No Direction Home
No Direction Home (Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2005) No Direction Home traces the meteoric rise of Bob Dylan to the unsought status of American prophet and the fall from grace that resulted in his withdrawal from public performance in 1966 for nearly a decade. Through more than three hours of interviews with Dylan and his contemporaries and footage of his early performances, placed into context by historical clips of significant events, Scorsese attempts to answer the questions that continue to intrigue many Americans.
Scorsese begins by giving us a glimpse into 1950s life in Hibbing, Minnesota, an iron mining and steel making town teetering on the precipice of one of America’s largest open cut pits. It was almost inevitable that the adolescent Robert Zimmerman, and a good number of his contemporaries left Hibbing, many of them joining the swell of students entering America’s colleges and universities.
Dylan was drawn to the rebels, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Scorsese’s documentary includes a clip of Brando in the 1953 movie The Wild Ones. Dylan says, “James Dean, Marlon Brando and The Wild Ones didn’t just spring up from nowhere…Time and progress obliterated the past as it was when I was growing up.”
Dylan finished high school and came to college in Minneapolis as ‘a musical expeditionary’. It was in the bohemian coffee shops of Dinkytown that Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. While he did not attend formal classes, the teenager undertook a self-directed crash-course in musical history and technique. Dylan heard a record by Oklahoma dust bowl singer Woody Guthrie. “He was a radical,” Dylan recalls. “You could listen to his music and learn how to live.”
Dylan learned Guthrie’s repertoire and, in 1961, set out for New York, where Guthrie was living in ‘some kind of hospital’, to visit him. Scorsese’s portrayal of New York in 1961 has a voice-over of President John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech. “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” the nation’s first Catholic president says. Scorsese introduces us to the Beat scene in Greenwich Village through original footage and conversations with musicians including Liam Clancy and Dave Van Ronk.
Mike Marqusee says the folk music revival had been shaped by the desire of early leftists to “Americanize” their ‘seemingly alien’ Marxist movement. The revival was halted by the Cold War paranoia of the McCarthy era, with Pete Seeger and The Weavers blacklisted, leftist leader Alan Lomax exiled in Europe, and Woody Guthrie crippled with Huntington’s chorea. By the late 1950s, the remaining faithful were eking out a living in Greenwich Village. Izzy Young, who opened the Folklore Center in Macdougal Street in 1957, says in No Direction Home that he and other men of the left recognized that the young Dylan would be the one to carry on the tradition established by Guthrie and Seeger. Dylan certainly seemed to be a ‘fellow traveler’, spending hours in the Folklore Center listening to records and reading songbooks. With the rock ‘n’ roll he’d immersed himself in during his teenage years and his apprenticeship performing in the coffee houses, Dylan’s musical education prepared him well for the next phase, as a songwriter.
He says: “I kinda went through Woody Guthrie…but I didn’t want to go through him as though it was just negligible…I didn’t consider myself a songwriter at all but I knew I had to write it and sing it.” As a farewell gesture, Dylan wrote his first song, Song to Woody. A performance at Gerde’s Folk City attracted media attention and he was offered a recording contract by John Hammond at Columbia. Scorsese contextualizes the political atmosphere of the era, introducing Suze Rotolo, the girl photographed arm in arm with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, who was working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1961, CORE had sent a group of ‘freedom riders’ on buses into the South to test a federal court civil rights ruling banning segregation on buses and trains.
“They were traumatic times,” Rotolo, who was living with Dylan, recalls. “Every day we were hearing about someone…being beaten to a pulp and I thought, this is insane, and Bob thought that too.” Rotolo booked Dylan for a CORE benefit concert in February 1962, for which he wrote his first protest song, The Death of Emmett Till, on the brutal 1956 murder of 14-year-old Till in Mississippi. It was the beginning of a creative outpouring for Dylan, with the next two years yielding more than 200 original songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’. Beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg describes the first time he heard a Dylan song: “I heard A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, I think, and wept because it seemed to me that the torch had been passed to another generation from earlier Beat illumination and self-empowerment.”
