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Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
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Eating the Document
For any Bob Dylan fan – and I certainly count myself
in that group – the immediate and overriding response to Martin Scorsese’s
second documentary on the singer-songwriter has got to be: what’s not to like?
The songs are great, the performances inspired, and the heady atmosphere of
this peak period in Dylan’s 1970s career is infectiously captured. Dylan had
reached back into his folk-club roots of the early ‘60s, mixed in some newer
blood, and assembled a loose, ever-expanding, touring ensemble (from October
1975 to May 1976) that avoided the big rock stadiums and evoked an old-style
musical revue-show. Scorsese has not only given us a generous (at 142 minutes)
assemblage of the available materials, he has also given it a decent digital
brush-up in picture and sound quality.
In many ways and on many levels, the film is simply
another part of the relentless campaign of Dylan and his manager Jeff Rosen to
revive, restore and release the “official bootleg” archive of the artist. Hidden
not far below the surface of this merry Netflix spectacle, however, are a few
intriguing questions.
“A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese”? Rolling Thunder Revue has aroused most
comment, so far, for its fancy fictional contrivances: inserting a young Sharon
Stone into the tour, for instance … and even an entirely imaginary character,
the titular politician (played by Michael Murphy) from Robert Altman’s
satirical series Tanner ‘88 (1988)
and its sequel, Tanner on Tanner (2004). There is no real deceit going in this sleight-of-hand: Scorsese begins
the whole shebang, after all – and I suspect this is among his few truly
personal contributions to the project – with a clip from a silent, magic-trick
film by Georges Méliès (thus linking it to his woeful Hugo, 2011); and he ends it with footage of a “compere” in a mask.
These games with fact and fiction doubtless refer, in Scorsese’s mind and
method, to Orson Welles’ classic F for Fake (1973).
Dylan has long claimed the freedom to turn his past
life into whatever story he pleases, and to project any image of himself that
he chooses – which is no doubt why he approved of Todd Haynes’ cubistic, many-Dylans
approach to the biopic I’m Not There (2007) – the weakest part of which was, curiously, the Richard Gere strand supposedly
evoking the mid ‘70s Rolling Thunder/Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) period. Dylan is fully part of the storytelling
game in Rolling Thunder Revue, verifying
(for instance) that the white stage make-up he and his collaborators wore was in
homage to the band Kiss – something that is probably not true at all.
So far, it’s a harmless prank. Things get murkier for
me, however, once Dylan starts talking about the mysterious documentary
filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp who was also along for the tour, shoving his camera
in everywhere – and whom we occasionally hear Dylan berate as he mutters at
someone off-screen in the archival footage. Dorp is played by performance
artist Martin Von Haselberg, so he doesn’t really exist – everything about him
has been faked up. There’s an odd moment near the end of Rolling Thunder Revue where Dorp castigates his off-screen
interviewer: “I’m the one who made this, you’re using it – this wouldn’t exist
without me, I’m the filmmaker here”. More than any of the other jokey
contrivances scattered throughout Scorsese’s film, this Mr Dorp is a device,
designed to cover something up. But who or what, exactly?
It has been astonishing to me to see how many
reviewers of Rolling Thunder Revue seem almost entirely unaware that it has been built on the remains of another,
earlier film: Dylan’s own Renaldo &
Clara, released in two different versions (4 hours and then 2 hours) in
1978, and last shown officially on UK’s Channel 4 in the early ‘80s. Two myths
have done the rounds in rapid succession since the release of Scorsese’s film:
that it’s best never to have seen Renaldo
& Clara, because it was a pretentious, lousy mess; and that Rolling Thunder Revue is built in part
from its leftover outtakes. In fact, it’s much more than outtakes: it looks to
me as if all the many hours of footage gathered for Renaldo & Clara, used or unused for Dylan’s longest cut, has
been put at the disposal of Scorsese and his collaborators, including editors
Damian Rodriguez and David Tedeschi.
This means that most of the sections that have come
around for special praise or attention in Scorsese’s compilation – such as a
scene of Allen Ginsberg reciting poetry to a room of elderly citizens, or a
touching moment at Jack Kerouac’s grave, not to mention the entirety of the
concert footage – were all originally staged and (more or less) directed by
Dylan. The trickster is playing his mirror-games to deflect this fact. Why?
