Renaldo and Clara

These days most everything is inherently cinematic: poetry, music, literature.

That's a good thing if you understand how cinema works and can escape its control when needed. One technique is to retreat to non-cinematic art, to surf the various pathways therein and then come back to the moving image from the outside.

This film, if you can find the five hour version, can provide one such exercise. Dylan builds his songs around images, but they are not images from film or film-influenced phrases. His images are what appears in dreams, originating in real life and sliced and diced by drugs. (Incidentally, the period of this film marks the transition from active tripping of various kinds to passive by his "acceptance" of fundamentalism another drug.)

His method has always been to eschew a plan, to avoid premeditated structure, to abandon great themes. Instead, he just starts, waits for images and ideas to appear and then arranges them on the table. His art is a combination of selection and composition. The selection is a matter of discarding everything that seems to be simple. That automatically puts him in the world of the Tambourine Man, where he has been in various guises for decades.

The matter of composition is something else. He just trusts how they appear. Since they all come from one mind, and that mind is coherent and somewhat interesting, they hang together. He doesn't know how they do and has given up questioning, except for a brief period of examining Kabbalah.

That's how he does it with his music, and it works to judge from his audience. He also does it with his prose rambles. This works less well; the act of juxtaposing elements in his songs leverages the vocabulary of rhythmic associations he pretty much invented. But he has no equivalent to serve his writing projects, so most of them come across as sophomoric. Same with this film.

He just started. But images in film (at least films like this) have to come from things that are presented in the real world. He relies on some friends to help create and select the images/ scenes/sequences. Ginsberg is an anchor who does understand the rhythms of poetry where Bob does not, but he is as ignorant as Bob concerning film.

Another friend is Sam Shepard who is credited as co-writer. During this time, he was working with Terence Malick on another project which is about the same problem of selection. Shepard and Malick for that matter have a coherent theory of "selection" that they can use in conceiving their projects and setting the basic tone. We can see much of that here; it all relates to folding of persons into characters that are assignable to other bodies. Thus we have many "actors" playing more than one role; roles that are assigned to more than one actor; scenes that are copied from real life; lives that are generated from scenes (bordello vignettes, Indian cosmologies, Black injustices, beat poems...)

That's the selection half and it is interesting as all getout. The composition half is pure dreck. Dylan trusts his intuitions as he always does. But these pieces don't all come from the inner spinning of a whole mind like Kieslowski's or Tarkovsky's. They come from all over and he stitches them together as if they did actually come from his visions. But they didn't so it has no coherent being.

He tries to use songs, his and others, as glue. Some of these are enjoyable by themselves but they sure don't help assemble a cinematic being.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

At over four hours and consisting of a lot of improvised and apparently self-referential scenes, this could and indeed has irritated many viewers. But if one stays with it and takes it as it comes (Dylan himself has recommended that one watches it doped), the film is an extraordinary meditation on the nature of self, performance, show biz and life. At its heart, the film seems to me to be saying that everything is show business (love, politics, poetry) or perhaps that show business (represented by a cheesy club act) is as valid a life choice as any of the more profound things portrayed. For all his supposedly radical support for Rubin Carter, the film suggests that the boxer is just as much a performer as anyone else. The film contains some moving sequences, not least the wonderful one in which Alan Ginsberg performs Kaddish before a group of oldsters. And not least, the concert footage of Dylan is magnificent - Isis being a stand-out. Which brings me back to the movie's theme: here is a performer whose name is not really Bob Dylan playing a performer who is called Renaldo performing a song about marriage but not marriage to his wife Sara (who plays Clara in the film) but marriage to the ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis - which implies that the singer really is Osiris, God of the underworld. But it's just this kid Robert Zimmerman! What is the real truth? This is the sort of heady trip the film offers. Put up with the irritating self-indulgence of much of this,and the enormous length, and there are great rewards. Re-issue it, Bob!

The drama of Renaldo and Clara, set against Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975-76.

Part concert film, part drama, part documentary Bob Dylan's 'Renaldo and Clara' is a sprawling, disjointed, puzzling affair. The concert stuff is great, as one would expect. Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue was a fantastic musical experience coming off the back of Dylan's excellent 'Desire' and 'Blood on the Tracks' albums and featuring Dylan at his most spontaneous, dynamic and, in terms of live performances, creative. Dylan had a great backing band (that included Mick Ronson, David Bowie's long-time guitarist) and the Revue also included big names such as Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn, performances of whose are also shown in the film.

For a Dylan fan like myself the music alone should be enough to give this film a thumbs up.

Unfortunately, it's not. The music makes around a third of this four-hour film and the remainder is very weak. The Renaldo and Clara drama is all over the place with a bare semblance of a plot and no character development or engagement.

The documentary side has some interesting bits to it: the roadies setting up the stage, some of the other background aspects to the tour, but for the most part it is like the drama, an uninteresting meander.

I really don't know what Dylan and co-writer Sam Shepard were thinking while penning the script for this or Dylan was thinking while directing and editing this. With Dylan's mountains of creativity it's not a surprise that he turned his hand to film: it's the execution that's the problem.

My one thought is that is that Dylan's songs often consist of seemingly-disjointed, stream-of-consciousness imagery and narratives and he tried to replicate that in a four-hour film. It works in a song because it's short enough that you don't need a neat, complete story, the listener can add their own interpretations and there's music so the narrative isn't all that matters. None of these mitigations apply in a feature film.

