No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese, 2005)

[bcsparker]

This might be off topic, but Bob was great in "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid".

[whipsilk]

bcsparker wrote:

Bob was great in "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid"

And he was dreadful in 2003's Masked and Anonymous, a film I really wanted to like.

[Faux Hulot]

And he was dreadful in 2003's Masked and Anonymous, a film I really wanted to like.

Oh gawd... almost unwatchable. At least it was shorter than Renaldo & Clara.

[filmfan]

I wish Martin Gods speed in his effort...he has a BIG job ahead of him !

[Faux Hulot]

Just ran across this AP story:

Martin Scorsese has been working on a film about Bob Dylan for two years and there's one important person he hasn't spoken to about it: Bob Dylan.

"I'd not like to deal with the man directly," Scorsese told television critics this weekend. "I'd like to create the story, to find the story, first of all, and then play it out the way I think it's right."

Full text here

[flyonthewall2983]

No Direction, Period

[flyonthewall2983]

This just came out on Blu-ray, but it's also been recently added to Qello, with many of the extras added at the end giving it a 6-hour length. I only just watched the main film, and shared my initial impression on Letterboxd.

Is this the first time that any of the Royal Albert Hall/London 1966 footage has been released? I'd love to know the history of that footage, partly as some of it was recreated for I'm Not There and mostly to know if the whole show was filmed.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Is this the first time that any of the Royal Albert Hall/London 1966 footage has been released? I'd love to know the history of that footage, partly as some of it was recreated for I'm Not There and mostly to know if the whole show was filmed.

The footage was originally captured for a follow-up to Dont Look Back by D.A. Pennebaker. Dylan didn't like how the documentary felt essentially like Dont Look Back 2, so he went ahead and reedited the footage into the unreleased documentary, Eat The Document. It includes small chunks of concert footage, including the "Royal Albert Hall" performance (actually was the Manchester Free Trade Hall). In fact, on the "Royal Albert Hall" album that was released in the 90s (and re-released this year), the tape that's recording the concert runs out twice. While the audio engineers change the tape, the recording cuts to the lower-grade audio recorded for this documentary.

I bought a bootleg in my pre-torrenting days back in 2007, but I'm sure the doc is out there online. Worth watching for the planets colliding moment of John Lennon wasted in a cab with Dylan.

[Lachino]

The footage was originally captured for a follow-up to Dont Look Back by D.A. Pennebaker. Dylan didn't like how the documentary felt essentially like Dont Look Back 2, so he went ahead and reedited the footage into the unreleased documentary, Eat The Document.

I've always had the impression it was more a case of Bob not liking the original Dont Look Back and wanting something else stylistically. Cinema Verité is arguably a better fit for the earlier socially conscious Dylan than the artsy beat poet of 65-66. And itching as he was to go electric, it's a special kind of irony that Dont Look Back captures Dylan doing something he's bored by in a style he doesn't like.

Eat The Document is certainly enjoyable and it's too bad it wasn't included as an extra for DLB but it must be one of those things mysteriously withheld by Dylan.

[hearthesilence]

Even better would be Something Is Happening, Pennebaker's own film using that '66 footage. It's roughly an hour long and some people (most notably Greil Marcus) have seen the whole thing. According to Marcus's accounts over the years, it's quite excellent, but it apparently shows very little (if any) of the hostility from the audience. Anyway, it would make sense to release that film and Eat the Document together. Maybe in another 25 years when they are actually impacted by copyright law?

[Roger Ryan]

Even more of the '66 tour footage showed up in this excellent promo video put together to hype the big "1966 Live Recordings" box set that just came out.

One question regarding the bonus footage on the new No Direction Home Blu-ray: is it in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio? An on-line promo from a couple of months back showed the additional footage stretched to fill a 16:9 frame even though the footage from the actual documentary edited alongside looked fine. Made me a little wary even though I'm interested in the upgrade.

[flyonthewall2983]

Having just checked what there is on Qello, the Dave Van Ronk interview is in 16:9 but it doesn't look stretched at all. Everything else is in 4:3.