By Hugh Davies
July 27, 2005
Martin Scorsese's long-awaited documentary on Bob Dylan is to be screened on BBC television in September, with the singer apparently as enigmatic as ever, judging by a segment just shown in Britain.
"You're constantly in a state of becoming," he says, mumbling to a camera operated by his manager, Jeff Rosen.
Dylan, who has given one television interview in 20 years, spent 10 hours talking to Rosen. The tapes were handed to Scorsese for editing. Scorsese, who filmed The Last Waltz in 1976, with Dylan singing Baby, Let Me Follow You Down with the Band, said: "I've had no contact with Dylan."
Any questions he had, he asked "through Jeff". It was "better", the director said, to "just deal with the material".
Roly Keating, controller of BBC Two, said the 210-minute film promised an "awesome and unique" picture of the singer, from Dylan's arrival in New York in January 1961 to July 1966, when he became a recluse after a motorcycle crash near his home at the time in Woodstock, New York. Much of the film is about Britain, with previously unseen outtakes from D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Eat The Document, shot on Dylan's 1965 and 1966 tours.
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AdvertisementA highlight is the moment when a fan, Keith Butler, stood up in Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1966, and shouted "Judas!".
His cry, and Dylan's contemptuous response, ("You're a liar") is seen as a watershed moment in Dylan's transition to electric rock, following the derision heaped on him at the Newport Folk Festival when he appeared with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Anthony Wall, editor of the Arena program, which is showing the film, No Direction Home, said Dylan talked about his recording of Like a Rolling Stone, the six-minute single driven by a circular organ riff, which broke the barrier of the three-minute pop record.
He said: "If anything, it's an emotional journey. Dylan talks about Joan Baez [an early lover], but doesn't answer questions in the way some artists do."
Telegraph, London