01 Dec I’m Not There (2007)

Shades

This was the semantically richest and emotionally deepest film experience I have had in years. And since I am different now that I was five years ago, it could qualify as near my favourite. It will likely not be so for you, at least to approach the way I did. It seems that you have to be my age, and have lived through the events the wrap this. Also, you have to have invested some part of your personal poetry in that of this man. And finally, you have to be sufficiently cineliterate to follow the amazing shape of the eye-concepts that are serially birthed.

Often I say that essentially all films are about other films, rarely reaching life. This does that, reaching life, but by going through, punching through art by force. It presents a collage of images in such a way that we can see through the space in them to truth. Its an amazing feat. But in order for it to work, you have to have those patches sparkle for you.

So for instance you have to have internalised Fellini’s one masterpiece, and be yearning for decades to escape the now close confines of the imagination set then. Of course when it was new, it was a wild ramble in the jungle, but now turn to tethers in the park. You really have to chafe at what passes for cinematic art, and dream of the next film, the one that will do for us what “8 1/2” did then.

You also have to have lived through the blasphemy of the Vietnam war and ideally have been on the “right side” throughout and still bear the pain of it. You have to – seriously, even though the director is too young for this — have had your life ruined by the revelation of a lying government, coupled with the spinning parade of false hopes from artists, many of whom we still admire. You have to have built your life taking into account mistrust.

But you also have to have had this particular dancer as a focus. This man who split into so many men, most of whom were designed to charm, all of whom weren’t men at all but crystallised paths to salvation. You have to have invested in a few of these paths yourself enough so that it cost you more than it ever could Dylan.

If you have all of these traits then you already have the web on which this tarantula dances. And this will seep into you like some exotic solvent carrying subtle hallucinogens. And it will haunt you forever. Oh, you’ll be able to slough it off and pretend that this is merely a clever puzzle of kinematic trivia. But this will hurt. It will hurt a lot, but only because of memories now defused.

It will make you soar as well, because it is so massively glorious. Many Dylans, well of course. Different ages, races, sexes. My, surely true.

Stories about films of one in another, about hiding from each other, about having sex with and spatting with each other. About disowning, and writing about each other. About one being another’s blood, who is the hidden eyebrow of another in a Joycean web, but one that makes sense because it is made out of the stuff that made us.

What impresses me so much is that even before this was conceived the filmmaker had to know something like this fabric of selves existed. And he had to — without having lived it himself — develop deep intuitions about how this specific soul danced upon us in music and images. He had to understand how to borrow and bend those images with the music in ways that would make Julie Taymor blush: “Thin Man” used not for confused sexual tension but the conflating of superficial dylanology with artistic expiration. “Pat Garrett” as the context for a world rather than the escape from one. Over and over again the juxtapositions of life events, image and music (often performed by others in strange deviations) are all wrong but so right.

And then this artist had to see it all cinematically, to send it directly into our soul. I suppose this is a particularly broad leap because of the disconnected way this must have been made.

I celebrate this. You might wonder if it worked for someone, somewhere. It sure did for me.

Cate understands the whole enterprise, from the outside, all the way through every layer. What a soul!

Posted in 2008

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB