The Rashomon Moment: Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

Bob Dylan performs for the crowd in Murray Lerner’s excellent 2007 documentary on the musician at the Newport Jazz Festival – THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR: BOB DYLAN AT THE NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL, 1963-1965.

In the winter of 2007 moviegoers were given a choice to see numerous impersonations of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a semi-experimental biopic or experience the living legend in concert at the Newport Folk Festival circa 1963. The former was Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There featuring several faux-Dylans portrayed by Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and others in a dramatic attempt to capture the many phases and contradictions in the musician’s life. The latter was Murray Lerner’s riveting time capsule, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965. The strange thing is that Lerner’s documentary featuring the real deal vanished after a brief theatrical run while Haynes’s film continues to enjoy wide exposure thanks to its release on DVD. I don’t know if this meant that the younger movie-going audience is more interested in popular actors playing Bob Dylan or that they have little interest in the sixties folk music scene that Dylan revitalized with his spectacular entry into it. 

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Marching into the Great Unknown

Do you like knowing what to expect when you go to a movie? Some moviegoers like everything laid out neatly and wrapped up at the end with no ambiguity. But when the director’s intentions and directorial choices are never made obvious or explicit, it can result in a baffling but memorable viewing experience. Welcome to Serge Bozon’s La France (2007), which had been widely praised at various film festivals (it was nominated for two awards at the Cannes Film Festival), but never made much of an impact on U.S. film critics and moviegoers.     

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