Bob Dylan and Joan Baez
Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time | To disgrace, distract, and bother me. | And the dirt of gossip blows into my face, | And the dust of rumors covers me. | But if the arrow is straight | And the point is slick, | It can pierce through dust no matter how thick.
Need a film for modern times? Forty-three years in the making, Murray Lerner's The Other Side of the Mirror is the movie. Due for release with the 3-CD, 51-track Dylan box set on October 30, fifty minutes of the eighty-minute feature showed up Sunday night on our national free-to-air TV channel. Featuring Bob Dylan's Newport appearances '63-'65, it offers a disturbingly immediate reflection of present uncertainty.
Only Lerner, director of 1967's Festival can tell us whether this is intended but, given the playlist, we can safely assume it is.
Mashing a narration-free eighty-minute film into an hour is difficult and the South African Broadcasting Corporation does not "do" difficult. Lopping the final section in which Dylan "goes electric", it unintentionally leaves us hanging suspended, awaiting an unknown inevitable.
Introduced by Joan Baez's views on Dylan's value as the 'voice of a generation', the 1963 footage is wonderfully raw, distilling the past four decades of the Twentieth Century into North Country Blues, With God on our Side (a powerful duet with Baez), Talkin' World War III Blues, Who Killed Davey Moore?, Only a Pawn in their Game, and Blowin' in the Wind.
The 1964 tracks echo our millennial confusion clearly — Dylan's laid-back rendition of Mr. Tambourine Man contrasts starkly with the bare-bone definition of his previous year's songs. Mirroring the fractured nature of the 911 years, which threw globalization, neoliberal economics, and resource wars into an already heated mix, Johnny Cash's truncated Don't Think Twice, It's Alright continues the disjoint and a focus that shifts between Dylan and Baez entrenches the neither-here-nor-there atmosphere of a short-lived interregnum.
Lerner includes some humorous material at this point, illustrating an attempt to shrug off looming issues. Baez sings a Dylan-style Mary Hamilton, Baez and Dylan perform an out-of-sync It Ain't Me, Babe, and the Queen of Folk offers her views on the "idolatry" she and Dylan enjoy. A second strong rendition of the final verse of With God on our Side performed with Baez precedes the final song taken from '64, a 'return to concern' in Chimes of Freedom.
1965 didn't happen on our public broadcaster. For the rest of the world and those who buy the movie though, it was the year Dylan turned Newport on its head, redefined music, and hit his own sometimes faltering, sometimes blundering, always visionary stride. The Other Side of the Mirror includes If You Gotta Go, Go Now, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Maggie's Farm, Like A Rolling Stone, Mr. Tambourine Man, and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. I'm sorry I didn't get to see the final set. Maggies Farm and Like A Rolling Stone are contrary and confrontational. Their lyrics feed an event during which the audience at which they were directed could not appreciate their value.
Many turned on the performer. The infamous "Judas!" hurled at Dylan lends the film's two renditions of With God On Our Side added import.
Lerner draws a direct line between then and now, melding the two to the present to give us an uncertain future. Closing the movie with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue leaves much unsaid, but says much as well. Dylan no longer projects his vision fifty years down the line. Having done so then, perhaps there is no need for him to do so now.
Dylan's listeners generally look to him to explain that which most wish explained away. His words, far larger than he, explain all. Opening the film, All I Really Want To Do clearly separates the singer from his song. The minstrel's message is deceptively simple: We do not learn from our mistakes and will repeat them. Lerner's inclusion of more than one rendition of several songs forgives us this small failing.
1997's haunting Time Out Of Mind saw Dylan relinquish his visionary past to become the DJ of our times; still tracking the future, but with a reporter's eye. Love and Theft, released on 11 September 2001, contains much pertinent to the day itself. High Water (for Charley Patton) has been credited with far more than Dylan ever intended, but its words were certainly prescient.
The credits of Murray Lerner's The Other Side of the Mirror, a film "...dedicated to those who dare to be different", roll to the final verse of Restless Farewell — a warning to those whose false clocks render them incapable of telling the time of day.
So I'll make my stand | And remain as I am | And bid farewell and not give a damn.
Bob Dylan | Restless Farewell
