Film & History Contact Us No Direction Home No Direction Home (Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2005) No Direction Home traces the meteoric rise of Bob Dylan to the unsought status of American prophet and the fall from grace that resulted in his withdrawal from public performance in 1966 for nearly a decade. Through more than three hours of interviews with Dylan and his contemporaries and footage of his early performances, placed into context by historical clips of significant events, Scorsese attempts to answer the questions that continue to intrigue many Americans. Scorsese begins by giving us a glimpse into 1950s life in Hibbing, Minnesota, an iron mining and steel making town teetering on the precipice of one of America’s largest open cut pits. It was almost inevitable that the adolescent Robert Zimmerman, and a good number of his contemporaries left Hibbing, many of them joining the swell of students entering America’s colleges and universities. Dylan was drawn to the rebels, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Scorsese’s documentary includes a clip of Brando in the 1953 movie The Wild Ones.

Dylan says, “James Dean, Marlon Brando and The Wild Ones didn’t just spring up from nowhere…Time and progress obliterated the past as it was when I was growing up.” Dylan finished high school and came to college in Minneapolis as ‘a musical expeditionary’. It was in the bohemian coffee shops of Dinkytown that Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. While he did not attend formal classes, the teenager undertook a self-directed crash-course in musical history and technique. Dylan heard a record by Oklahoma dust bowl singer Woody Guthrie. “He was a radical,” Dylan recalls. “You could listen to his music and learn how to live.” Dylan learned Guthrie’s repertoire and, in 1961, set out for New York, where Guthrie was living in ‘some kind of hospital’, to visit him. Scorsese’s portrayal of New York in 1961 has a voice-over of President John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech. “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” the nation’s first Catholic president says. Scorsese introduces us to the Beat scene in Greenwich Village through original footage and conversations with musicians including Liam Clancy and Dave Van Ronk.

Mike Marqusee says the folk music revival had been shaped by the desire of early leftists to “Americanize” their ‘seemingly alien’ Marxist movement. The revival was halted by the Cold War paranoia of the McCarthy era, with Pete Seeger and The Weavers blacklisted, leftist leader Alan Lomax exiled in Europe, and Woody Guthrie crippled with Huntington’s chorea. By the late 1950s, the remaining faithful were eking out a living in Greenwich Village. Izzy Young, who opened the Folklore Center in Macdougal Street in 1957, says in No Direction Home that he and other men of the left recognized that the young Dylan would be the one to carry on the tradition established by Guthrie and Seeger. Dylan certainly seemed to be a ‘fellow traveler’, spending hours in the Folklore Center listening to records and reading songbooks. With the rock ‘n’ roll he’d immersed himself in during his teenage years and his apprenticeship performing in the coffee houses, Dylan’s musical education prepared him well for the next phase, as a songwriter.

He says: “I kinda went through Woody Guthrie…but I didn’t want to go through him as though it was just negligible…I didn’t consider myself a songwriter at all but I knew I had to write it and sing it.” As a farewell gesture, Dylan wrote his first song, Song to Woody. A performance at Gerde’s Folk City attracted media attention and he was offered a recording contract by John Hammond at Columbia. Scorsese contextualizes the political atmosphere of the era, introducing Suze Rotolo, the girl photographed arm in arm with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, who was working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1961, CORE had sent a group of ‘freedom riders’ on buses into the South to test a federal court civil rights ruling banning segregation on buses and trains. “They were traumatic times,” Rotolo, who was living with Dylan, recalls.

“Every day we were hearing about someone…being beaten to a pulp and I thought, this is insane, and Bob thought that too.” Rotolo booked Dylan for a CORE benefit concert in February 1962, for which he wrote his first protest song, The Death of Emmett Till, on the brutal 1956 murder of 14-year-old Till in Mississippi. It was the beginning of a creative outpouring for Dylan, with the next two years yielding more than 200 original songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’. Beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg describes the first time he heard a Dylan song: “I heard A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, I think, and wept because it seemed to me that the torch had been passed to another generation from earlier Beat illumination and self-empowerment.” It is fitting that Scorsese now includes a segment of a radio interview recorded with Studs Terkel for Chicago station WFMT in May 1963, just after the Cuban missile crisis. Terkel says to Dylan of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, “I think it will be a classic.

