Dylan does a total Woody Guthrie
impersonation with "Talkin' World War III Blues" and then, switching
from antiwar satire to civil-rights pathos, overwhelms the crowd with
the complicated phrasing, credible analysis, and palpable emotion of
his Medgar Evers- inspired "Only a Pawn in Their Game." The festival
ends in a paroxysm of good feeling, with Dylan fronting a half-dozen
performers singing his (or rather Peter, Paul and Mary's Top 40 hit)
"Blowin' in the Wind." He's serious and modest, and he upstages them
all.

n 1963, Dylan was a prodigy performing for a particular coterie. A
year later, he is the festival's undeniable star, confident and no
longer scruffy, with a repertoire of original songs--"Mr. Tambourine
Man," "All I Want to Do," "Don't Think Twice"--so good that the
audience seems to shake its collective head in disbelief. Had the
coffeehouses of MacDougal Street really incubated so miraculous a
talent? No longer is Dylan anybody's protégé; now Baez is his straight
man, particularly when they sing their increasingly lugubrious anthem
"With God on Our Side."

For his final number, Dylan introduces "Chimes of Freedom," declaiming
it in a controlled beatnik ecstasy. It's his most complex song to date--
and his most generous ever, a Whitmanesque embrace extended to "every
hung-up person in the whole wide universe." The words keep spinning
and tumbling; the sense of communion is overwhelming. Dylan delights
in blowing the audience's mind. The crowd can't stop applauding. In a
moment no one will ever see again, after a song he will soon cease to
play, Bob pops back onstage to tell the fans that he loves them.

As the '65 festival begins, Dylan sports a fancier guitar and a better
haircut. What's more, he's wearing shades and smoking his cigarettes
onstage. It's clear that he's planning to run away from home. And the
songs are even better! When he sings "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)," the
audience still leans forward to concentrate. Then he appears in a
polka-dot shirt and leather jacket, fronting the amplified Paul
Butterfield Blues Band, and blows the audience away with the
declaration that he ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Scattered sullen boos. Dylan charges into his just-released Top 40 hit
"Like a Rolling Stone." More boos.

Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody
photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007
In I'm Not There, Haynes envisions Newport '65 as a direct assault on
the audience. The dandified Dylan and his band spray the crowd with
machine-gun fire. Then, following the logic of The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance, Haynes elects to "print the myth": He stages the
apocryphal scene in which Pete Seeger has to be restrained from
cutting the power supply with an ax. It's war!

In The Other Side of the Mirror, Dylan simply leaves the stage, but
the crowd calls him back. Can't it please be the way that it was?
Dylan returns alone and contemptuously sings them something they'll
like: a polished, slightly rushed, and vaguely sarcastic version of
"Mr. Tambourine Man." The audience begs for more. He leaves them with
a hyper-enunciated rendition of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." End of
story. Was ever a star more appreciated--or more stifled by that
appreciation?

Haynes's protagonist first appears as an 11-year-old African-American
(Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails, hobnob bing with hobos, and
calling himself Woody. Singing his Dust Bowl ballads and doted on by
white Southern liberals, this plucky, pint-size vagabond is a
hilariously self-aggrandizing, assured, voluble, and precocious
performer, even if he has to be reminded that it's 1959. He's also a
tough act to follow, but the mythmaking has only just begun.

Dylan's next avatar, the diffident protest singer Jack Rollins
(Christian Bale), resembles another Dylan model, Ramblin' Jack
Elliott, and inhabits a pastiche of the Scorsese doc No Direction
Home. Looking back on the folk scene, Julianne Moore plays a fictional
Joan Baez ("Every night I would invite this ragamuffin on stage")
while Jack explains why he decided to take a powder: "All they wanted
from me was finger-pointin' songs." (Not that Dylan ever stopped
pointing his finger; he just shifted targets. Indeed, Jack will later
reappear as the born-again, gospel-singing Pastor John.)

