Renaldo and Clara (1978)

Bob Dylan on tour with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975; concert footage, documentary interviews and bizarre improvised character scenes.

Director:

Bob Dylan

Writers:

Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard

Stars:

Bob Dylan, Sara Dylan, Joan Baez

2 wins.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Bob Dylan	...	Renaldo
Sara Dylan	...	Clara
Joan Baez	...	Woman in White
Ronnie Hawkins	...	Bob Dylan
Jack Elliott	...	Longheno de Castro
Harry Dean Stanton	...	Lafkezio
Bob Neuwirth	...	The Masked Tortilla
Allen Ginsberg	...	The Father
Mel Howard	...	Ungatz
David Mansfield	...	The Son
Jack Baran	...	The Truck Driver
Helena Kallianiotes	...	Herself
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter	...	Himself
Anne Waldman	...	Sister of Mercy
T Bone Burnett	...	The Inner Voice (as T-Bone Burnett)

Storyline

This epic is a mass amalgamation of three separate film-types that is, contrary to popular opinion, coherent and a unified whole. Bob Dylan is shown in concert, often masked, during the Rolling Thunder Revue. The film also features documentary footage, including Ruben "Hurricane" Carter's struggle against the forces that have imprisoned him. The third element is fictional "role-playing" footage with Bob Dylan in the guise of guitar-strumming Renaldo and his wife Sara as his companion Clara. Ronnie Hawkins takes on the role of Bob Dylan in these sequences. The film includes footage of a visit to the grave of Jack Kerouac, an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading and various friends and acquaintances, namely David Blue (playing pinball by a swimming pool), discussing experiences on the road.

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Plot Keywords:

character names as title | three word title | plagiarism | written and directed by cast member | concert tour | 

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

25 January 1978 (USA)

Also Known As:

Renaldo e Clara

Filming Locations:

Alabama, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Lombard Street Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

292 min (original) 122 min (re-cut)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Did You Know?

Trivia

When the film was originally released, its screenings were extremely limited. The film received very many condemning reviews and many theaters refused the screenings. The film was cut from its original four-hour length to a two-hour length, and what was left was mostly concert footage. This version was shown in more theaters than the original director's cut. The original four-hour cut would appear on European television some time later, on Channel 4.

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Quotes

The Truck Driver: Why are you so much in a hurry? Is the law after you?
Renaldo: I am the law!

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Crazy Credits

The opening credits end with a title card reading "A Film by BOB DYLAN" directed after he is credited as writer and director. The closing credits are divided in three sections, separated by wide time gaps, played over a different artist, soul singer Hal Frazier, performing "In The Morning", a song written by Barry Gibb.

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Alternate Versions

Originally released at 292 minutes (yes, that's almost five hours!). After dismal box office returns, Dylan shortened the film to 122 minutes removing almost all of the narrative storyline and leaving mostly concert footage.

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Connections

References The Wizard of Oz (1939)

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Soundtracks

Muleskinner Blues
Written by Jimmie Rodgers and George Vaughn
Performed by Jack Elliott

User Reviews

Select Masks, Assemble Lives

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.