Even though it may have come out of your feelings about atomic rain…” and Dylan responds, “No, no, …It’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain.” This early interview symbolizes Dylan’s long-running dance with the media, who were culpable in both building the myth of Dylan the prophet and in tearing it down again. Scorsese shows a clip of television talk show host Steve Allen introducing the young Dylan as ‘a genius, a singing conscience and moral referee, as well as a preacher.’ With these sorts of expectations, it was hardly surprising that Dylan backed away from the mantle thrust upon him and repudiated any suggestion that he was politically motivated. Although No Direction Home sets the context for Dylan’s ascendancy and places his early songs in their rightful place in the lexicon of American music, even Scorsese, one of America’s most perceptive filmmakers, is unable to offer any clear insight into his early motivation. The lengthy interview with Dylan, skillfully interspersed with the memories of those who accompanied him on his remarkable journey and footage illustrating contemporary events, is yet another example of interviews in the 40-year history of Dylan in which he downplays any political ideology behind his music.

Political issues in the early 1960s seemed polemic to many Americans, as Joan Baez describes in No Direction Home: “Things were cut and dried then. You were either for the war or against it, hated niggers or supported King, you were forced to take a side.” Dylan’s denial of political conviction is reinforced in No Direction Home. Speaking of Pete Seeger, he says “I didn’t realize he was a communist, I didn’t even know what a communist was.” Van Ronk remembers that “Bobby wasn’t really a political person.” He wasn’t a member of any political organization and only played a small direct role in any protest movement, but Dylan’s songs gave voice to the discontent sweeping America’s youth in the 1960s. He performed Only a Pawn in Their Game in a cotton field outside Greenwood, Mississippi, in July, 1963, at the height of the SNCC’s (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) voter registration drive He then joined Seeger and the Freedom Singers in a rendition of Blowin’ in the Wind. Later that year, he reprised this performance at the Newport Festival and the March on Washington.

Dylan says in No Direction Home that “to be on the side of people who are struggling for something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being political”, but he definitely took a side in the era’s most effective movement for social change. His ability to articulate the complex emotions of the emerging counter-culture and its causes roused such passion in Dylan’s audiences and caused them so much anguish when his lyrics turned away from protest. Van Ronk talks about Dylan tapping into the ‘collective unconscious’ of America, although Dylan himself is more pragmatic when he says: “I’d taken all the elements I’d ever known to make broad sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was a general essence of the spirit of the times.” Dylan represented a conjunction of conditions impossible before that point in history – Cold War hysteria, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, Hollywood’s portrayal of disaffected youth, and the knowledge that he accumulated from the American folk music tradition, literature, theatre and poetry, and from the alternative energy of the Greenwich Village activists and artists he fell in with when he came to New York. He steadfastly refuses right up to the present, however, to be cast as the voice or the conscience of his generation.

He would prefer to be celebrated as a creative artist who mastered his craft. Scorsese’s immensely enjoyable documentary not only raises all these historical influences on Dylan, but does so in a way that helps a modern audience to understand and sympathize with one of the twentieth century’s most influential musicians. Kim Britton, The University of Newcastle (Australia) No Direction Home (Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2005) As a documentarian of the counter-culture Martin Scorsese’s credentials are impeccable. He is vocal in his abiding experiential connection to those of his generation, of whom Bob Dylan, the subject of his epic documentary No Direction Home, is certainly a contemporary. He also completed his documentary apprenticeship as an editor of the landmark musical mission statement of a generation which was Woodstock. His producing and directing work on The Blues might be effectively be judged a beautiful and thorough grounding of his discourse on the subject of rock-and-roll, cataloguing the soul of the music which, once turned electric, energized and enervated a generation.

In addition to this nostalgic grounding, his work as a future-forward pioneer of images on MTV, specifically the landmark dance-realism blend he pioneered for Michael Jackson 13 minute music short for Bad express his persisting interest in the hopeful further fruition, and even to the point of over-ripeness, of the sound of soul, folk and the blues. Like his interpretation of Howard Hughes in his 2004 film The Aviator, Scorsese is irresistibly flashing forward, seeking out the science fiction of a medium, while simultaneously revisiting the glamour of an era’s ethos, an achievement which may equally be attributed to that film. So too, as his immediate follow-on from that biopic, is his documentary biopic of Dylan an attempt to capture his subject’s prescience which simultaneously grounding him solidly in his own recollections of an era, and those of his contemporaries. As such Scorsese is clearly reconnecting with the very roots of his induction into the world of the visual arts. The thoroughness and well-rounded perspectives he brought to The Blues are echoed in his inclusion of varied talking heads in No Direction Home.

Joan Baez makes what might be judged a perfunctory appearance as Dylan’s muse, yet the clear scope of recollections gained from Beat maestro Allen Ginsberg are bracing, particularly given that he in fact passed on before the millennium. In particular his emotional admission of the moment in which he realized he and his Beat compatriots had been supplanted, by the folkie Dylan, as unofficial poet laureate is a scene of genuine cultural profundity. Scorsese acknowledges the business of self-promotion behind any success, not only through Dylan’s own admissions, but also the observations of various managers, promoters and doyens of the folk scene. Dylan himself, in interviews specifically recorded for the film, is candid, lucid, yet certainly more wary than the caricature of youthful brilliance he presented to D.A. Pennebaker in Look Back in Anger. Indeed, while Scorsese maintains a tight, understated connection to the nuances of time, achievement, and a fading sense of mission in the older Dylan, at times he appears to waver in his depictions of the wild young man.

