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Bob Dylan Video:
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home
Video
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home |  |  | | List Price: $14.99 | | Label: Paramount
Salesrank: 3020
Released: September 20, 2005 | | Our Price: $9.27 | | Used Price: $7.50 | | MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD | |
| Features:
Color DVD Full Screen NTSC | |
Editorial Review:
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. Description of Bob Dylan - No Direction Home:
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 
No Direction Home: The Soundtrack | 
Chronicles: Volume One (paperback edition) | 
Bob Dylan Scrapbook | 
Don't Look Back | 
The Bob Dylan Bootleg Series | 
The Last Waltz |
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home Reviews:
A Great Direction 
2009-12-24 - This is Martin Scorsese's magisterial account of Dylan's early years. It includes extensive selections of previously unseen interviews with Dylan. Izzy Young is a real standout, though at least one of his pungent comments was cut from the film. Allen Ginsberg is characteristically perceptive.
Some of the Newport footage has been superseded by the release of "The Other Side of the Mirror," but there is a lot of exciting concert material here. Scorsese's real triumph is in the editing. He makes the story exciting and moving. There is a mass of material to work with, so that kind of achievement is extraordinarily difficult. Using Dylan's tour of England as a framing device, the film is a drama of the rise and emotional collapse of a great artist. The film, that is, is more than a document. It is a moving human drama.
--Lawrence J. Epstein, author of Political Folk Music in America from Its Origins to Bob Dylan
Awesome
2009-10-21 - Loved it. Loved the way it used film footage to show progression of Bob Dylan from early career to when he was just sick of everyone's bull crap.
A fantastic look into the life of Bob Dylan!
2009-05-07 - For you Bob Dylan fans this is a must have. This DVD tells the whole story & then some. I was impressed with the history of music & how Dylan was inspired by the past. His musical genius is incredible and inspiring.
Electrifying!
2009-04-25 - I'm not a music connoisseur so I can't offer any pithy comments about his musicianship or knowledgeable comments about Bob Dylan's place within the broader context of American music. But I well remember the first time I heard his voice over a car radio. It was "Positively 4th Street". I had never heard those kinds of words before, sung by that kind of voice, and in that tone of voice! I didn't know why or to whom he was flinging those bitter, condemning phrases, but I knew in my heart that he was absolutely justified. Bob Dylan(though I didn't know this or anything else about him at the time)was eight years older than me, and in 1965 he seemed like some kind of disembodied messiah to my rebellious teenage mind. I listened religiously to see if I could hear that voice again, for in that time and place there was no such thing as a personal music collection for kids. Soon, I heard "Like a Rolling Stone", another song of renunciation and distancing from conformity and cliques that seemed to me to contain a wisdom and righteous anger that fitted my own mood perfectly. These songs became anthems for me during the mid-sixties, even though they were played but seldom on the local radio station in that rural farm community. Dylan was so little known in that area that the radio announcer always pronounced his name Di-lan, with a long "I". Now, after all these decades, with my memories of that voice and its message receded into the past, I decided to check out this documentary "No Direction Home" just out of curiosity. I'll admit I expected to be disappointed. My God! What an amazing discovery to find that the reality of the phenomenon of Bob Dylan that I encountered in this film even exceeded those long-ago idealizations that I had formed. Not that I indulge in hero-worship any more or think Dylan is some kind of saint. He is certainly not that, as I think the documentary reveals. He was simply an amazing song-writer who had an uncanny knack for wedding his poetry to a perfectly matched musical presentation. It seems obvious from his own comments that he didn't set out to capture the spirit of an age, but he did obviously intend to write songs that contained something real and meaningful. This he did in a unique and masterful way. It is truly astonishing to see the early footage of Dylan looking so very, very young and innocent, but producing this awesome music with such assurance and in a voice of such authority. Of course there are those who don't see it this way, and think he is vastly overrated. These people might as well save themselves the trouble of watching "No Direction Home". Others of us who watch the film will be even more convinced that there was a spiritual element to this music because of the way it made us feel, and that Dylan was a bit of a messiah after all, albeit an unwilling and mocking one.
Amazing
2009-03-26 - A must see for any Dylan Fan. I never get tired of watching this Documentary.
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