Dylan would have been far better off just releasing this as a concert film - no attempt at drama. After the full-length version bombed he did release a two-hour, mostly-concert, version of this but by then it was too late as fans had already written it off.

The movie was filled with bad acting.

Plus, this movie did Joan Baez extremely dirty, erasing the fact that Joan Baez dated Bob Dylan in 1964. In 1965 Bob Dylan cheated on Joan Baez with Sara Lownds, then he goes & re-write history in Renaldo and Clara, turning Joan into the 'other woman' in his fairy tale marriage.

Warning: At the timestamp of 3 hours 20 minutes, Bob Dylan starts gargling. What is this? A Cofsils experdine gargle commercial?

Alternate title of the movie: This Movie is a Giant Middle Finger to Joan Baez. Dump Joan Baez, break her heart, marry the other girl named Sara Lownds, and then flip the tables and cast Joan Baez as the other girl instead. Talk about erasing the truth, eh? Plus, gargle a while to make audience confused and make people fools for 4 hours straight and pretend it to be a cinematic masterpiece".

Renaldo and Clara (1978) 235 min., Theatrical cut

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Bob Dylan plays Renaldo, his real life wife Sara plays Clara and Joan Baez, Dylan's long-time mistress, plays The Woman in White. This 1978 film features Dylan as director and it hit theaters with a huge bomb as critics tore it apart, fans didn't show up to see it and some theater owners refused to play it. Dylan later edited the film down to 122-minutes, which featured mostly concert stuff, but this version hasn't been seen since the original release. All of this was filmed during Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, which in my opinion featured Dylan's at his best and only ranking second behind the legendary 1966 tour. The gimmick of this tour was that Dylan, along with Baez, Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth and various others would tour around the country without announcing any dates. Instead, they'd simply have their tour bus stop and the concert would take place within the matter of days, if not on that day itself.

As far as a story goes, it's all over the place. We have the central story of Renaldo and Clara and the husband's affair with The Lady in White, which is clearly drawn off Dylan's own marital issues. We also have Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan with Ronne Blakley playing his wife with these segments centering on the price of being a legend. We also have other wide range of events with coverage of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter taking some of the running time, which this tour, with Dylan's song "Hurricane", was trying to bring awareness to his case.

I'm a die-hard Dylan fan but the first hour of this film is among the worst stuff ever put to film. The movie is downright self indulgent, self centered and very poorly directed. However, with that said, something happens during the later part of the film, which for about an hour, makes it somewhat entertaining. It's really hard to absolutely trash this film because the concert footage is very special and feature some great tracks. Dylan, appearing in whiteface, does some of his greatest stuff on this tour and that features the greatest versions of "It Ain't Me Babe" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall". Both of these classic folk tunes are given the "rock-a-billy" treatment and I've yet to hear better versions. Dylan also plays more recent turns including a blazing version of "Iris", a heartbreaking version of "Sara" and the opening number "When I Paint My Masterpiece". You also have a very heartfelt and deeply emotional performance of "Just Like a Woman" and a great country version of "I Want You". Dylan fans will also be interested in a brief clip of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", which is the only known performance of this song, although it can only be heard briefly in the background. We also get a cover of "House of the Rising Sun" and duets with Baez on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "I Shall Be Released".

Even with the great music, for the most part this film is a total washout as we're watching home movies for nearly four hours. There's no camera-work to speak of as the camera is simply all over the place and there's never any clear focus or shots set up. It appears everything was done with one take and the ugliness of the picture really comes through. However, I will add, that I've never seen a film like this so perhaps that's another positive for the film. There are countless scenes that come out of no where and really mean nothing including a very long sequence with Indians fighting over equal rights. We also get countless scenes of David Blue talking about the old days of the Village where Dylan and various others got their start. There are some interesting insights here but the footage just keeps going and going to the point where it gets boring. There's also footage with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter that is pretty interesting as we see him in jail, although none of the concert footage of Dylan performing at the prison is included (only news footage is currently available via bootlegs). There's some other nice stuff including the stage being set up, Dylan before and after shows as well as other sequences where we get to see Dylan being Dylan but I doubt anyone, outside of major fans, are going to sit through four hours of stuff just for these magical moments.

In the end, this film is a total disaster that only die-hard fans will enjoy. In fact, I'd bet most people couldn't get past the one hour mark with this thing, which is the reason this thing didn't stay in theaters over a week. The movie has been pulled by Dylan, which means the only way to see it are through bootlegs but who knows if Dylan will ever let the movie be released again. I'd certainly love to hear from him and what the film was trying to do but the closest we've come to this is an interview where Dylan said people should be stoned when they watch it. Sadly, I didn't have any reefer handy when i viewed the film so I can't comment on how true that statement is. Again, this is a very special period in Dylan's career but this documentary/film doesn't touch upon its greatness. The Rolling Thunder Revue would run into early 1976 before ticket sales turned bad and the West Coast tour was canceled all together. Thankfully Columbia released "Live 1975" as part of their Genuine Bootleg Series, which is highly recommended. Also available is the original live CD "Hard Rain", which also produced a TV show and an alternate version, which hasn't been released outside of bootlegs.