Humor is readily apparent in every dry one-liner he cracks out of the voluminous footage of 1960s Dylan. Yet referentially Scorsese seems over-dependent on the found footage. Other critics have noted how much of Pennebaker’s film is used in the film’s second half. I would tend to agree. If the footage is meant to capture the varied moods of the young man surely Scorsese, a director so celebrated for his editorial collaborations, could have chosen a few more choice moments from the film, whose ethos seems so at odds with that of the autumnal Don’t Look Back. Another scene, at the beginning of the film’s second half, is not in fact from the Pennebaker film, yet this too follows the young Dylan as he riffs interminably in wordplay. Scorsese’s fascination seems akin to that he has for the celebrated improvisations of Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro in his own original works, yet Dylan’s gifts are so choicely expressed throughout, so aptly catalogued that the sequence, like those of Don’t Look Back distract from the film’s focus. Surely the more measured, economical Dylan of today would disapprove of such preening.

No Direction Home catalogues Dylan’s career from its early rumblings to his fateful decision to go electric. True to his training, Scorsese inventively cuts from chronologically order recollections on the part of Dylan and his peers to early electric performances and his audience’s first responses. Here again Scorsese might be accused of overstatement. The sight of one earnest fan after another trashing the new Dylan stands in stark contrast to the variations of blues commentary one might find in the titular series, or the singular, powerful mission statement found in an interview with an ordinary young couple in Woodstock. In embracing the scope of the epic documentary Scorsese has announced his presents with the loudness Pauline Kael noted in his direction of Raging Bull. Rather than allowing a story to be told, he could not resist the urge to illustrate to the audience his presence as the director, the assembler of the narrative. As such his re-visitation of an era is redolent of Scorsese improvisational moments, and the directorial fondness he is noted for in his overt referentiality, and dependence on reverent homage.

Lindsay Coleman University of Melbourne lindsaycoleman562@hotmail.com Last updated: June 20, 2016 "American Masters" No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (TV Episode 2005) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error No Direction Home: Bob Dylan 5h 59min A chronicle of Bob Dylan's strange evolution between 1961 and 1966 from folk singer to protest singer to "voice of a generation" to rock star.

Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC Visit our Awards Central section Related News a list of 28 titles created 16 May 2012 a list of 33 titles created 31 May 2012 a list of 26 titles created 02 Sep 2013 a list of 25 titles created 08 Mar 2015 a list of 29 titles created 2 months ago Title: No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (27 Sep 2005) 8.6/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 1 Primetime Emmy. Another 6 wins & 7 nominations. See more awards » Videos Edit Storyline He is one of the most influential, inspiration and ground-breaking musicians of our time.

Now, Academy Awardâ"¢ winning director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, 1990) brings us the extraordinary story of Bob DylanâEUR(TM)s journey from his roots in Minnesota, to his early days in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, to his tumultuous ascent to pop stardom in 1966. 27 September 2005 (USA) See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia The black cylindrical case that Allen Ginsberg was resting his hand upon during his interview was a Manfrotto camera tripod case the crew brought along with them for the interview. See more » Goofs Footage of the San Francisco Bay Bridge is included among footage of New York City illustrating Bob Dylan's arrival there. See more » Quotes Bob Johnston : I believe in giving credit where credit's due. I don't think Dylan had a lot to do with it. I think God instead of touching him on the shoulder he kicked him in the ass. Really. And that's where all that came from. He can't help what he's doing. I mean he's got the Holy Spirit about him. You can look at him and tell that.

I Walk The Line Written by Johnny Cash (as John R. Cash) Bug Music Inc. on behalf of House of Cash, Inc. and Unichappell Music on behalf of Hi-Lo Music, Inc. He's Younger Than That Now 20 September 2005 | by hand2handyman (United States) – See all my reviews Well, it took a director as great as Martin Scorsese and 45 years of recording, travelling, ramblin' and bein' busy bein' born instead of dyin', but at long last Dylan fans from Dharma to Duluth have a glimpse behind the genius in the dark sunglasses. A remarkable film--for so many reasons that it would take at least 3 1/2 hours (the length of the movie) to list them--but the main reasons anyone with an interest in His Bobness needs to view this film are as follows: 1) Scorsese's direction: Almost 30 years after he chronicled the passing of a musical era with his magnificent film The Last Waltz, Scorsese once again captures musical brilliance and history on film as only someone who truly appreciates Dylan's historical as well as cultural influence could.

