No Direction Home: Bob Dylan [DVD] [2005]

“Part One” of “No direction home” goes from the late 1950´s to 1963, and deals with the place where Dylan grew, and the kind of music he liked. I found this specially interesting, as I hadn´t heard of Woody Guthrie, Tommy Makem, and others that had an enormous influence on Dylan. I enjoyed watching and hearing him as he developed as an artist, and changed accordingly.

“Part two” covers the period that goes from 1963 to 1966. It is very good, and has great footage of Dylan´s concerts, like “Part one”. The main difference between the two dvds probably is that the second one lacks the kind of explanation regarding the historical context that the first one has. All the same, it is enjoyable, and only obviously in fault when compared to “Part one”.

This documentary includes lots of footage of the young Dylan and comments made by the “old” Dylan, the person that young and gifted man grew up to be. Not only that, but there are also quite a few interviews of people who knew him at one moment or the other, and that help to shed some light on him. The interviews that involve Joan Baez are probably the most insightful regarding Bob Dylan´s character, and his refusal to be trapped in a role as symbol of the left.

I think that if there is a constant in Dylan´s career, it is probably the fact that he refuses to be pinned down, to be anything other than himself, and that is nothing less and nothing more than what he feels like being at the moment. “No direction home” shows that, and I think we should congratulate Martin Scorsese for that. So... thanks, Martin, but please bear in mind I really, really want to watch the sequel :)

Belen Alcat

I was more than satisfied with Part One (late 1950's-63) - very little psycho-babble on his childhood; merely shots of his face as a kid fading into the music which influenced him. The arrangement of the old footage from Woody Guthrie to Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers(they even had the legendary John Jacob Niles!) was genuinely exciting; it was Dylan without warts (the guy stole 45 invaluable records from a generous folk music collector, justifying it by claiming to be a musical expeditionary, and with a straight face); and Dave van Ronk was a genuine character, stating that Dylan was comfortable with the Left, but not really a man of the Left. Yet the Left cottoned on to him, seeing him in terms of an activism which was not fully there (compared with Baez or the courageous Pete Seeger). This told me far more about the wish-fulfilment of the US Left in the early 60s than any other programme. The Dylan performances were gems. So - Part One was excellent, with the music and the historical contexzt reinforcing each other.

But - Part Two (1963-66) did not live up to my expectations. The great performances by Dylan were there - they even had the legendary British concert where someone called out 'Judas' as he began Like a Rolling Stone, leading him to spit back 'you're a liar' and to use the song like a gun against the critics in the crowd (they had been partly organised by the British Communist Party, who were angry at Dylan's withdrawal form political folk music). The historical context was there at the start, but then suddenly stopped. It became one-sided - a chronicle of his performances, at its best a recognition that Dylan's breath-control in the 1964-66 period was an expression of beat poetry set to electronic sound (Whitman and Ginsburg used breath as a more natural means of organising the poetic line than the artifical iambic pentameter).
But the historical context was missing - what was Dylan's attitude to the Vietnam War? The angst in his music of 1964-66, looking for the desperate and desolate in an age of affluence, was to my mind a reflection of the angst troubling American society as the Great Society was being proclaimed.
Worse, the musical context was missing. What about the Beatles, whose own music was transformed by Dylan, and who helped to transform Dylan ("that's nothing; it's just something I learned in England")? Dylan didn't stop listening to music in 63; he continued to evolve, and the musical influences on that evolution are missing here. So we are left with the performances, magical as they were.

So - Part Two was not excellent. It was merely very good.