Jonathan Hodgers. Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals. London: Routledge. 2024. 252 pp.
Reviewed by Timothy Hampton, University of California, Berkeley
Lovers of classic Hollywood cinema will remember a feature of many films featuring the devastatingly handsome Cary Grant. Grant was a heart throb, but his films often made fun of his good looks. No matter how debonaire or brave Grant appeared to be, some part of his character was always standing back and casting an ironic eye on his own movie idol persona. This quirk of Grant’s filmography is worth recalling when we consider Jonathan Hodgers’ scrupulously researched and insightful account of Bob Dylan on film. Hodgers argues that there is a particular kind of “Dylan effect” that hovers around such films as Dont Look Back, Renaldo and Clara and even the more conventional Masked and Anonymous. Hodgers shows that all of Dylan’s films explore the relationship between cinematic reality and some version of the “real” or non-cinematic world. Put differently, if handsome Cary Grant is never merely handsome, neither is Bob Dylan, on film, ever merely Bob Dylan (or not Bob Dylan). And the contrast between filmed Dylan and the Dylan who by his very presence shapes the film, Hodgers shows, is an important feature that links all of Dylan’s films together. It’s an impressive and productive thesis that lends Hodgers’ book weight and intellectual cogency.
Hodgers pursues this feature of Dylan’s history through an extended opening meditation on the question of the author or auteur in cinema. There is of course a sizable body of writing about the extent to which directors of films are their “authors,” and about the history of the auteur film, which emerged out of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hodgers begins by distinguishing between filmic vehicles which repurpose Dylan’s earlier music for some type of “re-creation” or “re-authoring” (xi), such as Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There or Martin Scorcese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, on the one hand, and films such as Dont Look Back or Renaldo and Clara, where the emphasis is on the more or less simultaneous emergence of a figure on screen and the creation of new musical performances. It is these latter films that interest Hodgers, and one of the goals of the book is to argue that there is a kind of dramatic and thematic consistency across a body of films that otherwise might seem to be quite diverse in genre and tone.
Hodgers devotes much of his analysis to Dylan’s two 1960s films, Dont Look Back and Eat the Document. Both cover Dylan’s tours of the UK during the time of his shift away from folk music to some sort of more impressionistic, often electric, music. Dylan’s status as counter-cultural hero, in his fancy clothes, wild hair and affected stage mannerisms is captured in these cinema-vérité productions, one by D.A. Pennebaker, and one worked up collaboratively by Dylan and Howard Alk (with, it would seem, some residual assistance from Pennebaker). Hodgers stresses the tension between the claims of cinema-vérité, to put us inside the action, watching real people in real time, and the avant-gardism of Pennebaker’s narrative technique, which insists on rapid cuts, lack of context, and an insistence on the presence of the camera as part of the action. This, asserts Hodgers, is one of the reasons Dylan called the film “dishonest” in an interview. And, indeed, the film somewhat shockingly avoids uncut takes of single songs, choosing rather to break them up and generally to film Dylan only from the front. Both Dylan and Pennebaker were involved in putting the film together, however, and the multiplicity of voices generates a kind of confusion that makes the thematic arguments we might expect from a documentary difficult to discern. Though the film offers an “interpretation” of events, it does so not through narration or thematic material, but through “organization, editing, and arrangement” (22).
I would note, in addition, that it was certainly influenced by the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, yet whereas that film had the advantage of offering four protagonists, joking and playing, here we have a single focus. This gives the film a curiously argumentative dimension, as if, in order to create social interest, Pennebaker and Dylan had to focus on scenes in which people are yelling at each other or trading insults. Dylan yells at people, reporters yell at Dylan, fans yell at Dylan and each other, and so on. Yet at the same time, Dont Look Back establishes a problem that will characterize much of Dylan’s work – the problem of figuring out how much of what we see is a film of Bob Dylan, and how much is a film by Bob Dylan – influenced by his preferences, input, and suggestions.