A Master Director chronicles a Master Musician. 2) Archival footage of everyone you never saw before on film, including Gene Vincent, Hank Williams, and early 60's Greenwich Village pioneers aplenty and of course.. 3) Bob. For reasons known only to himself, Dylan actually speaks on record about his least favorite topic, himself. Along with last year's autobiography, this film reveals far more of the portrait of the artist as a young man than could ever have been anticipated given Bob's notorious closed-mouthed history on his own history. With Elvis, Ray Charles and John Lennon gone, there are few--if ANY--artists whose historical and musical importance even come near that of Bob Dylan. In No Direction Home, we see as much, if not more, than we are entitled to see about how and why young Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, MN became the most important songwriter of the 20th century. He's got everything he needs--he's an artist--but just this once, he DOES look back. 75 of 88 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Super Reviewer ½ Probably the best music documentary I've seen.

This masterpiece focuses as much on the roots of Dylan as Dylan himself. Graham Jones Super Reviewer Great for what it covers, especially the actual Dylan interviews Scorsese carries on with him "now." There's nothing better than hearing Dylan talk about Dylan. Now if only Scorsese could do a documentary that brings us up to the present. Lanning : ) Super Reviewer ½ A compelling and essential documentary about arguably the greatest American singer/songwriter of all time. Directed by the comparably great Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home is essential viewing for both die hard and passive Dylan fans (and really, who isn't in some way a Bob Dylan fan?), as it details his career from its start until the late 60s; the most important part of his development as an artist, and the most interesting. I can most easily compare this film with Bukowski: Born Into This, which is an essential, brilliant doc about Charles Bukowski told largely from the perspective of the man himself. Here one particular Dylan interview is cut throughout the film and adds to and comments on the other perspectives at work.

And also, like Born Into This used Buk's poetry to no small effect, No Direction Home is riddled with awesome footage of live performances and song recordings, many of which are studio takes which probably can't be heard anywhere else. I really can't recommend this enough. Its a brilliant, sprawling documentary about the most important American musician of all time, made by one of the most important American filmmakers of our time - now that should be plenty of incentive! Christopher Mercer Project MUSE - No Direction Home (review) No Direction Home Lindsay Coleman No Direction Home (2005) Directed by Martin Scorsese American Masters, Distributed by Thirteen/WNET ( ) 208 min. As a documentarian of the counter-culture, Martin Scorsese has impeccable credentials. He is vocal in his abiding experiential connection to those of his generation, of whom Bob Dylan, the subject of his epic documentary No Direction Home, is certainly a contemporary. Characteristic to much of his directorial work, Scorsese is irresistibly flashing forward, seeking out the science fiction of a medium, while simultaneously maintaining grounding in an era's ethos.

His documentary biopic of Dylan is an attempt to capture his subject's prescience, while simultaneously grounding him solidly in the recollections of an era. No stranger to documenting the world of music, Scorsese edited the landmark musical mission statement of a generation which was Woodstock (1970), as well as producing and directing The Blues (2003). The thoroughness and well-rounded perspectives he brought to The Blues are echoed in his inclusion of varied talking heads in No Direction Home. Joan Baez makes what might be judged a perfunctory appearance as Dylan's muse, yet the clear scope of recollections gained from Beat maestro Allen Ginsberg are bracing, particularly given that he in fact passed on before the millennium. In particular, his emotional recollection of the moment in which he realized he had been supplanted as unofficial poet laureate by the "folkie" Dylan is a scene of genuine cultural profundity. Scorsese acknowledges the business of self-promotion behind any success, not only through Dylan's own admissions, but also the observations of various managers, promoters and doyens of the folk scene.

Dylan himself, in interviews specifically recorded for the film, is candid, lucid, yet certainly more wary than the caricature of youthful brilliance he presented to D.A. Pennebaker in Don't Look Back (1967). [End Page 91] Indeed, while Scorsese maintains a tight, understated connection to the nuances of time, achievement, and a fading sense of mission in the older Dylan, at times he appears to waver in his depictions of the wild young man. Humor is readily apparent in every dry one-liner he cracks out of the voluminous footage of 1960s Dylan. Yet referentially, Scorsese seems over-dependent on the found footage. Other critics have noted how much of Pennebaker's film is used in the film's second half. I would tend to agree. If the footage is meant to capture the varied moods of the young man, surely Scorsese, a director so celebrated for his editorial collaborations, could have chosen a few more choice moments from the film, whose ethos seems so at odds with that of the autumnal No Direction Home.

