This is a Festival response to Dont Look Back (1967)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 September
This is a Festival response to Dont Look Back (1967)
Yesterday's double-bill included Dont [sic] Look Back (1967), following Bob Dylan’s pivotal UK tour in 1968 with the still relatively new handheld camera: I am left wanting to check two things, one of which any web-site will tell me (how old Dylan was then, because I’m hopeless with ages and couldn’t be sure), the other being how the film was received by those who had started following his career, which is best done by consulting a biography: there is the reassurance not only that someone has taken the trouble to research the subject, but that a publisher will have checked it for accuracy.
I shall come back to why, but first to say how beautiful Joan Baez’ voice was at that time (she is seen arriving with Dylan, and was around for the earlier part of the tour), and what a pleasure it was to see footage of the famous concerts in the Royal Albert Hall (it was not identified which songs (or parts of them) were from which). His career has lasted so long that it is refreshing to see him at this time, although it is what true fans (and I know about a few) would know all about (and have multiple takes of the audio and visuals), and to hear him trying out audiences in Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool.
The interest in Dylan’s age and the film’s reception are linked, and I got into conversation afterwards, because I had found it quite a revelation to see three encounters : one at a hotel, when it seems that one of Dylan’s party (or his or their guests) had thrown a glass into the street, and two when he meets a science student (as he calls himself) who had wanted to meet him before a gig (and, maybe, to write about the meeting), and then with someone from Time magazine before going on at the Albert Hall.
Regarding the glass incident, it could be construed that Dylan shows concern that someone might have been hurt, but (I think twice) he ends up (when no one says who did it) declaring that he does not want it to be his responsibility, which, in all honesty, sounds more like not wanting to be sued.
I missed the opening remarks of what we see with the student, but I think that he was asking Dylan why he doesn’t like him. As things develop, and after Dylan has said that he doesn’t know him so why should he like him and asked for reasons why he should get to know him, it felt more like he has a chip on his shoulder, picking on someone with a few argumentative ploys, and moving between them, rather in the way that someone might play with hurting or threatening a victim.
I know that I am sensitive to seeing such behaviour, because I am quite capable of intellectual showing-off and trying to take someone down a peg or two, but the display of seemingly unprovoked hostility was even more clear with the person from Time. Dylan announced straightaway that he wouldn’t see anyone after the gig for an interview, and that he would be called a folk-singer: he could explain to him what a folk-singer is and why he isn’t one, but the man would just nod and not get it, and, no, he wasn’t going to bother to do so.
He said exactly what he thought of the publication, what it was, who read it, and why he didn’t need it, because he had sold out the Albert Hall twice without it. Move over, Mr Ego! Has Dylan recanted and been on the cover of Time since, one wonders, and does he still engage in verbal fisticuffs?
Early on in the tour, he employed the technique of saying that all the words in a question could mean different things to different people, so how could he answer it? That just seemed evasive, and the treatment dealt out to the two other men seemed like a good deal more of the same – but from whom was he really seeking to escape?
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