It is fitting that Scorsese now includes a segment of a radio interview recorded with Studs Terkel for Chicago station WFMT in May 1963, just after the Cuban missile crisis. Terkel says to Dylan of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, “I think it will be a classic. Even though it may have come out of your feelings about atomic rain…” and Dylan responds, “No, no, …It’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain.”
This early interview symbolizes Dylan’s long-running dance with the media, who were culpable in both building the myth of Dylan the prophet and in tearing it down again. Scorsese shows a clip of television talk show host Steve Allen introducing the young Dylan as ‘a genius, a singing conscience and moral referee, as well as a preacher.’
With these sorts of expectations, it was hardly surprising that Dylan backed away from the mantle thrust upon him and repudiated any suggestion that he was politically motivated. Although No Direction Home sets the context for Dylan’s ascendancy and places his early songs in their rightful place in the lexicon of American music, even Scorsese, one of America’s most perceptive filmmakers, is unable to offer any clear insight into his early motivation. The lengthy interview with Dylan, skillfully interspersed with the memories of those who accompanied him on his remarkable journey and footage illustrating contemporary events, is yet another example of interviews in the 40-year history of Dylan in which he downplays any political ideology behind his music.
Political issues in the early 1960s seemed polemic to many Americans, as Joan Baez describes in No Direction Home: “Things were cut and dried then. You were either for the war or against it, hated niggers or supported King, you were forced to
take a side.” Dylan’s denial of political conviction is reinforced in No Direction Home. Speaking of Pete Seeger, he says “I didn’t realize he was a communist, I didn’t even know what a communist was.” Van Ronk remembers that “Bobby wasn’t really a political person.”
He wasn’t a member of any political organization and only played a small direct role in any protest movement, but Dylan’s songs gave voice to the discontent sweeping America’s youth in the 1960s. He performed Only a Pawn in Their Game in a cotton field outside Greenwood, Mississippi, in July, 1963, at the height of the SNCC’s (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) voter registration drive He then joined Seeger and the Freedom Singers in a rendition of Blowin’ in the Wind. Later that year, he reprised this performance at the Newport Festival and the March on Washington. Dylan says in No Direction Home that “to be on the side of people who are struggling for something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being political”, but he definitely took a side in the era’s most effective movement for social change.
His ability to articulate the complex emotions of the emerging counter-culture and its causes roused such passion in Dylan’s audiences and caused them so much anguish when his lyrics turned away from protest. Van Ronk talks about Dylan tapping into the ‘collective unconscious’ of America, although Dylan himself is more pragmatic when he says: “I’d taken all the elements I’d ever known to make broad sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was a general essence of the spirit of the times.”
Dylan represented a conjunction of conditions impossible before that point in history – Cold War hysteria, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, Hollywood’s portrayal of disaffected youth, and the knowledge that he accumulated from the American folk music tradition, literature, theatre and poetry, and from the alternative energy of the Greenwich Village activists and artists he fell in with when he came to New York. He steadfastly refuses right up to the present, however, to be cast as the voice or the conscience of his generation. He would prefer to be celebrated as a creative artist who mastered his craft.
Scorsese’s immensely enjoyable documentary not only raises all these historical influences on Dylan, but does so in a way that helps a modern audience to understand and sympathize with one of the twentieth century’s most influential musicians.
Kim Britton, The University of Newcastle (Australia)
No Direction Home (Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2005) As a documentarian of the counter-culture Martin Scorsese’s credentials are impeccable. He is vocal in his abiding experiential connection to those of his generation, of whom Bob Dylan, the subject of his epic documentary No Direction Home, is certainly a contemporary. He also completed his documentary apprenticeship as an editor of the landmark musical mission statement of a generation which was Woodstock. His producing and directing work on The Blues might be effectively be judged a beautiful and thorough grounding of his discourse on the subject of rock-and-roll, cataloguing the soul of the music which, once turned electric, energized and enervated a generation. In addition to this nostalgic grounding, his work as a future-forward pioneer of images on MTV, specifically the landmark dance-realism blend he pioneered for Michael Jackson 13 minute music short for Bad express his persisting interest in the hopeful further fruition, and even to the point of over-ripeness, of the sound of soul, folk and the blues.