No Direction Home catalogues Dylan's career from its early rumblings to his fateful decision to go electric. True to his training, Scorsese inventively cuts from chronologically ordered recollections on the part of Dylan and his peers to early electric performances and his audience's first responses. Here again Scorsese might be accused of overstatement. The sight of one earnest fan after another trashing the new Dylan stands in stark contrast to the variations of blues commentary one might find in the titular series, or the singular, powerful mission statement found in an interview with an ordinary young couple in Woodstock. In embracing the scope of the epic documentary, Scorsese has announced his presence with the loudness Pauline Kael noted in his direction of Raging Bull (1980). Rather than allowing a story to be told, he could not resist the urge to illustrate to the audience his presence as the director, the assembler of the narrative. As such his re-visitation of an era is redolent of Scorsese's improvisational moments, and the directorial fondness he is noted for in his overt referentiality, and dependence on reverent homage.

Lindsay Coleman Amazon.com: Bob Dylan - No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese: Movies & TV Bob Dylan - No Direction Home — Sling Television: 7 days FREE Watch Live TV Programming Any Time and Anywhere. Simple monthly pricing, no long-term contracts or hidden fees. Watch now See all buying options Bob Dylan - No Direction Home $36.50 & FREE Shipping on orders over $49. Details Only 12 left in stock. Sold by CtC Media Lounge and Fulfilled by Amazon . Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and . If you're a seller, Fulfillment by Amazon can help you increase your sales. We invite you to learn more about Fulfillment by Amazon . Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Show details Buy the selected items together This item:Bob Dylan - No Direction Home by Bob Dylan DVD $36.50 Only 12 left in stock. Sold by CtC Media Lounge and ships from Amazon Fulfillment. FREE Shipping on orders over $49. Details I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) by Christian Bale DVD $7.07 In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. FREE Shipping on orders over $49. Details Special Offers and Product Promotions Save Big On Open-Box & Pre-owned: Buy "Bob Dylan - No Direction Homeâ from Amazon Warehouse Deals and save 60% off the $14.98 list price. Product is eligible for Amazon's 30-day returns policy and Prime or FREE Shipping. See all Open-Box & Pre-owned offers from Amazon Warehouse Deals. Editorial Reviews Product Description The two-part film includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylans during that time. For the first time on camera, Dylan talks openly and extensively about this critical period in his career.

Amazon.com It's virtually impossible to approach No Direction Home without a cluster of fixed ideas. Who doesn't have their own private Dylan? The true excellence of Martin Scorsese's achievement lies in how his documentary shakes us free of our comfortable assumptions. In the process, it plays out on several levels at once, each taking shape as an unfailingly fascinating narrative. There is, of course, the central story of an individual genius staking out his artistic identity. But along with this Bildungsroman come other threads and contexts: most notably, the role of popular culture in postwar America, art's self-reliance versus its social responsibilities, and fans' complicity with the publicity machine in sustaining myths. All of these threads reinforce each other, together weaving the film's intricate texture. Scorsese's 200-plus-minute focus on Dylan's earliest years allows for a portrayal of unprecedented depth, with multiple angles: a rich composite photo is the result. The main narrative has an epic quality: it moves from Dylan growing up in cold-war Minnesota through Greenwich Village coffeehouses and the Newport Folk Festival, climaxing in the controversial 1966 U.K. tour that crowned a period of unbridled and explosive creativity.

In his transition from Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, we observe him concocting his impossible-to-describe, unique combination of the topical with the archaic, like an ancient oracle. Scorsese was able to access previously unseen footage from the Dylan archives, including performances, press conferences, and recording sessions. He also uses interviews with Dylan's friends, ex-friends, and fellow artists, and, intriguingly, with the notoriously reclusive Dylan himself (who looks back to provide glosses on the early years), fusing what could have turned into a tiresome series of digressions and tangents into a powerful whole as enlightening, eccentric, contradictory, and ultimately irreducible as its subject. Some of the deeply personal bits remain unrevealed, but Dylan's preternatural self-assurance acquires a slightly self-deprecating, even comic edge via some of his reflective comments. Alongside the arrogance, we see touching moments of the young artist's reverence for Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. Joan Baez, in a poignant confessional mood, comes off well, and the late Allen Ginsberg is so seraphically charming he almost steals the show a few times.

A crucial throughline is Dylan's hunger for recognition and ability to shape perceptions so that would be singled out as not just another dime-a-dozen folk singer. It's illuminating--particularly for those familiar with the artist's latter-day aloofness on stage--to see his reactions to audience booing in the wake of his "betrayal" in this fuller context. No Direction Home also makes clear--in a way that wasn't possible in D.A. Pennebaker's iconic Don't Look Back --how Dylan's ability to manipulate his persona always, at its core, protects the urge for expression: Dylan's ultimate mandate, as an artist, is never to be pinned down. As Scorsese masterfully shows, the myth around Dylan only grows bigger the more we discover about him. --Thomas May DVD features: This two-disc set of Scorsese's full two-part documentary includes treats such as Dylan working on a song at his hotel during the UK tour as well as performing several songs as in concert or on TV.

