elpie-
this should be interesting:
globeandmail.ca
Trailing the elusive Dylan
Griffin Ondaatje and Craig Proctor have made a documentary on the myth of Bob Dylan in which Dylan barely appears -- which is fitting, given the subject matter, BRAD WHEELER writes ...
The hunt is fearsome -- even more so for Bob Dylan, who long ago chose to play the part of the hunted. And his chasers, hungry and legion, have just been increased by two.
Griffin Ondaatje and Craig Proctor spent three years, off and on, making Complete Unknown, an irregular, irreverent 94-minute documentary that captures home-movie style a journey into the myth and overexamination that obscures the mumbling genius Dylan -- a man who spoke for a generation, but inconsistently for himself.
If Dylan won't speak for himself, then others have -- and will. The renowned folk-rocker is nothing if not considered. Whole forests have been cleared for books on the subject, and films continue to come. Martin Scorsese, who caught Dylan on film in The Last Waltz, has apparently persuaded the notoriously reticent legend to let him film a documentary about the singer's early career, to be aired on the BBC.
Complete Unknown shows on cold digital a parade of celebrated musicians (Steve Earle, Odetta, Bruce Cockburn, Billy Bragg and others), obscure academics and men on the street. They all know Dylan as much as the others, which is to say, not much at all. Except for a brief glimpse in an old home movie, obtained from Anna McGarrigle, Dylan does not appear in the film. (The clip shows Dylan leaving the stage at Newport in 1965, the infamous "event" where he chucked the acoustic guitar and plugged in an electric.)
Arriving at a downtown Toronto basement pub, Ondaatje and Proctor seem an odd pair. Ondaatje, 37, is tall, soft-spoken and resembles his author father Michael (The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion); Proctor, 36, is burly, dishevelled and unshaven.
Meeting downstairs is fitting enough -- it was Dylan's Basement Tapes album that provided the impetus for the film. In 1967, while recuperating from a motorcycle accident, Dylan and the members of The Band recorded huge amounts of music, some of it brilliant, some of it sketchy, in the basement of a house called Big Pink in West Saugerties, N.Y. A portion of the material was released in 1975 as a two-record set; more comprehensive is the five-volume Genuine Basement Tapes from 1992. (As well, The Band released its own album from separate sessions at the house, Music from the Big Pink, in 1968.)
The delay in the release of the Dylan tapes served to trigger rumour and feed the legend. Ondaatje bought into it large, intrigued that Dylan, at age 26, was grounded enough to know that he should stay out of sight in order to regain some space. "I think anyone in his position would probably want to duck out," Ondaatje reasons, his own voice barely competing against the house stereo as it blares Neil Young's Long May You Run.
As Dylan runs, pursuit is all but assured. In 2000, Ondaatje put aside a novel he was working on, called his friend Proctor and they set off with a third friend, a cameraman, for Big Pink. The idea behind the film project was hardly even realized at that point. "We just filmed everything, the shape of the film was something that happened in the editing," Ondaatje explains.
In all, 90 hours were filmed. Editing involved intercutting the talking heads with landscape shots and humorous, non-Dylan archival film clips. In fact, the film as a whole has a comic undertone to it, complete with an interview subject who, in rather full detail, mistakenly refers to Dylan's writing of "Mr. Tangerine Man" rather than Mr. Tambourine Man. And then there's the dentist who contends that bad teeth are the reason behind Dylan's stern-faced, close-mouthed portraits. "He's my dentist," Proctor says, "and as much as it was a light-hearted moment, I think he's serious."
Indeed, they all seem serious. From Jane Siberry's esoterica to an erratic astrologer, all the interview subjects seem committed to the task of catching Dylan in their own minds, even as they struggle to explain him to others.
And though some of the talkers are spectacularly obscure, none are identified as they appear. Both the celebrated musicians and the others are only credited at the end of the film. That, according to Proctor, was intentional. "It levels the playing field. We wanted to make it democratic that way, with everybody at the same advantage or disadvantage. While there's a respect for the musician's insight, we wanted to say that Dylan is everybody's."
He's all ours, and he's all too much, even for huge fans like Proctor and Ondaatje. "It's been years of overthinking it, and now we're liberated from that kind of analysis," Proctor says. Ondaatje agrees: "It's strange to think that for three years, at some point of the day, I'd be thinking about Bob Dylan. It will be nice not to have to think about that."
What he's thinking about now is getting the film placed in a couple of film festivals (no screenings have yet been scheduled) and being done with it. "There was a sense of going into the heart of the unknown -- a complete unknown -- that you're never, ever going to know. And that journey can be kind of fun, but it can be exhausting, a bit too obsessive at times."
The journey cost the pair more than $20,000, and included a pair of forays into upstate New York, as well as trips to Greenwich Village and Hibbing, Minn., Dylan's birthplace. To defray costs, the pair stayed with relatives on the road. Friends and family helped out with postproduction costs, but the two are in debt.
This is not a full-time endeavour (Ondaatje works for MusicWorks magazine and Proctor for a legal publishing firm), and the idea of selling the film seems a lot less interesting to the pair than making it. "I feel good about it," Ondaatje says, when asked about the film's prospects. "In some ways, though, you just have to let it go. Some people will like it; some may not even notice it."
A copy of the film sent to Dylan's management received positive feedback from that end. Time will tell if the film's fate will end up reflecting its title, but Dylan himself, certainly, is still very much the unknown. Ondaatje admits he had no hope or desire to hem the man in.
"It wasn't meant to be an exposé. For a while, he could be corralled by being talked about by other people, but at the end of the film, the gate opens and he's more free than when the film started."
Good. Dylan roams yet, mostly unfound, more powerful for being somewhere else. Long may he run. |