Haynes then executes a Pirandellian pirouette, jumping to the last
days of the Vietnam War. The protagonist is now Robbie (Heath Ledger),
an egocentric Method actor who, after Jack Rollins's disappearance,
became "the new James Dean" by impersonating the folkie icon in a
biopic called Grain of Sand. Still with me? Robbie is introduced
breaking up with his wife Claire. Haynes flashes back a decade to
their meeting in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. An independent
artist and then the mother of Robbie's children, Claire is the
relationship woman, combining aspects of Suze Rotolo and Sara Dylan
and played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, herself a text as the daughter of
a '60s "It" Girl, Jane Birkin, and a monstre sacré, French troubadour
Serge Gainsbourg.

Having unmasked and remasked the protagonist, Haynes skips at once
back and ahead to mod London to present his own sacred monster--the
incandescent mid-'60s electric speed freak Jude Quinn (Cate
Blanchett). Haynes is not what one would call a natural filmmaker. His
ideas are too evident, his schemata overly present. He is, however, a
sort of natural Brechtian: His actors are always "quoting." I'm Not
There gets surprisingly naturalistic performances from Ledger and
especially Bale. But it's the blatant alienation effect provided by
Marcus Carl Franklin and Cate Blanchett's fastidiously copied
mannerisms that truly dramatize the self-invented, sheer sui generis-
ness of the Dylan trip.

With Blanchett, the movie turns black-and-white faux vérité. Drawing
on Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and riffing on A Hard Day's Night
(Jude frisks with under-cranked, helium-voiced Beatles at a British
lawn party), Haynes ponders Dylan's most alarming and compelling
manifestation as the vitriolic brat-visionary "voice of a generation."
Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) dances attendance; a smug BBC journalist
(Bruce Greenwood) casts himself as the clueless Mr. Jones; an Edie
Sedgwick-like ex-debutante (Michelle Williams) drifts onto the scene,
grist for Jude's malicious humor.

Self-destruction seems imminent, but Haynes isn't finished. A mature
Dylan (Richard Gere) named Billy (as though he were the Kid in
retirement), but referred to as "Mr. B," is riding out the apocalypse
of High Sixties craziness, incognito in a western town named
Hallowe'en that, complete with giraffe, is part Woodstock and the rest
Fellini. This is the righteous Cowboy Bob of the John Wesley Harding
LP, the Dylan of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and the bicentennial
"Rolling Thunder" tour, as sanctimoniously played by the only actor in
the film who was of age to experience the Dylan juggernaut firsthand.

Everything is here, but is I'm Not There intelligible to anyone beyond
the cognoscenti? Is Haynes addressing Dylan? Is he imagining how Jude
Quinn must feel--a freak suffering a surplus of intelligence and
feeling, the loneliness of forever talking above people's heads, the
pressure of being the smartest, the most popular, the coolest,
funniest, most talented person in the room? When everybody's a kiss-
ass phony or a belligerent poseur, how are you supposed to be real?
(Especially since, as with the subject of Borges's story, you have
trained yourself to pretend to be somebody so that no one discovers
your "nobodiness.")

Could this conundrum be the root of Bob Dylan's long, tortuous, not
entirely requited love affair with the movies?

One needn't be a hardcore Dylanologist to figure that Bob grew up on
Hollywood westerns or to glean that back when he was hanging out on
Bleecker Street, he was also glomming nouvelle vague flicks at the
Bleecker Street Cinema. The 2000 Oscar he won for the song "Things
Have Changed" from Wonder Boys meant so much to him that he took it on
tour, perched as a talisman atop his amplifier.

Christian Bale as Jack Rollins
photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007

Haynes, who has surely thought as much about Dylan and the movies as
anyone on earth, told a New York Film Festival audience that I'm Not
There referred to a number of Dylan's favorite movies--by which he
seems to have meant Fellini's 8 1/2--as well as Dylan vehicles. Haynes
further noted that, although he had no direct dealings with his
subject, he was told that Dylan gave his blessing to the I'm Not There
project on the basis of screening Haynes's earlier movies.

Dylan always identified with directors; he imagined his own life as a
movie. Yet to appear in a movie would be to fix an identity, to admit
that one was acting. Perhaps it was this conflict that denied him
something like Mick Jagger's charmed résumé--collaborations with
Kenneth Anger, documentaries by the likes of Peter Whitehead, the
Maysles brothers, and Robert Frank, a career-defining performance in
the cult film Performance. Jean-Luc Godard made a Rolling Stones
rehearsal the centerpiece of One Plus One; Dylan had to make do with
an inane dis in Masculine-Feminine: "Who are you, Mr. Bob Dylan?" Hey,
how did Godard guess that the question of identity would haunt every
movie (and every move) that Mr. Bob Dylan would make?