More for the Dylanologist Girl of the North Country Man of Constant Sorrow Unused promotion spot for "Positively 4th Street" "I Can't Leave Her Behind" - Work in progress in hotel room Product Details Amazon.com: No Direction Home: Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan, Paul Nelson, Martin Scorsese, Susan Lacy By David on September 13, 2005 Format: DVD Found this at The Rogovoy Report (He is a cultural critic for WAMC Northeast Public Radio) I've seen the complete No Direction Home Martin Scorsese documentary, upcoming on American Masters on PBS in a couple of weeks (9/26-27), and it's really great. I didn't realize that it includes extensive new interview footage with Bob Dylan himself, appearing in his most straightforward, seemingly normal role EVER -- even more than on the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley -- normal enough almost to take him at his word on his extensive comments on particular songs, his background, incidents in his career, etc.

The film includes terrific interviews with dozens of key figures from Dylan's life and career, including Izzy Young, Harold Leventhal, Joan Baez, Paul Nelson, Bob Neuwirth, Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Pete Seeger, Mark Spoelstra, Suze Rotolo , and fortunately, Allen Ginsberg and Dave Van Ronk when both of them were still around. The film also includes a tremendous amount of vintage film clips, concert footage, and still photography, a lot of which I've never seen before -- and I think I have had access to most if not all of the unofficial stuff circulating from that era. It even includes footage from postwar Hibbing, as well as early recordings (some of which of course are reflected in the companion CD "soundtrack"). It includes a lot of Newport Folk festivals and "Eat the Document" era concert and incidental footage in the best quality I've ever seen or heard any of it, and a lot that I don't think was included in the original ETD. The home DVD version also includes extensive full-song versions of concert songs that will not be screened on TV.

More important than all these parts, the sum total is a fascinating "interpretation" of how Robert Allen Zimmerman became Bob Dylan up through and including summer 1966, weaved subtly by master filmmaker Scorsese simply through vintage clips, interviews, and really smart editing. The way Scorsese handles the combination of interviews and songs reminds me of The Last Waltz, but he does an even better, more subtle (and more complex) job here. I think it's as valuable a document that has ever been made about Bob Dylan -- as valuable as any book or biography, including Chronicles itself. Now, if only Scorsese spent equal time and effort on 1966-2006, but I imagine that's not likely to happen..... I've gotten some feedback already that Scorsese didn't originate this project and had nothing to do with the original footage, but of course that doesn't matter -- the point is he and/or his team organized it in a way that makes it a coherent narrative, and one with a particular point of view that has the imprimatur of Bob Dylan himself. For those who take issue with that, I suggest, as Dylan himself said all those years ago, eat the document.

By Flipper Campbell VINE VOICE on September 21, 2005 Format: DVD When you get to the end, you want to start all over again. That's the No. 1 reason to own the DVD version of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home." Coming from a project so awash in audio and video treasures, it seems odd that the only meaningful extras are complete versions of Dylan numbers trimmed in the documentary. That said, there are some great performances in the extras -- for example, the 8-minute version of "Like a Rolling Stone" with the band that became the Band. The DVD's Dolby Digital 5.1 audio achieves reference quality. Images are TV-friendly full screen, with pleasing grays and medium contrasts. The video texture is amazingly consistent given the Babylon of sources. The film's subtitle should be something like "Bob Dylan, 1960-65." Dylan acts as his own witness throughout -- at ease, clear, sometimes funny and seemingly pleased to take control of his legend. "I don't feel like I had a past," Dylan says, but the assembled evidence proves otherwise.

Part 1 unspools much like a video companion to Dylan's vastly entertaining biography "Chronicles, Volume One," which covers his years on the Greenwich Village folk scene, the epicenter of American hip in the early 1960s. "No Direction Home" becomes A Film By Martin Scorsese in its dark concluding act. Like "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas," it captures the paranoia and disintegration as the central character's life implodes. The artist faced a far-flung confederacy of dunces, Scorsese shows us, over and over: moronic reporters, abusive audiences, uncomprehending music lovers, petulant folkies, teenagers who shrieked, fawned and grabbed. No one seems to have any sense except for Dylan and his in-crowd. Dylan's songs play non-stop in that gorgeous DD audio, but there is little discussion, surprisingly, of the groundbreaking music he produced in the mid-'60s -- no recognition of the vast Baby Boom audience that heard the genius in his explorations and embraced them. No one testifies to the deep and immediate influence of "Highway 61 Revisited" on rock innovators up to and including John Lennon.