Like his interpretation of Howard Hughes in his 2004 film The Aviator, Scorsese is irresistibly flashing forward, seeking out the science fiction of a medium, while simultaneously revisiting the glamour of an era’s ethos, an achievement which may equally be attributed to that film. So too, as his immediate follow-on from that biopic, is his documentary biopic of Dylan an attempt to capture his subject’s prescience which simultaneously grounding him solidly in his own recollections of an era, and those of his contemporaries. As such Scorsese is clearly reconnecting with the very roots of his induction into the world of the visual arts.
The thoroughness and well-rounded perspectives he brought to The Blues are echoed in his inclusion of varied talking heads in No Direction Home. Joan Baez makes what might be judged a perfunctory appearance as Dylan’s muse, yet the clear scope of recollections gained from Beat maestro Allen Ginsberg are bracing, particularly given that he in fact passed on before the millennium. In particular his emotional admission of the moment in which he realized he and his Beat compatriots had been supplanted, by the folkie Dylan, as unofficial poet laureate is a scene of genuine cultural profundity.
Scorsese acknowledges the business of self-promotion behind any success, not only through Dylan’s own admissions, but also the observations of various managers, promoters and doyens of the folk scene. Dylan himself, in interviews specifically recorded for the film, is candid, lucid, yet certainly more wary than the caricature of youthful brilliance he presented to D.A. Pennebaker in Look Back in Anger.
Indeed, while Scorsese maintains a tight, understated connection to the nuances of time, achievement, and a fading sense of mission in the older Dylan, at times he appears to waver in his depictions of the wild young man. Humor is readily apparent in every dry one-liner he cracks out of the voluminous footage of 1960s Dylan. Yet referentially Scorsese seems over-dependent on the found footage. Other critics have noted how much of Pennebaker’s film is used in the film’s second half. I would tend to agree.
If the footage is meant to capture the varied moods of the young man surely Scorsese, a director so celebrated for his editorial collaborations, could have chosen a few more choice moments from the film, whose ethos seems so at odds with that of the autumnal Don’t Look Back. Another scene, at the beginning of the film’s second half, is not in fact from the Pennebaker film, yet this too follows the young Dylan as he riffs interminably in wordplay. Scorsese’s fascination seems akin to that he has for the celebrated improvisations of Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro in his own original works, yet Dylan’s gifts are so choicely expressed throughout, so aptly catalogued that the sequence, like those of Don’t Look Back distract from the film’s focus. Surely the more measured, economical Dylan of today would disapprove of such preening.
No Direction Home catalogues Dylan’s career from its early rumblings to his fateful decision to go electric. True to his training, Scorsese inventively cuts from chronologically order recollections on the part of Dylan and his peers to early electric performances and his audience’s first responses. Here again Scorsese might be accused of overstatement. The sight of one earnest fan after another trashing the new Dylan stands in stark contrast to the variations of blues commentary one might find in the titular series, or the singular, powerful mission statement found in an interview with an ordinary young couple in Woodstock.
In embracing the scope of the epic documentary Scorsese has announced his presents with the loudness Pauline Kael noted in his direction of Raging Bull. Rather than allowing a story to be told, he could not resist the urge to illustrate to the audience his presence as the director, the assembler of the narrative. As such his re-visitation of an era is redolent of Scorsese improvisational moments, and the directorial fondness he is noted for in his overt referentiality, and dependence on reverent homage.
Lindsay Coleman University of Melbourne lindsaycoleman562@hotmail.com
