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Bob Dylan - No Direction Home

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Bob Dylan - No Direction Home

(196 customer reviews)

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Condition: New
Format: DVD
Surround Sound; DVD; Full Screen; NTSC

Description

The times, oh yes, they were a changin' and Bob Dylan's music embodied the very essence of the '60s and significantly impacted the social history of those changing times. Martin Scorsese skillfully takes the most artistically fruitful years (1961-1965) of this legendary folk ballad singer and presents the man and his music in this compelling documentary. 2005/color-b&w/3 hrs., 37 min/NR.

Product Details

Actors:	Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese
Format:	Surround Sound, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Language:	English
Subtitle:	English
Number of Discs:	2
Studio:	Paramount
Run Time:	208 minutes
DVD Release Date:	September 20, 2005
Average Customer Rating:	based on 196 reviews

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review: 4.5

( 196 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

211 of 224 found the following review helpful:

Best Dylan documentary ever Sep 13, 2005 By David L. Minton
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.

198 of 215 found the following review helpful:

Not my review, but that of a UK viewer Sep 09, 2005 By J. Morrison
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."

41 of 42 found the following review helpful:

As good as it gets Sep 22, 2005 By Flipper Campbell
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.

27 of 30 found the following review helpful:

Dylan's being seen as an "enigma" said more about his audience Sep 29, 2005 By Daniel Berger
Dylan is probably the premier American poet post-1960. His songs shimmer in a way that most songs do not but that poems can, and are boosted by his own performance of them, as the fine live selections picked for this film demonstrate. His oft-mocked drone is not in evidence early in his career, this film's focus.

Some reasons suggest themselves here about why Dylan met with such enthusiasm. He entered a folk scene by its very nature about people performing the work of other people, i.e. all those "folks" whose music was being rediscovered. So when Dylan began writing his own stuff, instead of just imitating Woody Guthrie, he automatically set himself beyond his peers.

This was an era when young people were musically starved. The pop scene was lean from 1958 - with departure of the first wave of original rockers variously to death, scandal or the Army - to the emergence of the Beatles in 1963. That's why a niche music like folk music could gain as much steam as it did. Dylan, writing with real lyrical power, got better notice at a time when his major competition included Fabian. His fans were the college crowd - people in college, just out of college, or about to go to college. But now, American college enrollments were exploding. If he'd been born 30 years earlier he probably would have been forced to work for a living. (Like all those folks folksingers sang about.)

Today's Dylan seems in the movie refreshingly void of BS, reflecting matter-of-factly upon his life and times. Much of the mystery attributed to him way back when, was bull to begin with, something he may very well have never sought or meant. Many parties were at fault:

--The fans who, worshipping him as an oracle, expected him to be oracular offstage, which he neither was nor wanted to be.

--The starstruck who parsed his every word and action for deeper meaning, like the one who presses him for the real message behind the shirt he's wearing on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. (Dylan tries to answer him honestly - "hey, it's just what I was wearing that day, I didn't give it that much thought" - but the fan won't take that for an answer.)

--The reporters who would ask him whether he was the Voice of a Generation. How could anyone answer that kind of question? If he said yes or even no, he'd seem unbelievably vain. How would he know? Who picks the Voice of a Generation, and how do they let you know? The movie contains a great clip where a reporter asks sonorously how many real folksingers there are. Dylan says, "136." The reporter has no idea he's being put on, and presses Dylan on the number. Dylan then says, "142." Much of what Dylan said, deemed enigmatic by the wide-eyed, were just goofs told when no straight and sincere answer existed. This says more about the naivete of the public at that time than it does about him.

Alienated young intellectuals found deep meaning in the outrageous, ever-changing lies Dylan told about his past, whether he claimed to be a cowboy, carnie or whatever. They neglected the obvious: as a 20-year-old college kid from a proper, comfortable small-town, middle-class Jewish home, he didn't have much of a past. Hardly anyone does, at 20. And so, he was trying on personae, as young people will. Folkies uncritically ate it up because they themselves were naïve, credulous, middle-class college kids rejecting their own backgrounds by singing songs of sailors, miners, Oppressed Negroes and Irish revolutionaries - of those, in other words, from as far away as possible in space and time from Levittown.

Too fixated on his being the Voice of a Generation, the world failed to notice obvious reasons Dylan did what he did. He quit playing folk because the scene got old, and because he wasn't the Pope of the Folk Church of Idealists Struggling for the Oppressed. He was a songwriter who put truths into song as well as anyone ever did, but who was ultimately in the music business, something inexplicably deemed shameful by folkies. He moved to rock because it was popular - the masses actually preferred electrical guitars to acoustic ones - and because in its exploding musical possibilities circa 1965 it offered more creative room than three-chord folk did. He faked his motorcycle accident because the pressures of pop stardom became too much to bear. And because, in his late 20s, he really wanted a normal family life. His kids, quoted in a recent bio, say he was a pretty good dad.

His milieu couldn't bear to imagine that someone could make these choices - a career? a home life? kids? Quel horreur! - or that this shows how smart, normal and well-grounded Dylan actually was. He walked away from folk music because he got tired of being deemed the Voice of a Generation by teenage depressives and other naifs. And he walked away from the same rock star pressures that drive lesser celebrities to drugs or other self-destruction. Sounds pretty sane, and not really very enigmatic, to me.

18 of 20 found the following review helpful:

Anyone can see he has the holy spirit in him Sep 28, 2005 By D. R. Gjelten
No one has mentioned this about the film - it really struck me that Dylan's writing seemed to be truly inspired, almost in a spiritual way. His long, wordy songs seemed to "channel the collective unconscious" as someone said - he seemed to be receiving messages from the people, or from the cosmos, or both. The scenes of him singing at the Newcastle gig made him look transcendent (or high - but if he was, he still managed to nail the songs, and that is a lot to remember.) I got the feeling that somehow these songs came through him in a way that was beyond his own control. Sure he was a person who cared about his reputation, but don't overlook, minimize or misunderstand (as some reviewers here have) the brilliance of the songwriting - the poetry - which first changed and then became part of our culture. The movie is incredibly interesting at a psychological and spiritual level.

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