Still, it's easy and satisfying to buy into Scorsese's view of Dylan as underdog. The slant and subjectivity give "No Direction Home" much of its drama and depth, especially in the final hour. Bottom line: No one has made a better rock documentary. By J. Morrison on September 9, 2005 Format: DVD I was very frustrated by the lack of credible reviews, so I hunted down a review from the UK Observer newspaper: "Bob Dylan is a private man who is notoriously camera shy. The TV interview he gave around the publication of his autobiography, Chronicles, last year was his first in two decades, so there was some surprise when Martin Scorsese announced he was making the definitive TV biopic with the man's full co-operation. It seems that in his sixties, Dylan - who has spent so much of his career laying false trails and telling downright lies about himself - has decided it's time to set the record straight and get his version of his life and times on the record, both in print and on film.

And Scorsese, who directed The Last Waltz, the 1977 film about Dylan's former backing group, the Band, was the obvious man to do it. Almost four hours long, No Direction Home deals only with the early part of Dylan's career, ending in 1966 and the tumultuous world tour on which he was booed by folk purists unable to accept his new-found rock'n'roll ways. It airs on BBC2 next month and is a riveting piece of film-making that draws on wonderful contemporary footage, much of it previously unseen, as well as revelatory new interviews. Scorsese and his team also turned up a treasure trove of unreleased music, which constitutes the latest volume in the 'official bootleg series' Dylan launched in 1991 to combat the pirates who have conferred on him the dubious honour of being the most bootlegged artist in history." Bob Dylan vs. The Press - No Direction Home: Bob Dylan - YouTube Bob Dylan vs. The Press - No Direction Home: Bob Dylan Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content.

Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Dec 3, 2013 More from Spitfire - Renowned director Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan chronicles the career of the singer and songwriter during the tumultuous years between 1961 and 1966. Dylan allowed Scorsese to have access to hours of footage that had never before been made public, including a number of live performances, and footage of Dylan in the recording studio. Director: Martin Scorsese No Direction Home: Bob Dylan Movie Review (2005) | Roger Ebert Tweet Then in 1968, I saw " Don't Look Back " (1967), D.A. Pennebaker's documentary about Dylan's 1965 tour of Great Britain.

In my review, I called the movie "a fascinating exercise in self-revelation," and added: "The portrait that emerges is not a pretty one." Dylan is seen not as a "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies," I wrote, but is "immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright." Advertisement I felt betrayed. In "Don't Look Back," he mercilessly puts down a student journalist, and is rude to journalists, hotel managers, fans. Although Joan Baez was the first to call him on her stage when he was unknown, after she joins the tour, he does not ask her to sing with him. Eventually she bails out and goes home. The film fixed my ideas about Dylan for years. Now Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," a 225-minute documentary that will play in two parts Sept. 26-27 on PBS (and comes out today on DVD), creates a portrait that is deep, sympathetic, perceptive and yet finally leaves Dylan shrouded in mystery, which is where he properly lives.

The movie uses revealing interviews made recently by Dylan, but its subject matter is essentially the years between 1960, when he first came into view, and 1966, when after the British tour and a motorcycle accident, he didn't tour for eight years. He was born in 1941, and the career that made him an icon essentially happened between his 20th and 25th years. He was a young man from a Minnesota town who had the mantle of a generation placed, against his will, upon his shoulders. He wasn't at Woodstock; Arlo Guthrie was. Advertisement Early footage of his childhood is typical of many Midwestern childhoods: the town of Hibbing, Minn., the homecoming parade, bands playing at dances, the kid listening to the radio and records. The early sounds he loved ran all the way from Hank Williams and Webb Pierce to Muddy Waters , the Carter Family and even Bobby Vee, a rock star so minor that young Robert Zimmerman for a time claimed to be Bobby Vee.

He hitched a ride to New York (or maybe he didn't hitch; his early biography is filled with romantic claims, such as that he grew up in Gallup, N.M.). In Greenwich Village, he found the folk scene, and it found him. He sang songs by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others, and then was writing his own. He caught the eye of Baez, and she mentored and promoted him. Within a year he was ... Dylan. The movie has a wealth of interviews with people who knew him at the time: Baez, Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, Liam Clancy, Dave Von Ronk, Maria Muldaur, Peter Yarrow and promoters like Harold Leventhal . There is significantly no mention of Ramblin' Jack Elliott . The documentary " The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack " (2000) claims it was Elliott who introduced Dylan to Woody Guthrie, and suggested that he use a harmonica holder around his neck, and essentially defined his stage persona; "There wouldn't be no Bob Dylan without Ramblin' Jack," says Arlo Guthrie, who is also not in the Scorsese film.

