The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival

Murray Lerner – 2007 – USA

This is an unusual film, assembled from Dylan’s appearances at the famous Newport Folk Festivals in 1963, ’64 and ’65.  Though he seems to have been present to shoot many important events in 60s music, including 1970’s Isle of Wight festival, Murray Lerner never became a documentarian on the level of D.A. Pennebaker or the Mayslses brothers.  It was only many years later that he started to re-cut his wealth of footage into a series of concert films.  This one isn’t exactly “direct cinema” because it takes place over several occasions, but it does qualify in some ways due to the absence of narration and after-the-fact interviews.  What the film really drives home is how compressed time was in the 60s in terms of the popular culture.  From the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” phase to Woodstock was a mere five years, for example.  In the film of Dylan in ’63, he is very much still in his Woody Guthrie wandering troubadour persona, in which he was trying to be invisible as a personality and a mere vehicle for the songs.  By the next year, he is wisecracking and being driven in cars with a small entourage.  By 1965, of course, his jeans and work-shirts have been replaced with black leather and sunglasses.  The ’65 Newport festival was the setting for the legendary moment when Dylan played electric guitar with a rock band; the worst blasphemy for a folk audience.  Even after so much time, hearing him booed mercilessly by the crowd is startling to experience.  In many ways, this was the moment when the 60s really became “the 60s.”  Aside from letting the songs play out in their entirety, which is admirable, Lerner also spends time with spectators, who are increasingly conscious of media and celebrity culture, to the extent that one young man declares that Dylan is no longer needed, or welcome, because he is so famous.  After Dylan himself, highlights include appearances by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and poor Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary futilely trying to calm the crowd’s pleas for encores from Dylan.