The many faces of Bob Dylan in the movies
We look at Bob Dylan’s relationship with cinema: films inspired by him, films that inspired him, and films featuring the great man himself.
In William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the traveller Jacques famously compares life to a play and sets out the seven stages of a man’s life: “They have their exits and entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts.” Life is also a play in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007), and the persona of its chameleonic subject is similarly divided into six distinct roles: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, rock’n’roll martyr, and star of electricity.
If being Bob Dylan is a type of performance, then it’s possible to construct an alternative narrative of his career based on his relationship with cinema – an entire medium based on artifice – and Haynes’ archetypes, each of which acts as visual shorthand for decades of projections and preconceptions about Dylan’s public image, offer a prism through which to consider his history with film, as a creator, subject and cinephile.
D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering Dont Look Back (1967) – shot on Dylan’s final solo acoustic tour in 1965 – represents the cinematic naissance of the Dylan myth. The ‘direct cinema’ aesthetic, observational and unobtrusive in nature, captures Dylan as he braces himself to weather the storm of his impending transition from folk to electric or, in Haynes’ terms, from prophet to rock‘n’roll martyr. We see the new persona being constructed before our eyes, with Dylan using his wryness and detachment as weapons against the stifling expectations that his years as sooth-saying folk troubadour have imposed on him. The shift to electricity is Dylan’s original sin moment, and the rest of his career would unfold in its shadow; the film is an invaluable document of the eve of transition.
On record, the shift from acoustic to electric is fully realised in the unrivalled 12-month run of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In the alternative cinematic narrative of Dylan’s career, the moment is marked by two companion pieces to Dont Look Back – Eat the Document (1972) and the rock‘n’roll martyr sequence of I’m Not There. The former is Dylan’s own cut of material shot by Pennebaker on the semi-electric UK tour of 1966. Jolting and disorientating, it is an immediate plunge into the brave new world of electric Dylan, as seen from the eye of the storm. The persona of Dont Look Back has crystallised into an icon; a mysterious, Blakean figure moving to his own strange rhythm.
The latter, a sequence in which Cate Blanchett plays Dylan as “Jude Quinn”, is a composite of both Dont Look Back and Eat the Document, shaded by a sense of reflection born of hindsight. Certain portions are directly reprised from the earlier films – such as the scene with the journalist (“How can I answer that if you’ve got the nerve to ask me?”) and the infamous “Judas” incident – while others are fanciful spins on the events of the time. Both Eat the Document and the Jude Quinn sequence aim to catch the shock of transition, the first with its bracing, obfuscatory style and the second with its imaginative casting of the Dylan role. Together, the three films serve as distinct visual counterpoints to the three classic records of 196⅚6.
These electric years of mercurial innovation came to an abrupt end with Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966. He returned from the crash with John Wesley Harding, a rustic, pared-back record with its roots in the mythology of the west; the rock‘n’roll martyr reborn as the outlaw. In the alternative cinematic narrative of Bob Dylan, film is his route to the heart of the outlaw and John Wesley Harding – named after a 19th-century bandit – betrays a cinematic sense of the western aesthetic (“Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl”), a stylistic trait that recurs throughout Dylan’s work. ‘Seeing the Real You At Last’ – a song rife with movie allusions – references George Stevens’ Shane (1953) and quotes Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy (1980) (“You could ride like Annie Oakley / You could shoot like Belle Starr”).
In ‘Brownsville Girl’, a song co-written by playwright and actor Sam Shepard, memories of watching Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950) are juxtaposed with a cowardly tale of would-be heroics. A subversive take on the outlaw ballad, it exploits the gulf between the cinematic ideal of the outlaw and the craven narrator – it’s Dylan’s own version of a revisionist western. In 1973, Dylan even appeared in one of the great revisionist westerns – Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Although Warren Beatty had considered Dylan to play Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – the film in which Hollywood went electric – Peckinpah’s film remains Dylan’s only non-rock star role on screen. Haynes reflects on the legacy of the film in the outlaw segment of I’m Not There, the picture’s strangest, most resonant passage.
Haynes’ fragments are not so neatly delineated in Renaldo and Clara (1978) and Masked and Anonymous (2003), the two films in which Dylan comes closest to reckoning with his own mythology. Shot on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1974-76, the former is a four-hour would-be opus directed by Dylan in star-of-electricity mode, mixing concert footage, fiction and documentary. There’s little reflection to speak of, but the picture’s patchwork framework gives the impression that these vignettes are direct, unrestrained dispatches from Dylan’s imagination.
The film is also the most notable example of his cinephilia, with multiple references to Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945) – from the use of whiteface to directly lifted dialogue – as well as a clear thematic debt to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of the Holy Whore (1971), which Martin Scorsese revealingly referred to as “a film about the collective idea, and about its impossibility.” Speaking of Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) in the first volume of his memoirs, Dylan said it “looked like life in a carnival mirror” – this is the approach he brought to Renaldo and Clara.
Larry Charles’ often overlook Masked and Anonymous, co-written by Dylan, is Dylan’s most direct engagement with his own legacy. He stars as a singer sprung from jail to play a benefit concert for the ruling authoritarian regime. The picture’s vision of dystopia, in which criminals ascend to the presidency and nobody notices when rebel fighters switch sides, recalls the blunt political nihilism of Dylan’s born-again period in the late 70s and 80s.
Songs like ‘Slow Train Coming’ and ‘Union Sundown’ are bitter flipsides to the protest record of the 60s, with the urgent specificity replaced by a broader, more despondent mistrust of authority (“Democracy don’t rule the world / You better get that in your head”). Masked and Anonymous takes an absurdist slant on this worldview, with Dylan shuffling stony-faced through proceedings, dispensing pithy epigrams at every turn (“You ever hang out?” “It always has been hanging out”).
The most surprising element of Masked and Anonymous is the frankness with which Dylan addresses his legacy. From his tendency to drastically change the arrangements of his songs on tour (“All of his songs are recognisable even when they’re not”) to the expectations his fans impose on him (“You’re supposed to have all the answers”), Dylan appears to be fully aware of his own mythology and, while he has often used that to his advantage, Masked and Anonymous is ultimately about an artist who will not be defined perceptions of others.
The songs played by his band in the film are the rhythm and blues numbers that would define his output in the 21st century. It is a return to the style of songs that his high school band The Golden Chords would have played in Hibbing, Minnesota in the 1950s, before Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. Perhaps Jacques is right in As You Like It – a man’s life does come full circle.
