Having just gone through a move, I haven't had the chance to write here much or watch or listen to much. The result is that I have been stewing over things long since digested, drawing parallels and such. The most persistent of these is "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' anti-biopic about Bob Dylan.

I wrote fairly recently about the film, lauding the way it captures the singer's protean nature. I've since gone back to watch Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home," the three-hour-plus documentary assemblage that seeks to present Dylan roughly from his arrival in New York until his motorcycle crash just a few years later. Having not seen "No Direction Home" very recently when I saw "I'm Not There," I didn't realize how many of Haynes' scenes are direct recreations of documentary footage used in Scorsese's film. This isn't exactly deep, but it's clear that Haynes film can be seen, from the title on down, as a direct refutation of the earlier film.

Sure, he portrays Dylan with a handful of disparate actors to drive the point home that no one trope can capture the artist. But by recreating scenes from Dylan's earliest days, he points up the theatricality of Dylan's performances during seemingly spontaneous events, and, in speaking for Dylan, says, "you may think you have me inside your little box constructed of film, quotes, photos and narrative, but I'm Not There." Not only is Haynes' deliberate as he points out that Dylan is too shape-shifting to accurately portray, but he also seems to comment directly on Scorsese's film by saying that no matter the source material, at best you are only highlighting a facet of your subject.

That makes Scorsese's film no less entertaining -- though his decision to stop long before some of the most fascinating aspects of Dylan's life and career (the accident and subsequent sabbatical, the Basement Tapes, his conversion, etc.) -- or illuminating for what it is, but it does call into question the notion that a film can adequately express a person's essence.

Taken together, the two films do as much to obscure as they do to illuminate.

Labels: Bob Dylan, movies, music