In his (sadly now defunct) “Bradlands” column for Sight and Sound, Brad Stevens,
among the staunchest defenders of Renaldo
& Clara, described its incessant and often ambiguous slides between
documentary and fiction: “The breaking down of categories is the film’s
structural principle, with none of these elements existing independently of the
others. And this ambitious structure reinforces what is clearly Dylan’s central
concern: the blurring of lines between one identity and another”. Identity is
indeed the key: Dylan is many people in it, and many others assume the role of
“Bob Dylan”! And I agree with Stevens: longueurs, obscurities and all, Renaldo & Clara is a pretty
remarkable film experiment, easily on par with, or well above the quality of,
similar musician-turned-filmmaker efforts by Neil Young, David Byrne, Frank
Zappa and others.
Why has Dylan so ruthlessly suppressed his own film,
and now woven an elaborately playful myth to obscure its very existence? (Even
the title Renaldo & Clara appears
nowhere in the end credits of Rolling
Thunder Revue.) The reason seems clear: the marital divorce between him and
Sara Noznisky – even the famous song in her name, “Sara”, gets no play in Rolling Thunder Revue. Presumably due to
legal agreements in their divorce settlement of 1977 (which both parties have
since scrupulously respected), Sara has been erased entirely from Scorsese’s
film, as have their children. (The same erasure happened in the sole volume to
date of Dylan’s written autobiography, Chronicles.)
This is quite a disappearance, considering that she is among the main players
in Renaldo & Clara, and that the
film is, in no small part, a reflection on their marital crisis. If one
believes the better biographies of Dylan, it was the experience of this tour
that essentially put the nail in the coffin of their union.
Although I have been conventionally signalling
Scorsese as the auteur of Rolling Thunder
Revue, we need to be a little careful with this attribution. As was the
case with the previous Dylan-Scorsese doco, No Direction Home (2005,
detailing the period 1961-1966), much of it – including interviews with people
who died some time ago, such as Sam Shepard and Rubin Carter (the subject of
“Hurricane”)– seems to
have been engineered by the aforementioned Jeff Rosen. No doubt Scorsese added
his special touches, and oversaw the general assemblage. But even where his
hand is most evident – in the montage flurries designed to convey the zeitgeist of the mid ‘70s in USA – there
is the hint of an evasion, an ulterior motive at work.
It is certainly odd and disconcerting to hear Dylan,
as he is today, recalling at the start of Rolling
Thunder Revue: “America was chased out of Vietnam in such a humiliating way”.
What? The strong political level of Renaldo
& Clara (reminiscent of Scorsese’s own early Street Scenes, 1970) is, in a single stroke, disposed of here. Dylan
lurched mightily from left to right in the period immediately following the Rolling Thunder tour – I love his music, but let’s not forget that
this is the guy who stood on stage at Live Aid in 1985 and suggested that “one
or two million” be taken from “the money that’s raised for people in Africa”
and given to American farmers! For someone who has travelled the wide world so
many times, Dylan is surely a first-class myopic All-American. And now Rolling Thunder Revue comes along to
help bolster that particular, conservative myth of his ever-rewritten self.
One person, in particular, has sadly disappeared as a
result of all this fiddling with the records of the past: Dylan’s close
cinematic collaborator in the 1960s and ‘70s, Howard Alk. (Here, too, the
comparison with F for Fake becomes
intriguing: Welles’ deserved success with that film had the inadvertent effect
of burying his collaborator François Reichenbach, whose own doco on Elmyr de
Hory, much pillaged by Welles, has itself become virtually invisible today.)
Alk’s biography is shadowy but fascinating: a comedian
in his youth alongside Elaine May and Mike Nichols, he coined at least one
immortal stand-up line: the definition of a Freudian slip as “meaning to say
one thing and saying a mother”. Alk
assisted on the classic Dylan documentary Don’t
Look Back (1967), and was both a cinematographer and co-editor of Renaldo & Clara; he also directed
several other political films with titles like American Revolution. But he died at age 52 of a drug overdose in
1982, and cultural history has not been kind to him.
In fact, he has been ungraciously submerged twice now. When No
Direction Home appeared, much was made of the unearthed, previously “lost”
colour footage shot by the celebrated D.A. Pennebaker that Scorsese was able to
draw upon. But that very footage had already been the basis of another bootleg
production never made officially available: Eat
the Document (1968), a savage mockumentary well before its time, even a
veritable anti-documentary, edited by
Dylan and Alk.
“Eating the document” has turned out to be something
that Dylan manages to do very well indeed, along with his high-level
co-conspirators.
MORE Scoresese: The Age of Innocence, The Blues, Bringing Out the Dead, Cape Fear, Goodfellas, The King of Comedy, Kundun, The Aviator, Casino, The Irishman, After Hours, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ © Adrian Martin July 2019 |
