Skip to main content

Renaldo and Clara

By

I have to say this movie eluded me completely. Will have to track down a copy.

THERE'S an insolence about "Renaldo and Clara," the four-hour film written and directed by Bob Dylan and featuring members of his Rolling Thunder Revue, that is not easily ignored. Mr. Dylan, who has a way of insinuating that any viewer who doesn't grasp the full richness of his work must be intellectually deficient or guilty of some failure of nerve, has seen fit to produce a film that no one is likely to find altogether comprehensible. Yet for anyone even marginally interested in Mr. Dylan—and for anyone willing to accept the idea that his evasiveness, however exasperating, is a crucial aspect of his finest work — "Renaldo and Clara" holds the attention at least as effectively as it tries the patience.

From a 1978 review by Janet Maslin, NYTimes

Here's a clip of the oft-mentioned Tangled Up in Blue from the movie.

Comments

  1. TripplerOctober 7, 2010 at 5:00 PM

    I have never watched any of the Dylan documentaries but am now quite intrigued thanks to our readings. What follows is a clip from that movie:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFd4MKd6Ac8&feature=related

    Never thought Joan Baez could look so elegant!

    I shall have to watch it and the rest of the movie/documentaries Dylan appears in.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonOctober 7, 2010 at 7:07 PM

    No Direction Home by Scorsese is very good, trip. Don't Look Back is of course the classic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TripplerOctober 13, 2010 at 9:58 PM

    In the Wilentz audio book 'Renaldo & Clara' was mentioned in disc 5. The author said it dealt with the themes of alienation, integrity, and knowing oneself and that it was inspired by 'Children of Paradise':

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037674/

    Dylan was reported to have claimed to been inspired by carnivals and fortune telling. Interestingly, the carnival is known for featuring people who are deformed or underprivileged but who succeed despite their shortfalls. The earlier movie was a study in artistic resistance to socially imposed conventions. I would suppose that 'Renaldo' must be in line with this theme.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more