collisionwork | Entries tagged with i'm not there

A mixed bag of things to post:

After getting back home Sunday night from seeing Ten West at The Brick (great show, unfortunately only in town for the weekend and closed), I finally got to see Todd Haynes' movie (or "Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan") I'm Not There for the first time and was completely blown away and then spent yesterday morning with the bonus material from the 2-disk set on and going in the background on the computer as I started writing this -- as I was rewatching the film with the director's commentary on, I wound up stopping my writing; couldn't concentrate on both.

The film completely knocked me out and I recommend it highly, though I have no idea how it'll play anyone other than a Dylan-obsessive who can also sit there and tick off with glee all the 60s movie references as they go by (8 1/2, Petulia, Performance, lots o' Godard, Blowup, etc. etc.). Berit digs Dylan, but not to the same degree, and wouldn't get most of the film refs, but seemed to like it (she had the same reaction to much of it she had when seeing some of the real footage of Dylan in No Direction Home, re: the fans who turned on the man when he went electric and the press - especially the British press - who were always trying to figure out what his hustle was - "What a bunch of assholes!").

In any case, the movie = amazing.

I wound up glad about one thing I didn't think I would, as well. The movie is named for a great GREAT Dylan song from the Basement Tapes sessions which has been known from bootlegs for 40 years but never officially released until the soundtrack album. The song is actually named ("mysteriously" as Haynes says of its subtitle in one of his comments on the DVD), "I'm Not There (1956)". It's a beautiful, fragile song - simple, hypnotic, heartbreaking, and - crucially - mostly unintelligible. You catch bits of words and thoughts but they just fade in and out of understanding as the "whirlpool" of a song (as Haynes puts it, I think quoting Greil Marcus) goes by. Dylan was probably making up the words right as he sang them, so who knows how much sense they were making anyway.

Here's the song, behind a cut, with video accompaniment:

( I'm Not There (1956) )

So a great deal of the beauty and mystery of the song - how ultimately unknowable it is - derives from its abstractness, never really comprehending what the words are, just kinda vaguely making them out. I figured then, that with a final official release - and a cover version by Sonic Youth on the same album - the words would be "settled" - Dylan or someone who could make them out from the master tape would give us the "correct" words.

Nope.

There are two sets of subtitles on the DVD, one of English for the hard-of-hearing, and one for just the song lyrics. Wonderfully, when the song finally comes up in the film itself, the two different sets of titles have almost completely different interpretations of Dylan's words. Then the Sonic Youth version plays over the end credits, and it's a third version of the words! Obviously, everyone's just been left on their own still to decide for themselves what the lyrics are (and I've found many versions online, no two the same, with some overlap here and there, all of which sound plausible if you listen to them next to the song).

For example, in this cut, here's three versions of a chorus-verse-verse-chorus sequence from the song, as subtitled three different ways on the DVD:

( But it's not too fast for Slim . . . )

Perfect.

Images seen recently to be shared - here's one I grabbed from Bryan Enk's Facebook page (hope that's okay, Bryan) that brings back fond memories of theatre on Ludlow Street. Yuri Lowenthal and me sitting on the garbage bins outside The Piano Store theatre as I give notes to the cast of my first production of Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, Summer, 1998: