Film

Dont Look Back – A Bob Dylan film 1967

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Don’t look back – A Bob Dylan film1967

 

He was very assured of who he was, but he was actually kind of inventing himself as he went along. He was like a person who had just stepped out of a Kerouac book, and there he was, in front of your eyes, and you were reading about him at the same time you were watching him.
–D.A. Pennebaker

Dont Look Back  is a 1967 film by D.A. Pennebaker that covers Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in the United Kingdom.In 1998, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Wanting to make more than just a concert film, Pennebaker decided to seek out both the public and private Bob Dylan. With unobtrusive equipment and rare access to the elusive performer, he achieved a fly-on-the-wall glimpse of one of the most influential musicians of all time and redefined filmmaking along the way. …and it is funny!

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If Not For You – A Bob Dylan Film (2019)

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

A film by Jaimin Rajani and Vineet Arora.

Synopsis: A tribute film on Bob Dylan, depicting Kolkata’s/Calcutta’s affinity with Dylan through cityscape and interviews of notable Indian musicians who were inspired by him. The film also draws parallels between Dylan’s body of work and the Baul tradition of Bengal.

Official Site

Well made and very interesting about Dylan’s connection with India and how he inspired a great number of Indian artists. A lot of interesting stories and characters, and at least for me, new information.

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Eat the document a Bob Dylan film 1972

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

I’ve always been waiting for an official release of Eat The Document. Now you can consider it as released. It’s more than a bootleg – here you can watch the film in a stunning quality: Very, very good picture quality and sound. …  Highlights of Eat The Document for me are the episode with Johnny Cash and the on stage performances – especially “Ballad Of A Thin Man”. This edition is a must have!
–> Review from DVDylan.com

Eat the Document is a documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland with the Hawks.  It was shot under Dylan’s direction by D. A. Pennebaker, whose groundbreaking documentary Dont Look Back chronicled Dylan’s 1965 British tour. The film was originally commissioned for the ABC television series ABC Stage 67. Continue reading “Eat the document a Bob Dylan film 1972” →

Bob Dylan songs that could have been movies – a playlist

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Bob Dylan songs that could have been movies – a playlist

The stories these songs tell might be happy or sad, truth or fiction. But they’ll all have one thing in common: They makes us see a film inside our head, or evoke a mood that feels like a movie . We follow the stories and identify with the characters, and like real movies they are sometimes linear (like most movies) and sometimes the structure is more experimental, like Reservoir Dogs or Satyricon. A few times we cannot say why they feel cinematic but they do.

Here are my choices:

All along the watchtower – Bob Dylan (here is a great live version from 6th of June 1999 in Colarado Springs) this could obviously be made into Euro-western with a prison break theme :

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Classic documentary: Heartworn Highways – the best music documentary ever made!

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

heartworn-highways1

The best music documentary ever made: Heartworn Highways

For it is just that, the best documentary about music I have ever seen! It looks like a home movie, you feel like you get insight into a world long gone and you feel like looking into a world just for the invited.

It is up on YouTube , so catch it before it gets taken down (or better, buy yourself a copy so you can see it as often as you want).

Heartworn Highways is made by James Szalapski whose vision captured some of the founders of the Outlaw Country  and Singer/Songwriter movement in Texas and Tennessee in the last weeks of 1975 and the first weeks of 1976. The film was not released theatrically until 1981.

Highlights for me: The visit to Townes Van Zandt’s caravan and the Christmas party at Guy and Susanna Clark (especially Steve Earle singing Mercenary Song).

Heartworn Highways (full movie):

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Tom Waits For No One – Academy award winning short film 1979

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Tom Waits Fo No One (short)
director: John Lamb

Tom Waits performed in 1978 live at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, photographed and rotoscoped.The original live action was shot with 5 cameras – 2 high, 2 low and one hand held.. shot by Dan O’Dowd and crew..The music from “The One That Got Away” blared in the background as Tom sang the lyrics. Donna Gordon is the dancer performing as the stripper, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation.

A total of 5,500 frames were captured, re-drawn, inked and painted by hand onto celluloid acitate to create this film. Produced by Lyon Lamb Video Animation Systems and directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology and talent ..and was created specifically for a burgeoning video music market that didn’t yet exist and arguably may be the first music video created for the MTV market.

However, a series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commercially, consequently catapulting it into obscurity.

In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short. Continue reading “Tom Waits For No One – Academy award winning short film 1979” →