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December 16, 2006
I have been watching the two disc DVD of No Direction Home by Martin Scorsese, which focuses on Dylan's life and music from 1961-66. It is a portrait of an musician as a young man in his cultural/musical context of opular culture in postwar America and musical tradition--a Bildungsroman. It is chronological, using archival footage intercut with recent interviews interwoven with exploring art's self-reliance versus its social responsibilities.
No Direction Home is long but it is very very good. Disc one starts with home recordings made in 1956, and charts the transformation from juvenile blues copyist to fully-fledged folkie strumming of the people's poet who makes contemporary music by reworking the old music; then his retreat from the leftist role of protest singer as 'a voice of a generation' ---advocated by Joan Baez or Pete Seeger-- and his transformation into a modern rock musician who played around with volume (noise) and dazzlingly surrealist wordplay. This disc is also a homage to Scorsese’s New York City.
Disc two traces Dylans' rejection of folk music at Newport with a performance of "Maggie's Farm," backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band -at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the rock work with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and the shift from literary surrealism into the hard rock music of the 1966 English tour with the Hawks, who later became The Band. There is extensive coverage of the famous 1966 Manchester concert--edited from the footage that DA Pennebaker shot on that tour. It ends in 1966 with Dylan's motorcycle accident.
It's an excellent film of that era--easily the best I've seen---and up there, as a film with Scorsese's The Last Waltz. That needs to be qualified as "No Direction Home" is an in-house project from Bob Dylan's management team, conceived as a way to frame Dylan's legacy. Scorsese edited the material--- there is heaps of raw material--- to show the historical significance of the music Dylan created during that turbulent decade.It highlights the emphasis Dylanb placed on image manipulation and mystique maintenance and "No Direction Home" can be interpreted as another addition to Dylan's hall of mirrors.
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Yes Fantastic! I think I will have to watch it a few times