In early 1965, Dylan informed the host of a TV chat show that he
planned to make a "horror cowboy movie." (Asked if he'd be cast as the
horror cowboy, he replied that, no, he'd be playing his mother.) That
spring, Dylan visited the Warhol Factory and sat for two screen tests--
one impassively behind shades and another smoking a cigarette and
glaring at the camera. As a gift, Warhol presented him with a silver
Elvis painting, which Dylan would give to Albert Grossman in return
for a couch. Soon after, Dylan was starring in his own vehicle, Don't
Look Back's account of his 1965 British tour. Too much of nothing is
revealed: A hypersensitive 24-year-old attempts to cope with mega-
celebrity. The inability of virtually everyone to respond to him as a
normal person is a given. Meanwhile, local journalists play a
collective Margaret Dumont to Dylan's sour Groucho: Who does this guy
think he is? (In I'm Not There, Haynes dramatizes the press's revenge--
outing Jude Quinn's suppressed middle-class Jewish origins.)

Don't Look Back premiered two years later at the same Summer of Love
Montreal Film Festival that opened with Bonnie and Clyde--with Dylan
already many months into post-motorcycle-accident seclusion. Hardly a
substitute for a new album, Pennebaker's film reprised the uneasy last
days of Dylan's pre-electric incarnation. It was nevertheless received
as a breakthrough, the first feature-length vérité pop-star portrait.
Dylan, however, must not have cared for it: He appropriated the
footage that Pennebaker shot of his 1966 British tour (meant for a TV
documentary) and--working with filmmaker Howard Alk--produced his own
perversely pulverized version. At once withholding and self-indulgent,
Eat the Document fragments brilliant onstage performances in favor of
Dylan's backstage riffs with soulmate Robbie Robertson and other
members of the entourage.

Although much of the footage would appear, even more perversely re-
normalized, in No Direction Home (and provided material for the Jude
Quinn sequences in I'm Not There), Eat the Document was never really
released. As befits a would-be underground movie, it had its
theatrical premiere at the Whitney Museum. Dylan, meanwhile, was down
in Mexico, making his first "real" movie, Sam Peckinpah's hippie
western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Peckinpah supposedly had no
clear idea who the singer was. Both the star, Kris Kristofferson, and
the screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, would take credit for recruiting
Dylan to play the Kid's smirky sidekick; Dylan, however, was surely
responsible for naming his character "Alias."

photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007

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Continued from page 3

Did Bob Dylan really exist? Such was the question posed four years
later, when Dylan directed his celluloid magnum opus Renaldo & Clara.
This four-hour extravaganza was born as a rockumentary of the 1975-76
"Rolling Thunder" tour; its purpose, according to the filmmaker, was
"to put forth a certain vision which I carry around, and can't express
on any other canvas."

Richard Gere as Mr. B
photo: Jonathan Wenk/The Weinstein Company, 2007
Hired to write dialogue--little of which would be used--Sam Shepard was
enjoined to study the epic backstage love story Children of Paradise
(the one previous movie that Dylan thought to have successfully
"stopped time") and Truffaut's New Wave noir, Shoot the Piano Player.
("Is that the kind of movie you want to make?" Shepard asked,
receiving the laconic reply: "Something like that.") Scorsese, who
first met Dylan when he was shooting The Last Waltz in late '76,
remembers a more suggestive model: Dylan spoke to him about R.W.
Fassbinder's Beware of the Holy Whore, "a film about the collective
idea, and about its impossibility."

To dream the impossible dream: Fassbinder would have had an easier
time imagining Dylan than vice versa. Shortly before Renaldo & Clara's
release, Dylan gave an interview to Rolling Stone in which he took
care to name-check (and patronize) the two key filmmakers of the '60s:
"Warhol did a lot for American cinema," he explained. "He was before
his time." As for Godard, Dylan recalled that, although he had never
seen a movie like Breathless, once he did, it seemed totally familiar;
he remembered thinking, "Yeah man, why didn't I do that, I could have
done that."

