Bridges within the Arts: Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese

Abstract

Bridges within the Arts: Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese Doris Hambuch and Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou “An exhibitionist only on stage,” David Yaffe writes about the 1965 Warhol Screen Test, “Dylan knew the camera loved him, but at that moment he did not love it back” (32). A great number of film appearances followed Bob Dylan’s experiment with Andy Warhol, most recently the Netflix original Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019). Other screen representations include Festival (1967), Dont Look Back (1967), The Concert for Bangladesh (1972), Eat the Document (1972), Renaldo and Clara (1978), The Last Waltz (1978), The Other Side of the Mirror (2007), Bob Dylan: Revealed (2011), and Trouble No More (2017). Arguing that film became the third most important component of Dylan’s work, after writing and music, we claim that his collaboration with Scorsese was best suited to facilitate his dependence on an audience: “I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself” (Chronicles 16), Dylan writes early on in his memoir. This suggests that he was, in fact, an “exhibitionist,” and not only on stage: “I needed to play for people and all the time” (Chronicles 16). The compatibility between Dylan and Scorsese, we argue, rests in their shared fascination with storytelling, and in their conviction that the bridge between fact and fiction is removable and sometimes redundant. In “Markin’ up the Score,” the opening chapter of Chronicles, Dylan recalls the significance of an encounter with the wrestler Gorgeous George early in his career (Chronicles 43). He remembers how he played as a teenager in the lobby of his Minnesota hometown’s main event building, when the celebrity’s wink and brief remark presented an inciting moment. In the next paragraph, he questions not only the fact itself, but also the relevance of its truthfulness: “Whether [Gorgeous George] really said it or not, it didn’t matter,” Dylan writes; “It’s what I thought I heard him say that mattered, and I never forgot it” (44). Scorsese, for his part, reveals in an interview with Raffaele Donato that “you can go back and stage the past. You want [End Page 119] to record the battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war? Stage it. It is a natural impulse and so is recording. They go hand in hand. That’s why for me there was never ever a difference between fiction and non-fiction” (Donato 200). The compliance between the musician and the filmmaker on their poetic licence with reality culminates in The Rolling Thunder Revue, which adds fictitious interviewees to existing documentary footage, while also featuring scenes from Dylan’s own Renaldo and Clara. The Rolling Thunder Revue thus blends a great number of genres, including the mockumentary, and seems best fit to reflect what Yaffe emphasizes throughout his thorough Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (2011), that the singer/poet1/actor/director/painter2 “contains multitudes” (Yaffe xvii), a nod to Walt Whitman, whose influence Dylan himself highlights in his memoir (Chronicles 103) as well as in The Rolling Thunder Revue. Scorsese’s first experience with music documentaries was as a co-editor of Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970); Dylan appears in this film very briefly, although he did not participate in the festival. Scorsese went on to experiment with re-authoring techniques in his own The Last Waltz (1978). The team for this film included writer Mardik Martin, editors Jan Roblee and Yeu-Bun Yee, and cinematographer Michael Chapman. Dylan is the last guest in their documentation of The Band’s farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, following many other famous musicians such as Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. At the time Scorsese was working on The Last Waltz, Dylan was directing his Renaldo and Clara (1978), co-written with Sam Shephard. In contrast to the former, the latter was not received well at all. Yaffe explains that Dylan’s “mostly unloved” film “in the spirit of Fassbinder, tried to achieve a collective correlative”3 (34), and failed. Three decades later, it would go on to contribute to the mosaic that is The Rolling Thunder Revue...