DET er høytidssttunder i kø for Dylanfansen (kjekt nå som Leeds har
ett tap i det siste...) nå for tiden!
www.expectingrain.com (drevet av en bibliotekar i Mo i Rana, driver Dylansiden i verden mest anerkjent for beste day-to-day-news om mannen - i internetts spede barndom kom siden sågar på ti-på-topp-listen over internetsider overhodet!!!) må oppdateres med news tre ganger daglig (en gang har vært det vanlige, to i det siste...)... BBC2 hadde en rating på 4% under det totimer lange programmet i går kveld (del II i kveld) og 8% av de voksne så på.
Og som Guardian under her skriver
quote:
It's hardly surprising then that three articles about the show appeared in this paper alone, before the event even happened.
Last night's TV Scorsese's much-hyped film about Dylan isn't quite what it first seems, but is remarkable, revealing and very funny
Sam Wollaston
Tuesday September 27, 2005
The Guardian
Rarely has there been the kind of feverish anticipation for a TV programme as there has been for Arena: No Direction Home - Bob Dylan (BBC2). It's one of those few occasions you can talk about a "TV event". Everyone's wanted a part of it, to have their say - it's lucky the train is slow in coming, because a lot of folk are hopping on. And it was directed by Martin Scorsese too. Dylan, Scorsese - it's a cultural commentator's dream. It's hardly surprising then that three articles about the show appeared in this paper alone, before the event even happened.
So did it live up to the hype? Yes, for the most part. I watched both parts, last night's and tonight's, in a row. That's three and a half hours of what felt like being inside Bob Dylan's head. Which is an interesting place to be. But I'm still going to have a bit of a moan.
The film mostly concentrates on the time between Dylan's arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to his tour of Europe in 1966, the defining and most interesting part of his career. It is made up of interviews with people who were there, who knew him - Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, Joan Baez of course, many more - and footage of Dylan playing, some of it seen here for the first time. Then there's film of other stuff going on at the time, in both music and current affairs - Martin Luther King, Kennedy, the anti-war movement, Woody Guthrie, Odetta - to put the songs into a historical context. And finally the whole thing is punctuated by an interview with the man himself - Dylan in a black leather jacket, against a black background, speaking to the camera.
I think most people watching will assume that this interview is new, most probably with Scorsese himself asking the questions. Certainly there's nothing to suggest that it isn't. It turns out though, that this interview happened in 2000, and it was conducted by Jeff Rosen, Dylan's manager. I feel a little bit cheated by that.
It's not that there isn't interesting stuff in there - but Dylan's given a free rein to ramble on about pretty much anything he pleases. Some of it is wonderful, sometimes it's nonsensical. And it's interesting that the most revealing moments of the film, when Dylan comes alive, are from previous archive footage. The best bits I think are in tonight's show - when Dylan is shown to be hilarious. At a press conference some time in the early 60s he plays with the journalists, avoiding their questions, batting them back, pretending to be all coy but totally in command of the situation. When someone asks him how many of the musicians who labour in the same musical vineyard in which he toils are protest singers he answers: "I think there's about 136 ... either 136 or 142."
He's very, very funny - but it takes a slightly combative situation to bring this out, one you don't get when your manager plonks a camera in front of you and says, "Say whatever you like, Bob."
It seems strange that Scorsese apparently turned down the opportunity to speak more with Dylan, and instead ran with the old stuff from five years ago. So what exactly did Scorsese do? An (admittedly very beautiful) editing job? But then what did David Tedeschi, the editor, do? Was Scorsese principally just a name to use as ammunition in persuading people to surrender their archive material?
I'll stop moaning because it sounds as if I didn't appreciate the film. In the end it doesn't really matter who did what, or when, if the end result is OK. And it's wonderful, a remarkable knitting together of a lot of tangled strands into a thing of sense and beauty. Maybe it will help to convert the unconvinced. Dylanites meanwhile will treasure it, while singing along.
Because even better than Dylan's jokes are his songs, of course. The musical highlight for me comes at the end of part one. It's 1966, we're at a gig in England, possibly the famous Manchester one where the "Judas" moment happened. Dylan is on stage, at the piano. It's dark but there's a bright stagelight behind him so it looks as if the moon is being eclipsed - by Bob Dylan. He starts to play Ballad of the Thin Man:
You walk into the room
With a pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
You say, "Who is that man?"
It's a mesmerising performance, electric. Electric in every way of course, and that's the problem for the die-hard folkies. They boo and shout "Switch it off". The fools.
Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick
Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick