The documentary form is never more about truth or fiction than your average feature film. It is just another technique, another “fantasy”, another way of presenting a person, story or place. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese embraces this philosophy in a way few music documentaries have. If one were to look at the canon of classic or essential documentary films, from Nanook of the North (1922) to Jaguar (1967) and General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974) to The Thin Blue Line (1988), there is no denying that part of what makes these films so compelling, and their stories so believable, is their element of fantasy.
I was lucky enough to see Rolling Thunder Revue at a preview screening at the Philadelphia Film Society’s Film Center. Seeing Scorsese’s film on the big screen, and hearing Dylan in that space, lent the film a degree of scope and urgency that is lost on the Netflix platform. The communal aspect of this event also lent the film a unique dimension that one cannot replicate in one’s own home. The house was nearly packed to capacity, mostly with Baby Boomers, and this energetic audience was riveted. People were singing along with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell as if they were at one of the concerts shown in the film. And, of course, they cheered and applauded with equal fervor.
This reaction to Rolling Thunder Revue is indicative of a willingness on the part of the audience to invite the film into their own collective fantasy. Rolling Thunder Revue is not a concert film like The Last Waltz (1978), but to the audience it served that purpose. This synchronicity between cinema and audience, this unification of desires and fantasies, is the epitome of what a good documentary film can do.
With regards to approach, Scorsese immediately opens his film with an excerpt from a turn of the century short film recording of a magician’s disappearing act that bluntly announces Rolling Thunder Revue’s aesthetic. Objectivity will be absent. This is a film that combines contradictory testimonies, archival footage, and a contemporary political context that will remake as much as it reenacts an event from Bob Dylan’s career.
Congressman Tanner (Michael Murphy), a character from Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 (1988) and Tanner on Tanner (2004) miniseries, appears in one of Rolling Thunder Revue’s contemporary interviews. He remembers how Jimmy Carter got him into one of the shows, which Scorsese supports with some carefully doctored photographs. This is the most overt aspect of the kind of fantasy at work in Rolling Thunder Revue. By co-opting Altman’s creation into the “Dylan legend” Scorsese essentially pinpoints how we, as Americans, view our politics as a form of entertainment, and vice versa. But this tactic also suggests that the kind of “plastic reality” of Altman’s film is sympatico with Dylan’s own image.
Throughout Rolling Thunder Revue, despite the fact that he is rarely off screen, Bob Dylan remains a mystery. What the audience does get is a myriad of impressions of Bob Dylan from about a dozen different testimonies. For Scorsese, as it was for Todd Haynes, this is enough. And this form of knowing without knowing is applied to all of the films portraits of Dylan’s supporting cast (Allen Ginsberg, Scarlet Rivera, Joan Baez, Ratso Sloman, Joni Mitchell, etc).
Yet, Scorsese’s most brilliant move with Rolling Thunder Revue is to frame his film within the complex of contemporary political discourse. The excerpts of interviews Scorsese selects at the start and close of the film emphasize ideas of American identity with phrases such as “returning to America’s roots”, “America has lost its way”, etc. This, coupled with archival footage of bicentennial celebrations, locates the fluidity of political rhetoric on the one hand while also demonstrating the steadfastness of political philosophy on the other.
Scorsese closes Rolling Thunder Revue with a statement by Allen Ginsberg intercut with Dylan performing Knockin’ on Heaven’s door. Ginsberg, echoing Scorsese’s agenda, asks the audience to take what they have seen with them and to use it to build their own communities, to express themselves. This direct address, no matter how on the nose, serves as a summation of the usefulness and necessity of the kind of fantasy Rolling Thunder Revue represents and, to an extent, inspires.
