Renaldo et Clara

These days most everything is inherently cinematic: poetry, music, literature.

That's a good thing if you understand how cinema works and can escape its control when needed. One technique is to retreat to non-cinematic art, to surf the various pathways therein and then come back to the moving image from the outside.

This film, if you can find the five hour version, can provide one such exercise. Dylan builds his songs around images, but they are not images from film or film-influenced phrases. His images are what appears in dreams, originating in real life and sliced and diced by drugs. (Incidentally, the period of this film marks the transition from active tripping of various kinds to passive by his "acceptance" of fundamentalism another drug.)

His method has always been to eschew a plan, to avoid premeditated structure, to abandon great themes. Instead, he just starts, waits for images and ideas to appear and then arranges them on the table. His art is a combination of selection and composition. The selection is a matter of discarding everything that seems to be simple. That automatically puts him in the world of the Tambourine Man, where he has been in various guises for decades.

The matter of composition is something else. He just trusts how they appear. Since they all come from one mind, and that mind is coherent and somewhat interesting, they hang together. He doesn't know how they do and has given up questioning, except for a brief period of examining Kabbalah.

That's how he does it with his music, and it works to judge from his audience. He also does it with his prose rambles. This works less well; the act of juxtaposing elements in his songs leverages the vocabulary of rhythmic associations he pretty much invented. But he has no equivalent to serve his writing projects, so most of them come across as sophomoric. Same with this film.

He just started. But images in film (at least films like this) have to come from things that are presented in the real world. He relies on some friends to help create and select the images/ scenes/sequences. Ginsberg is an anchor who does understand the rhythms of poetry where Bob does not, but he is as ignorant as Bob concerning film.

Another friend is Sam Shepard who is credited as co-writer. During this time, he was working with Terence Malick on another project which is about the same problem of selection. Shepard and Malick for that matter have a coherent theory of "selection" that they can use in conceiving their projects and setting the basic tone. We can see much of that here; it all relates to folding of persons into characters that are assignable to other bodies. Thus we have many "actors" playing more than one role; roles that are assigned to more than one actor; scenes that are copied from real life; lives that are generated from scenes (bordello vignettes, Indian cosmologies, Black injustices, beat poems...)

That's the selection half and it is interesting as all getout. The composition half is pure dreck. Dylan trusts his intuitions as he always does. But these pieces don't all come from the inner spinning of a whole mind like Kieslowski's or Tarkovsky's. They come from all over and he stitches them together as if they did actually come from his visions. But they didn't so it has no coherent being.

He tries to use songs, his and others, as glue. Some of these are enjoyable by themselves but they sure don't help assemble a cinematic being.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Renaldo And Clara was hit hard by critics, but was a true testimont that Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) is the true modern leader of entertainment, and learder of social change.

P.S. I would also like to find somewhere where I can buy this movie.

The drama of Renaldo and Clara, set against Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975-76.

Part concert film, part drama, part documentary Bob Dylan's 'Renaldo and Clara' is a sprawling, disjointed, puzzling affair. The concert stuff is great, as one would expect. Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue was a fantastic musical experience coming off the back of Dylan's excellent 'Desire' and 'Blood on the Tracks' albums and featuring Dylan at his most spontaneous, dynamic and, in terms of live performances, creative. Dylan had a great backing band (that included Mick Ronson, David Bowie's long-time guitarist) and the Revue also included big names such as Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn, performances of whose are also shown in the film.

For a Dylan fan like myself the music alone should be enough to give this film a thumbs up.

Unfortunately, it's not. The music makes around a third of this four-hour film and the remainder is very weak. The Renaldo and Clara drama is all over the place with a bare semblance of a plot and no character development or engagement.

The documentary side has some interesting bits to it: the roadies setting up the stage, some of the other background aspects to the tour, but for the most part it is like the drama, an uninteresting meander.

I really don't know what Dylan and co-writer Sam Shepard were thinking while penning the script for this or Dylan was thinking while directing and editing this. With Dylan's mountains of creativity it's not a surprise that he turned his hand to film: it's the execution that's the problem.

My one thought is that is that Dylan's songs often consist of seemingly-disjointed, stream-of-consciousness imagery and narratives and he tried to replicate that in a four-hour film. It works in a song because it's short enough that you don't need a neat, complete story, the listener can add their own interpretations and there's music so the narrative isn't all that matters. None of these mitigations apply in a feature film.

Dylan would have been far better off just releasing this as a concert film - no attempt at drama. After the full-length version bombed he did release a two-hour, mostly-concert, version of this but by then it was too late as fans had already written it off.

Quirky, idiosyncratic, often confusing and much too long mixture of concert footage, documentary and fictional scenes is definitely fascinating to watch, but one wonders, if Bob Dylan ever was certain about his intentions to create this film or whether he had an idea who its potential audience would be.

When it was theatrically released in most of Europa,BOb Dylan's work was boiled down to a 100 min version.I had to wait almost thirty years to see the complete movie (about 4 hours).Was it worth the wait?

The performances make me inclined to think that it was.Virtually all the songs Dylan performs are great live moments,and it would be wise to release (I think it has already been done)an only-songs DVD:Wearing a mask,or with his white make-up,Dylan's sings his songs as if "a life were depending on them " (and in the case of "Hurricane" it is true!):all the songs from the "desire" album are superior to the studio tracks:"Isis", "one more cup of coffee" and "romance in Durango" are almost spooky.The "blood on the tracks" material triumphs too: "tangled up is blue " will blow your mind and a strange "if you see her say hello" accompanied on piano which is heard when Dylan and Baez walk across the snow is so "new" I did not recognize the song at first."A hard rain 's gonna fall becomes a heavy metal stomp which makes the original 1963 version sound like a demo.There's also a countrified "I want you" (not as stunning,perhaps ,as the slow Budokan version),a moving "Sarah" (Lowndes)and a rare live version (heard as background)of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands " .

We are also treated to the delights of the duets.I'm not the kind of people to tell you that Baez "is holding Bob back and makes him a robot on a leash":when they sing together ,I'm on cloud nine Johnny Ace's "never let me go" is brilliant and a very long version of "the water is wide" is heard during one of the numerous scenes of the Renaldo/Clara/Woman in White triangle.

Baez's "Diamonds and rust" is admirable but unfortunately it is cut ,which is a shame!Roger McGuinn gives a riveting instrumental version of his Byrds classic "Eight Miles High" with Baez's doing the frug to it and then leads the band into a blistering version of "Chesnut mare" another Byrds classic.

I would not go as far as to write that the non-musical sequences were as magical as the others.David Blue playing pinball and remembering the Village days is not really absorbing (although he mentions Phil Ochs -who could have been part of the Rolling Thunder Review);the love triangle deals with the three involved persons's private lives and I do not think it will interest the younger generation who almost knows nothing about their love affairs;outside of the handful of artists I've mentioned,the other musical sequences are average-to-poor.

One can save the scenes on the street concerning Rubin Carter and the one when Ginsberg and Dylan visit Jack Kerouac's grave .Even more disturbing is this other sequence in a graveyard where the two men speak of Jesus and the Way of the Cross.This and "people get ready " ("there's no room for the hopeless sinner") might explain Dylan's sudden (and short-lived) conversion to Christianity in the late seventies.

"Renaldo and Clara" is a hotchpotch ;it's hard to imagine a non Dylan buff sitting through these four hours.

Like this? Try this: "Hard Rain" a 1976 concert:they wrote that the Rolling Thunder Review was moribund at the time but don't you believe them!"Hard rain" is one -hour long and there is never a dull moment !(most of the material was released on the eponymous album)