{"id":5515,"date":"2020-03-22T11:15:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-22T05:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=5515"},"modified":"2020-03-22T19:42:38","modified_gmt":"2020-03-22T14:12:38","slug":"rolling-thunder-revue-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/rolling-thunder-revue-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rolling

The Sharon Stone \u2018interview\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n

In Rolling Thunder Revue <\/em>(2019), Martin Scorsese\u2019s new documentary on singer Bob Dylan, actor Sharon Stone makes a startling revelation. In her interview Stone mentions getting introduced to Dylan and his group while they were on a concert tour in her hometown in the year 1976 and describes her subsequent friendship with him. An aspiring teenage model, Stone recounts, she was attracted to the singer\u2019s talent and charisma and ended up accompanying the group for the remaining part of the so-called \u2018Rolling Thunder Tour\u2019.<\/p>\n

Dalliances with teenage fans, often legally underage, have been a poorly concealed secret of the testosterone-driven world of American music. But in this case, Stone\u2019s anecdote, along with few other \u2018realistic\u2019 references in Scorsese\u2019s film turned out to be fictitious. It is the director\u2019s mischievous postfactual take on the truth-telling power of documentaries \u2013 a gag or a joke reminiscent of Woody Allen\u2019s fake documentary Zelig<\/em>. Allen starts Zelig with a series of fake interviews of real-life celebrities extolling the virtues of his maverick fictional protagonist. However, unlike Woody Allen, Scorsese is not making a mockumentary \u2013 as fake documentaries are fashionably called these days. Rather, on the face of it, Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> is a conventional documentary about Dylan\u2019s legendary tour of US and Canada in 1976. \u00a0Sharon Stone was merely enacting a scene planted by Scorsese inside the documentary. The fakery becomes apparent when Sharon claims later in the film that Dylan had told her that the song \u201cJust like a Woman\u2019 was dedicated to her. Stone goes on to add that she realised that Dylan was \u2018pulling a fast one\u2019 on her, and the song was written 10 years before they met.<\/p>\n

In her fictional account in the film, Sharon Stone is \u2018deceived\u2019 by Dylan, and Scorsese is deceiving us \u2013 the gullible viewer by contaminating a documentary with non-fiction elements. Why is the master filmmaker resorting to this gimmickry? It prods us to dig the surface of the film, looking for cues and desperate to separate the wheat from the chaff, the credible from the incredible.<\/p>\n

\"Bob

Don\u2019t Look Back (DA Pennebaker, 1967) DVD cover<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cYou are telling the truth when you are wearing a mask\u2019 \u2013 says Dylan, in the documentary. Throughout the tour, he always performed on stage with his face painted white. It was Dylan\u2019s version of the \u2018mask\u2019. In a career spanning five decades Dylan had kept on assuming different persona \u2013 a poet, a civil rights activist, a troubadour, an evangelist \u2013 his faces are many. Scorsese tries to capture this chameleon-like quality of Dylan by tweaking the documentary form. Formal jugglery apart, this two-and-half-hour long documentary, currently streaming on Netflix, bristles with the rebellious spirit of 1970s counterculture, taking us back to a forgotten episode of American cultural history. We are presented with several blazing on-stage performances by Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and a host of singers who were part of the Rolling Thunder tour, undertaken by Dylan and Co to mark the bicentennial of American independence. Scorsese commemorates this tour with the compilation documentary put together from archival footage excavated and digitized after 4 decades. This rather long documentary drifts between different events from the tour \u2013 performances, rehearsals, jamming sessions, banters and is occasionally punctuated by formal interviews Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and others, recorded in the historical present. These new interviews contextualise and interpret things that happened during 50 days of the tour in 1976. The film\u2019s apparent lack of formal organisation is deceptive. It is more of an artifice meant to lure the audience into a deeper conversation with filmic representation and its limitations. How does a four-decade-old historical material speak to a contemporary cultural context? Scorsese has made a valiant attempt to make the past speak to the present, fake with the real, stretching the boundaries of non-fictional representation in films.<\/p>\n

\"Rolling

The \u2018masked\u2019 truth-teller \u2013 Bob Dylan performing in Rolling Thunder Revue<\/p><\/div>\n

