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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Ned Kelly Rides Again

In 2011, Justin Kurzel, an Australian director, first attracted attention for his feature film debut, The Smalltown Murders, which was based on the crimes of serial killer John Bunting in South Australia. For his follow-up film, he went to Scotland and made a savage, stylized interpretation of MacBeth (2015) starring Michael Fassbinder, which was nominated for the Palme d’Oro at the Cannes Film Festival. Then Kurzel graduated to the major leagues for Assassin’s Creed (2016), a big budget fantasy adventure filmed in Malta, Spain and the UK and based on the popular video game series. The critics savaged it, moviegoers were indifferent, and it was considered one of the biggest bombs of 2016. After that, Kurzel returned to his homeland and decided to focus on a folk hero who is still a polarizing figure in his country’s history – Ned Kelly. The subsequent film, True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), is a visually dynamic and emotionally chaotic biopic which might be the most unusual interpretation yet of Australia’s infamous outlaw.   Continue reading