BY HANK REINEKE
In March of 2019 I took a drive to the Hudson River town
of Nyack, New York, for a rare public screening of Bob Dylan’s ill-fated
cinematic opus Renaldo & Clara. The film, originally released to art
houses in New York City and Los Angeles January of 1978, was mercilessly panned. The movie – shot during Dylan’s fabled autumn
1975 tour with his ragtag Rolling Thunder Revue – all but disappeared from
cinemas and, mostly, from public consciousness within the span of a few
weeks. The original cut of the film was,
let’s charitably say, a rambling affair, clocking in at just under four hours.
Dylan would tell his co-writer, the playwright Sam Shepard,
that he was looking to model his film after a pair of French classics: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis
(Children of Paradise) (1945) and Francois
Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Or, as he would further expound in his
famous mumble, “Something like
that.†If that was Dylan’s original
vision for Renaldo & Clara, the
resulting film fell far short of its lofty ambitions. Four decades on, I can still recall reading Pauline
Kael’s withering review in the New Yorker,
describing Dylan as a “sour Messiah,†the film demonstrating “an absence of
artistic intelligence.†Even the street-hip Village
Voice famously devoted several pages of opinions on the opus from seven
different writer-critics, all of whom descended with sharpened knives.
There’s one aspect of the original production that’s
pretty remarkable. In the torrent of old
releases that would flood the market following the advent of home video, Dylan never
chose to green-light an official release of Renaldo
& Clara. The notes to this set suggest
one reason this might be so: the
original negative of the musical
portion of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour footage seems to have been lost. The dazzling tour footage offered here on
this new Criterion release - material mostly culled from vintage Renaldo & Clara footage in strikingly
gorgeous quality, all things considered – is the result of a pristine 4K
transfer from a surviving 16mm workprint.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason behind my traveling to Nyack in
2019 was two-fold. The screening of Renaldo & Clara that afternoon was
to be hosted by Rob Stoner, the bass player and bandleader of the Rolling
Thunder Revue, Bob Dylan’s backing ensemble in autumn 1975. I was hoping that since Stoner was a central
figure in Dylan’s inner circle (at one time), we might – at long last – experience
the film in better resolution. The only
copies of Renaldo and Clara that
circulated through “underground†channels amongst collectors had allegedly been
sourced from a couple of one-off European TV broadcasts. Since the videotapes of those broadcasts
varied wildly in picture and sound quality, the caliber of the bootleg sourced
was dependent upon what generation a copy had been mastered from.
So it was with some surprise and disappointment when I discovered
that Stoner’s personal copy was hardly better than any of the several rather ropey
dupes that found their way into my own collection over the years. What didn’t disappoint were the memories and asides
that Stoner would re-live and share as the near four-hour epic that is Renaldo & Clara unspooled, once
again, before our eyes.
The old saying suggests “truth is stranger than fiction.†I personally believe that truth is, more
often than not, actually far more interesting
than fiction as well. Which leads me
into this discussion of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling
Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, newly released as part of the white-glove
Criterion Collection series. There were
plenty of reasons to be excited by this release. Scorsese is an unabashed Bob Dylan fan. Anyone who saw “Life Lessons,†the director’s
segment of the 1989 anthology film New
York Stories, will recall Nick Nolte’s emotionally-wrought artist fiercely thrashing
away at his canvas as Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone†plays angrily on the
stereo in his studio loft. More
importantly, it was Scorsese that also gave us – via a PBS broadcast in 2005 -
the celebrated and highly recommended 207 minute long two-part documentary film
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home.
So when it was announced in 2018 that Scorsese would be
tackling a film recounting Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour for
Netflix, my expectations ran pretty high. But on the evening of the film’s streaming premiere, I switched off the
TV at the program’s conclusion with, at best, a sense of
half-satisfaction. The footage of
Dylan’s musical performances was stunning, an affirmation of the legendary
status long affixed to these shows. On
the other hand, I admit to being totally dismissive of the film’s faux
documentary aspects. As a huge admirer
of Dylan’s music and career, it only took a few minutes in to see that the
feature’s sub-title “A Bob Dylan Storyâ€
was a literal one. It was exactly that,
a story: an uneasy blending of factual items with fantasies and outright
deceptions.
The problem with the folks who involve themselves on Bob
Dylan’s various film projects is that they allow themselves to get personally sucked
into his personal orbit of playful disinformation and obfuscation. His film collaborators become, in effect, coconspirators. The reason that D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal
documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, Don’t Look Back (1967), will very likely remain the most honest
portrait of the artist is that this director didn’t allow himself to be
manipulated by the bard - to any great degree, at least. I’m not of the camp to pretend that the
Dylan we’re introduced to in Don’t Look
Back (magnetic, abrasive, playful, rude, gifted), is the “real†Bob
Dylan. Once Pennebaker’s cameras begin to
roll, Dylan may or may not have consciously play-acted before them. But at least audiences were allowed to decide
for themselves whether or not Dylan was the ultimate brat or a musical genius
or, perhaps, a confusing and peculiar mix of both.