Interestingly, this is Scorsese\u2019s second major film on Bob Dylan. In 2005 he made No Direction Home<\/em>, which Jeff Rosen, Dylan\u2019s manager invited him to direct. Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> gains currency from the director\u2019s familiarity with the subject and his expertise in music documentaries. In terms of filming style, Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> harks back to the cinema verit\u00e9 classic Don\u2019t Look Back<\/em> (DA Pennebaker, 1967) \u2013 the spirited \u2018fly-on-the-wall\u2019 exploration of Dylan\u2019s 1967 tour of Britain, rather than the restrained \u2018talking heads\u2019 approach of No Direction Home<\/em>. As opposed to the precocious, young 26-year-old Bob Dylan we encounter in Pennebaker\u2019s 1967 film, the Bob Dylan mid-1970s in Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> is mellowed, patient and even refreshingly compassionate at times. Particularly charming is violinist Scarlet Rivera\u2019s description of how she was recruited by Dylan literally from the streets while on her way to perform a gig. Apart from Rivera, the film is animated by the presence of the tour mates Joni Mitchell, Sam Shepard, Ronee Blakely, \u201cRamblin\u2019 Jack Elliot, and of course Dylan\u2019s former girlfriend singer Joan Baez. The chemistry between the former couple unfolds in a curious scene in the film where Dylan chides Baez for marrying someone \u2018she thought<\/strong> she loved\u2019. \u201cSee, that is what thought<\/strong> has to do with it. Thought will f**k you up\u2026it\u2019s the heart and not the head.\u201d However, it is not Joan Baez, but the poet Allen Ginsburg who competes with Dylan in his gentle yet domineering presence throughout the film. A close friend of Dylan, Ginsburg admired the singer for his ability to write songs, while he could write only poems. Dylan reminisces about various facets of Ginsburg, the poet\u2019s mastery of the form, their shared fondness for author and counter-culture icon Jack Kerouac. In a memorable scene from the film, the duo is seen reminiscing about Kerouac by his grave in Massachusetts, reading their favourite lines from a copy of Kerouac\u2019s \u201cOn the Road\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Rolling

The bard and the poet \u2013 Bob and Allen during the tour<\/p><\/div>\n

The film records both a physical and musical voyage \u2013 the attempt by Dylan to capture the soul and spirit of America in a crucial period following the end of the Vietnam war. A key to deciphering this intriguing film is probably underlined by the first scene. The film starts with a silent period trick film where a magician, with a sleight of hand, seemingly makes a woman disappear, only to be brought back immediately. Filmmakers, Scorsese is saying, are fundamentally tricksters or illusionists. Film is an art of illusion and documentary, despite its association with truth and reality, is no exception. Today the world around us is so deeply contaminated by untruth that filmmakers need to train audiences by juxtaposing the real with the fake. Scorsese reminds us that the name of the film is borrowed from an indigenous American shaman, and the expression Rolling Thunder means \u2018speaking the truth\u2019. If the documentary form does speak the truth, it needs to constantly reinvent its language to remain relevant. In Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> Martin Scorsese seems to have attempted just that.<\/p>\n

More to read<\/strong><\/p>\n

Taika Waititi\u2019s Boy: Exploring Masculinity from an Indigenous Perspective<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Suffering of Ninko: Clash of Restraint and Libido<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Obscure Surrealist Classic \u2013 Un Soir Un Train<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article examines Martin Scorsese\u2019s 2019 documentary Rolling Thunder Revue<\/em> as a crucial and timely formal intervention in documentary film language. It argues that Scorsese has tried to interrogate the \u2018truth claim\u2019 associated with documentary films by introducing fake or unreal elements in the narrative. A long practitioner of musical documentary films, Scorsese, seems to have taken inspiration, not only from the tradition of \u2018mockumentaries\u2019 (fiction films masquerading as documentaries) but also from the shifting notions of truth in the postfactual mediascape of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

Currently streaming on Netflix, the documentary Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)<\/em> is Martin Scorsese\u2019s postfactual take on Bob Dylan and his 1976 tour of US and Canada. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":948,"featured_media":5517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421],"tags":[2266,263,2265,2264],"class_list":["post-5515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-film-reviews","tag-bob-dylan","tag-films-of-martin-scorsese","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-rolling-thunder-revue"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/948"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5521,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5515\/revisions\/5521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}