Visions of Bob Dylan: His back pages captured on films

After all, the scope of his historical imagination stretches from before the flood to the end of days, and the man himself can sometimes seem to dwell outside of time altogether. Devotees who use the age of their idol to calculate their own dismaying senescence may be shocked that he is so old, but to many more of us he has always been around. He was never young. Or else he was so much older then, and he’s younger than that now.

Andrew Marvell, writing about John Milton, worried “that he would (for I saw him strong) /Ruin the sacred truths to fable and old song.” The current of Dylan’s strength, especially in the early phases of his career, ran in the opposite direction. Taking up the fussy antiquarianism of the folk revival, he restored strangeness and sublimity to the old songs, even as he made them new. A hustler and a confidence man arriving on a scene that valued authenticity and ideological relevance above all, he ruined any easy distinctions between protest and surrealism, parody and profundity.

Marvell was also wary of Milton “lest he perplexed the things he should explain/And what was easy he should render vain.” This describes Dylan’s method, and also his persona, almost too well. He has always been a virtuoso of enigma and obscurantism, even — or perhaps especially — when speaking plainly. In his nonmusical writing, the teasing, puzzling, half-nonsensical ‘novel’ ‘Tarantula’ pales in strangeness next to the matter-of-factly autobiographical ‘Chronicles.’ And, similarly, while cinematically inclined Dylanophiles might want to sample the eccentricities of ‘Renaldo and Clara’ or ‘Masked and Anonymous’ — or the brilliantly elusive kaleidoscope of Todd Haynes’s ‘I’m Not There’ — the full mystery of Bob Dylan is better grasped in documentary form. Starting on Wednesday, Film Forum is offering a double feature of the literal Dylan, made up of ‘Don’t Look Back’ (1967), by D A Pennebaker, and ‘The Other Side of the Mirror,’ Murray Lerner’s compendium of Newport Folk Festival concert footage from the early 1960s. Both films highlight the mischievous, mercurial aspects of Dylan’s personality, while also providing undeniable proof of his musical prowess and incidental proof that he was, indeed, a young man once.

Absurdities of celebrity culture

Pennebaker, following Dylan on his 1965 trip to England, employs the over-the-shoulder, fly-on-the-wall techniques of cinema verite to capture the large and small absurdities of modern celebrity culture. The black-and-white images, the sunglasses and cigarettes might impart, to modern eyes, a period flavour, but the basic existential conundrum of life in the media spotlight has hardly changed.

‘Don’t Look Back’ is so perfect and prescient that Haynes, in some parts of ‘I’m Not There,’ had only to restage some of what Pennebaker had captured. Watching the original now, in the wake of ‘I’m Not There,’ you may be astonished at Bob Dylan’s uncanny ability to impersonate Cate Blanchett.

Like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ — or, for that matter, Jean-Luc Godard’s contemporaneous films — ‘Don’t Look Back’ retains a startling hold on the present tense. Something is still happening, and if you don’t know exactly what it is, you can tell it has to do with the tension between the weight of musical traditions and the lightness of modern pop culture. The centre of gravity is shifting, or perhaps the laws of gravity are being rewritten entirely, permanently troubling our ability to distinguish seriousness from whimsy, or reality from artifice.

And maybe we never needed to. In ‘The Other Side of the Mirror,’ Dylan, skinny and diffident, shows up in Newport as, depending on the year and the point of view, a young pretender, a crown prince or a renegade. He is attached to Joan Baez, and also detached from her, and his most notorious moment of apostasy — playing an electric guitar! at a folk festival! — is revealed to be something other than what the legend would have you believe.

But what is hardest to believe may be what is most self-evidently true, namely that this kid from Minnesota, before he was 25, was able to absorb so much of the history of the world, musical and otherwise, and turn it into songs that are likely to last at least until Judgment Day.