For Hodgers, the problems visible in Dont Look Back are at least partially resolved in the hard-to-find Pennebaker work Something Is Happening, and then in the still officially unreleased Eat the Document. Dylan put Eat the Document together with help from Howard Alk and Pennebaker out of footage from his 1966 tour with The Hawks, who later became The Band. Here, the “surrealism” of the approach frees the film from the structures of chronology. Eat the Document’s disavowal of meaning or logic might be seen as a rebuke of Dont Look Back. Hodgers shows how Eat the Document works dialectically, setting up contrasts between images and scenes and using images to comment on lines in performance. Alk also records in color and ventures on stage, among the musicians, in a way that provides a more powerful cinematic experience.
Hodgers also uses his close analysis of these early films to set up a series of thematic oppositions that, he avers, are consistent across Dylan’s work. There is often a “double” who stands over against the protagonist (for example, Donovan in Dont Look Back), often a plot involving Dylan’s character and some mysterious or dangerous woman, often a tension between the heroic performer and “management” (corporate or, in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, legal), and usually the presence of some journalistic figure introduced to raise questions about the integrity of performances. Hodgers traces these thematic elements across Dylan’s film work, adding as well a longer list of more abstract oppositions (youth-age, innocence-experience) of the kind we might expect in the work of a pop star.
Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid provides a greater challenge for Hodger’s analysis, since Dylan didn’t make the movie, and only had a small role as a minor character. However, Hodgers’s analysis of the film does a good job of looping it into Dylan’s camp by stressing the ways in which it is a film that, like much of Dylan’s songwriting, draws obsessively on clichés and tropes from earlier art works: “All in all, Pat Garrett as a whole is deeply concerned with story, memory, and reminiscence. Into this intertextual milieu, Dylan brings abundant references from his own output” (75). And Hodgers goes on to detail the ways in which Dylan’s music intervenes in certain moments of the plot, adding resonance to what is happening visually.
The centerpiece for any analysis of this kind would certainly have to be Dylan’s 1977 self-directed film Renaldo and Clara. The film is long, a bit boring, and was a commercial and critical failure. However, Hodgers makes a strong case for the creativity of Dylan’s approach, linking it back to two major inspirations, Shoot the Piano Player and Children of Paradise (both in different ways important documents in the emergence of the French auteur theory of cinema). Yet the film is also deeply influenced by a documentary tradition, which it both uses and upends, as we see multiple scenes where it is difficult to discern whether we are watching Dylan, or some version of Dylan playing another character. This confusion is highlighted, Hodgers shows, by the careful use of music, which fades in and out as a commentary on the action. Hodgers’ careful account of the film, supplemented by his work in the Dylan archive on early versions, is an impressive contribution to our knowledge of the movie. It made me want to watch it again.
More challenging for Hodgers are Dylan’s two Hollywood films, 1987’s Hearts of Fire and 2003’s Masked and Anonymous. Hearts of Fire is pretty bad, and Hodgers makes no attempt to defend the film. However, he does point out that Dylan’s presence twists some of the representations. “Part of the film’s interest … lies in the fact that Dylan plays himself with a veneer of fiction” (144). Hodgers points out that Dylan “nudged” the script to correspond to his own cadences as a way of bringing his character closer to how he wanted to be seen. Or, one could add, to what he could do, given his limited acting chops.
Hodgers is on happier ground with Masked and Anonymous, where he traces the interactions between Dylan, who partly wrote the scenario, and director Larry Charles. He points out that the film draws heavily on references to Dylan’s career, evoking songs and earlier moments, using musical performance in an effective way. Hodgers argues that the film might be seen in a kind of dialogue with Dylan’s deeply citational album “Love and Theft” which came out around the time of filming. He points to the fact that Dylan was deeply involved in the early work on the film, before fading out, as he often seems to do in collaborations.
Bob Dylan on Film is a learned and insightful guide to an important feature of Dylan’s career. By focusing on the histories of the various productions, Hodgers shows a rarely glimpsed aspect of Dylan’s persona. It is a book that will appeal to students of cinema as well as to fans of Dylan’s music, and it illuminates both areas of activity. Hodgers has wonderful insights into how Dylan’s presence shapes (or, we might say, distorts) the cinematic enterprise. Whereas some other musical figures might just show up on the set, hit their marks, and strum their chords, Dylan’s restlessness makes films about him into hybrid productions, never sure of their own status. In this way, we might say, the cinematic record of Dylan’s career parallels much of his songwriting. It bends genres, redraws boundaries, and opens up new avenues for reflection.