Advertisement Dylan's new friends in music all admired the art but were ambivalent about the artist. Van Ronk smiles now about the way Dylan "borrowed" his "House of the Rising Sun." The Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac's On the Road, influenced Dylan, and there are many observations by the beat poet Allen Ginsberg , who says he came back from India, heard a Dylan album and wept, because he knew the torch had been passed to a new generation. It is Ginsberg who says the single most perceptive thing in the film: For him, Dylan stood atop a column of air. His songs and his ideas rose up from within him and emerged uncluttered and pure, as if his mind, soul, body and talent were all one. Dylan was embraced by the left-wing musical community of the day. His "Blowin' in the Wind" became an anthem of the civil rights movement. His "Only a Pawn in the Game" saw the killer of Medgar Evers as an insignificant cog in the machine of racism. Baez, Seeger, the Staple Singers, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary all sang his songs and considered him a fellow warrior.

Advertisement But Dylan would not be pushed or enlisted, and the crucial passages in this film show him drawing away from any attempt to define him. At the moment when he was being called the voice of his generation, he drew away from "movement" songs. A song like "Mr. Tambourine Man" was a slap in the face to his admirers, because it moved outside ideology. Baez, interviewed before a fireplace in the kitchen of her home, still with the same beautiful face and voice, is the one who felt most betrayed: Dylan broke her heart. His change is charted through the Newport Folk Festival: early triumph, the summit in 1964 when Johnny Cash gave him his guitar, the beginning of the end with the electric set in 1965. He was backed by Michael Bloomfield and the Butterfield Blues Band in a folk-rock-blues hybrid that his fans hated. When he took the new sound on tour the Hawks (later the Band), audiences wanted the "protest songs," and shouted "Judas!" and "What happened to Woody Guthrie?" when he came onstage.

Night after night, he opened with an acoustic set that was applauded, and then came back with the band and was booed. "Dylan made it pretty clear he didn't want to do all that other stuff," Baez says, talking of political songs, "but I did." It was the beginning of the Vietnam era, and Dylan had withdrawn. When he didn't ask Baez onstage to sing with him on the British tour, she says quietly, "It hurt." Advertisement But what was happening inside Dylan? Was he the jerk portrayed in "Don't Look Back"? Scorsese looks more deeply. He shows countless news conferences where Dylan is assigned leadership of his generation and assaulted with inane questions about his role, message and philosophy. A photographer asks him, "Suck your glasses" for a picture. He is asked how many protest singers he thinks there are: "There are 136." At the 1965 Newport festival, Pete Seeger recalls, "The band was so loud, you couldn't understand one word. I kept shouting, 'Get that distortion out! If I had an ax, I'd chop the mike cable right now!' " For Seeger, it was always about the words and the message.

For Dylan, it was about the words and then it became about the words and the music, and it was never particularly about the message. Were drugs involved in these years? The movie makes not the slightest mention of them, except obliquely in a scene where Dylan and Johnny Cash do a private duet of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and it's clear they're both stoned. There is sad footage near the end of the British tour, when Dylan says he is so exhausted: "I shouldn't be singing tonight." Advertisement The archival footage comes from many sources, including documentaries by Pennebaker and Murray Lerner (" Festival "). Many of the interviews were conducted by Michael Borofsky, and Jeff Rosen was a key contributor. But Scorsese provides the master vision, and his factual footage unfolds with the narrative power of fiction. What it comes down to, I think, is that Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minn., who mentions his father only because he bought the house where Bobby found a guitar, and mentions no other member of his family at all, who felt he was from nowhere, became the focus for a time of fundamental change in music and politics. His songs led that change, but they transcended it.

His audience was uneasy with transcendence. They kept trying to draw him back down into categories. He sang and sang, and finally, still a very young man, found himself a hero who was booed. "Isn't it something, how they still buy up all the tickets?" he asks about a sold-out audience that hated his new music. What I feel for Dylan now and did not feel before is empathy. His music stands and it will survive. Because it embodied our feelings, we wanted him to embody them, too. He had his own feelings. He did not want to embody ours. We found it hard to forgive him for that. He had the choice of caving in or dropping out. The blues band music, however good it really was, functioned also to announce the end of his days as a standard-bearer. Then after his motorcycle crash in 1966, he went away into a personal space where he remains. Advertisement Watching him singing in "No Direction Home," we see no glimpse of humor, no attempt to entertain. He uses a flat, merciless delivery, more relentless cadence than melody, almost preaching. But sometimes at the press conferences, we see moments of a shy, funny, playful kid inside.

And just once, in his recent interviews, seen in profile against a background of black, we see the ghost of a smile. Popular Blog Posts

Question: No Direction Home is a documentary about whom?
Answer: Bob Dylan