Dont Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967)Adam & Sam's take (starts at 44:23)Dont Look Back mostly takes place in rooms (of the green or hotel kind), where Bob Dylan and his friends/associates are basically hanging out during a UK tour. There is a constant ballet of people shyly opening the door, risking a look and entering to see the main man. They all seem to be expecting different things from him : some insight on life, an explanation of why his fans love his songs, sometimes even friendship. As Adam and Sam discuss, Dylan doesn't exactly come off all that great from those interactions : arrogant and vapid are words that come mind, especially in that Time interview.
And yet... the film I was reminded of the most when I was thinking about it afterwards was The Last Temptation of Christ, strangely enough. For many at the time, Dylan was basically a prophet, someone to guide them into a new era, to lead a cultural revolution that everybody felt was coming any time now. A journalist describes his songs as sermons early on. He's asked about religion and spirituality, about what his message is, about the youth of the day, and he simply has no answer. There's a reason he's a singer and not a politician : the only way he can find to express himself is through music and songwriting, and once he's off the stage he's barely coherent, generally stand-offish and even petty at times. Like Dafoe in Scorsese's film, he's making it up as he goes along, and can't keep up with what's constantly asked of him (not entirely unfairly I should say, when he opens his concerts with The Times They Are A Changin' ). He's just a man, checking himself in the mirror before going on stage, getting competitive with a British "rival" (Donovan), and marveling at the new guitars they have in Britain in an amusing piece of unintentional foreshadowing.
There's also the question of how much we're getting of the "real" Dylan here. Pennebaker's fly-on-the-wall style is great at making us forget the camera (especially in a surprising scene where we see Albert Grossman negociating bookings for the tour), but there had to have been a certain degree of performance to what Dylan was doing : you can especially feel it in the protracted argument with the annoying young "reporter". I don't know that it detracts from the film though, because I get the feeling he's performing for the other people in the room as much as he is doing it for the camera. To get back to Pennebaker, his style meshes very well with Dylan : unfocused, unkempt, refusing to really tell a story, instead focused on capturing moments. Intimate, wonderful moments such as Dylan and Baez singing a Hank Williams song in a hotel room as well as the more theatrical scenes (anything involving Donovan) and the concerts of course. The editing is sharp, but also leaves much to the imagination, much like Dylan's famously hard to understand lyrics.
8/10