A monstrously curdled ego was about to be uncorked. "My film is about
identity--everybody's identity," Dylan declared. Asked about the
running time, Dylan expressed surprise "that people think that four
hours is too long for a film. As if people had so much to do. To me,
it's not long enough. . . . Americans are spoiled, they expect art to
be like wallpaper with no effort, just to be there." Advertised as "a
motion picture mural about relationships, about Bob Dylan, about all
of us," Renaldo & Clara opened with a performance of "When I Paint My
Masterpiece."

Truly, pondering Dylan brings out the grandiloquent in everyone, even
himself. The height of psychodramatic self-deification, Dylan's movie
presented the filmmaker as Renaldo, a man in the clear plastic mask, a
Third World savior, venerated by Native Americans, African-Americans,
and beatnik Americans alike. When not performing in clown-face,
Renaldo swanned around bare-chested as the Woman in White (Joan Baez)
competed for his attention against long-suffering Clara (wife Sara,
who would divorce Dylan during editing). The character "Bob Dylan" was
played by fat Ronnie Hawkins, the onetime leader of the band that
became the Band.

This humorless, solipsistic spectacle was hell on audiences but heaven
for headline writers: "Gone With the Idiot Wind" or "Ballad in Plain
Dull." The Village Voice sent six writers to review, five of whom
panned it. "So many reputations are sunk by Renaldo & Clara that it's
like watching the defeat of the Spanish Armada," James Wolcott
cackled; Mark Jacobson put his life in jeopardy, beginning his review,
"I wish Bob Dylan had died." In The New York Times, Janet Maslin
nailed the star's peculiar narcissistic diffidence: Dylan gives the
impression "that he isn't really interested in acting, and that he is
always acting anyway."

New Times reported that Dylan now considered himself a filmmaker with
a dozen movies planned. But after Renaldo & Clara's critical
bludgeoning (and $2 million loss), he retired from the field. Although
stranger things have happened, it seems unlikely that the movie will
receive a 30th-anniversary re-release. Still, the 2003 Masked &
Anonymous, directed (pre-Borat) by Seinfeld's Larry Charles and
starring Dylan, revisited Renaldo & Clara on a lower, less grandiose
key and was more fondly shrugged off. Although The New York Post
called Masked & Anonymous "a strong contender for the worst movie of
the century," few critics managed much indignation; more typical was
Michael Atkinson's assessment in the Voice of the film as "the final
survivor of a dying dinosaur species . . . a trash-can monument to
Dylan's aging coolness."

Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles
Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to
superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never
come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign
over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but
someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll.

No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded
that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through
the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and
greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then--having achieved fame and
adoration beyond reckoning--vanish into a folk tradition of his own
making.

Lerner opens The Other Side of the Mirror with ex-Weaver Ronnie
Gilbert introducing Dylan at the 1964 festival. This artist, she tells
the crowd, "grew out of a need." The times demanded him, and so did
the audience. "You know him--he's yours." It may be pretty to think so,
but that's a social function against which Dylan would spend decades
rebelling. Not until the debacle that was Renaldo & Clara would
Dylan's fans fully appreciate the monster they had wrought.

I'm Not There has one near constant: Everyone complains that Jack or
Robbie or Jude or even Mr. B has changed. (Haynes too: Several
observers have made the point that where Velvet Goldmine attacked its
chameleon-like David Bowie character for betraying his fans, I'm Not
There reveres Dylan for his existential metamorphoses.) This
resentment is complicated by an aggrieved sense that Jack/Robbie/Jude
should have been changing the world instead of himself--as if he
actually had a choice.

I'm Not There is a unique collaboration. It's an essay that derives
its intellectual force from the idea of Bob Dylan, and its emotional
depth from his songs. Haynes doesn't deny his subject's insistence
that his authentic self could never be explained or portrayed--and
might not even exist. "I don't know who I am most of the time," little
Woody confesses in the midst of his compulsive mythmaking. We don't
either, although, then again, we really do.

Moments before I'm Not There ends, Haynes presents a shock close-up of
the young Dylan taking a harmonica solo and then, over the credits,
the sound of the inexhaustible performance that is "Like a Rolling
Stone." There's a chill every time the actual voice is heard. Six
characters and one ghost who, except for that brief moment, is not
even there. This is the Dylan movie that Dylan himself could never
make.