Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Movie Bob Dylan: Renaldo and Clara
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Pervert Titian’s functionalization.”
– something my software thought I said about Renaldo and Clara
In the movie The Princess Diaries and its sequel, Julie Andrews plays Clarisse Renaldi, only slightly modified from her name in the novel series on which the movies are based, Clarisse Renaldo. This is in reference to the film directed and written by Bob Dylan, or at least some form of the titular Renaldo.
I don’t know that that is true and neither do you.
Renaldo and Clara, originally released in 1978, exists in a form just over four hours long, a truncated concert movie form, as a variety of small vignettes, archived reels, bootleg VHS, private copies, and more private copies. It has never been commercially available since its original to theatrical releases in the 1970s.
Ronnie Hawkins plays Bob Dylan in Renaldo and Clara, and Renaldo and Clara can be anyone. Bob Dylan could and was Renaldo for awhile, or pretends to be.
Renaldo and Clara is supposedly, or intended to be, about birth and death coming from the same place (The Death Cunt), identity as a transferable and permeable mask, the mystique and engineered myth of Bob Dylan, our discomforting interest in his private and romantic life, the death penalty, life sentences, public opinion, colonization, genocide, flowers, bullshit, anecdotes, and pinball.
One thread through can be the need to hustle, whether a genuine or perceived need, and how need whether it is genuine or perceived, is always perceived and genuine.
One can follow flowers, colors of flowers the disability of flowers, symbolism of flowers.
You can watch the concert footage and just zone out on the rest, let it wash over you like cheapie soap opera and small man on the street news footage.
Bob Dylan is whoever you mistake him to be, and when Kristofferson or the character he plays in the movie is mistaken for Bob Dylan, he is as Dylan as he wants to be. The movie is about the performance life. Cold turkey lying down into performance. Goose pimple bones of plagiarism and docupoetics.
If you look at the 1978 reviews and suppositions of Renaldo and Clara, they’re mad at Bob Dylan. They may complain about the Rubin Carter scenes, about the poor acting by non-actors, they may complain about the scenes involving Native Americans – and they did – simply because there are Native Americans there, and they might get upset that Allen Ginsberg is playing father, that poets exist in a movie, but when you look, when you really look at what they say specifically, the direction that their criticisms move into, all those other complaints, all those other frustrations, all those other upsets or to carry us to a place they are already out which is fucking Bob Dylan.
Do things that really hold us up, as a collective broader audience, from really grappling with Renaldo and Clara, or that Dylan wants the movie so big, complex, complicated, the musing, that he made a movie big, amusing, and complicated , and that the movies out of circulation and has been for a very long time. The movie will be out of circulation for a very long time.
Because of its lack of availability, and it’s complicatedness (if not its complexity), Renaldo and Clara is largely – even more largely than with many other movies – in our heads, imagination, and the kind of memory which blurs together perceived events, memories of memories, things we read, stuff we heard about, and projections we bring to the cinema hypothetical. With such a long run time, even if we had the opportunity to screen the film over and over and over again, it would be difficult to retain every plot thread, background details, the interrelation of symbols, situations, scenarios, to keep everything orchestrated in a clear thought.
That is what they call a non-narrative film, which is always kind of ridiculous if you take the term literally or by other uses of the term outside of film, also is going to set wrong with many people. Martin Scorsese has made two movies about Bob Dylan , both of them nonnarrative, which also sit very wrong with some people. Those two movies are also fairly long, escaping the 90 minute to 2 hour sweet spot of the traditional feature film. Those two films, ostensibly documentaries, include lies, perversions, prevarications, and self reflective artistry. Non-narrative film can feel like an unscalable mountain, especially the moment we start to think of it as nonnarrative film.
If you take Renaldo and Clara as a sequence of experiences, you end up with some experiences that mean more to you, and some that mean less, but overall, a stream of experiences which are comprehensible in their individual parts. Consider Renaldo and Clara as a stream of consciousness, as a metaphoric rock, or an arc of metaphors, symbols present themselves, people do nude themselves, a world opens for our interpretation. As social realism, or a window into societies, we understand that there are show people, that there are show trails, that there is entertainment and there is livelihood and out for many of us, in any field of practice, being entertaining is inherently required for our livelihood.
The scenes of people on the literal street giving their opinions on the incarceration of Rubin Carter and the documentarian fly on the wall footage of children and pow-wow-goers deflate the parade of famous and niche-famous friends, but even the sketches or monologues by friends and colleagues illuminate that most motion pictures any of us see are collaborations of colleagues and friends. Even the documentary.
The concert movie cut, whittling down the long film to a short punchy digestible non-narrative movie, may be, as an act, the clearest statement to the call for hustle. Somebody does not want to look behind the curtain, they do not want to know there is a curtain, they want to forget anything but show.
We have to be entertaining to eat, to have somewhere to crash, to justify crashing in the first place.
It is a sexist, paranoid movie. It is a movie about sexism and paranoia. It is a movie by a fame-deluded egomaniac. A movie about fame-deluded egomaniacal society.
Sara Dylan, Bob Dylan, and the Lady in White, are playing out their lives onscreen, uncomfortably scripted and pretentiously played. Sara Dylan and Bob Dylan are played onscreen by A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nashville’s Ronee Blakley and Ronnie Hawkins of the Band, the Blackhawks, the Hawks, and Toronto’s own annual Ronnie Hawkins Day.
Things go inside through out, back before the forth.
Sometimes a movie is just about selling a horse. Some movies, you have no horse to sell.
Renaldo and Clara appears to be easily summed up, fairly specific in its intentions, maybe bewildering in its execution, but anytime we try to follow the thread Ian and back out of the labyrinth, we ran a chance of holding the wrong thread. If a thread can be wrong.
In Renaldo and Clara, Bob Dylan is not played by Bob Dylan, Renaldo is played by multiple actors, Renaldo and Clara both are not people but italics people I closeout Alex,. Renaldo, like Bob Dylan, is a face or an expectation which can be cleaned, I kind of unofficial, yet named role.
One thread through can be the need to hustle, whether a genuine or perceived need, and how need whether it is genuine or perceived, is always perceived and genuine.
One can follow flowers, colors of flowers the disability of flowers, symbolism of flowers.
You can watch the concert footage and just zone out on the rest, let it wash over you like cheapie soap opera and small man on the street news footage.
How much of life, and how much of your time in front of a television set, a cell phone, tablet or theater screen in your home, is cheapie soap opera and man on the street news?
It opened at the Quad on 8th Street in NYC. I sat through the 4+ hour version 6 times in 4 days. Each time I thought it was about something else. It is a film about identity, how Mr D saw himself, how others saw him and his relationship with those around him. We will never know its “meaning” and after all that is what great art is, it is the empty spaces between the lines where we insert our meaning.
It obviously had a deep meaning to Mr D. as he committed a fortune to make it and was totally disillusioned when it was criticized, so much so that he pulled it and prevented its re-release. Eventually, a scaled-back 2-hour version which is basically a concert document was released to recoup his money. The 4-hour version still floats around in the bootleg never world.
No doubt it is some of the best concert footage ever capturing a time when Dylan was at a creative peak. Allen Ginsberg thought much of the original version and wrote a dissertation that also still floats around.