The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan (1978)

I happened to read these words during my flight to Los Angeles — having just finished watching the "conventional and sentimental" in-flight movie — hardly knowing then that, just a day later, I would be seeing a film that perfectly embodied Bunuel's notion of the possibilities of cinema.

Renaldo and Clara — an audacious and remarkable four-hour movie that will open in New York and Los Angeles on January 25th and soon thereafter in cities around the country — is Bob Dylan's second film. His first, Eat the Document, was a kind of antidocumentary, a night journey through the disjointed landscapes of Dylan's and the Band's 1966 world tour, a magic swirling ship of jump cuts, "ready for to fade." It was a fascinating work, but it came and went after only a few showings.

To remain on a given level, no matter how exalted, is a sin, a spiritual teacher once said. And just as it is impossible for Bob Dylan "to sing the same song the same way twice' — as he himself puts it — so his new film is a departure from 'Eat the Document,' as it announces the arrival of a visionary cinematic free spirit.

Conceived over a period of ten years, and edited down by Howard Alk and Dylan from 400 hours of footage, Renaldo and Clara was shot during the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, whose participants make up a cast that includes Bob Dylan (Renaldo), Sara Dylan (Clara), Joan Baez (the Woman in White), Ronnie Hawkins (Bob Dylan), Ronee Blakley (Mrs. Dylan), Jack Elliott (Longheno de Castro), Bob Neuwirth (the Masked Tortilla), Allen Ginsberg (the Father), David Blue (David Blue) and Roger McGuinn (Roger McGuinn).

"Who Are You, Bob Dylan?" was the headline in the French newspaper read by Jean-Pierre Leaud in Jean-Lue Godard's "Masculin-Feminin". And the mystery of Renaldo and Clara is: "Who is Bob Dylan?" "Who is Renaldo?" and "What is the relationship between them?"

I decided to ask Bob Dylan himself.

"There's Renaldo," be told me, "there's a gug in white face singing on the stage and them there's Ronnie Hawkins playing Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is listed in the credits as playing Renaldo, yet Ronnie Hawkins is listed as playing Bob Dylan."

"So Bob Dylan," I surmise, "may or may not be in the film."

"Exactly."

"But Bob Dylan made the film."

"Bob Dylan didn't make it. I made it."

"I is another," wrote Arthur Rimbaud, and this statement is certainly demonstrated by Renaldo and Clara, in which characters in masks and bats — often interchangeable — sit in restaurants and talk, disappear, reappear, exchange flowers, argue, visit cemetaries, play music, travel around in trains and vans and, in one exhilarating scene, dance around at the edge of a beautiful bay, where they join hands and begin singing an American Indian/ Hindu, Indian-sounding chant to the accompaniment of a bop-shoo-op-doo-wah-ditty chorus — a religion and rock & roll reunion.

To the anagogic eye, however, the film seems to be about just one man — who could pass for the Jack of Hearts, the leading actor of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," a card among cards, an image among images — and just one woman. Together they find themselves in the grip of a series of romantic encounters that are reenactments of the Greal Mystery, culminating in the confrontation of the Woman in White (Joan Baez), Clara (Sara Dylan) and Renaldo (Bob Dylan) — a meeting at the border of myth and reality. Using his physical image and name as the raw material of the film, Bob Dylan — like the Renaissance kings of masque and spectacle — moves daringly and ambiguously between fiction, representation, identification and participation.

Renaldo and Clara, of course, is a film filled with magnificently shot and recorded concert footage of highly charged Dylan performances of songs like "It Ain't Me, Babe," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" — the last of whose delicate and eerie instrumental breaks makes you feel as if you were entering the gates of paradise themselves. Avoiding all of the cinematic cliches of pounding-and-zooming television rock & roll specials, the cameras either subtly choregraph the songs — revealing structures and feelings — or else look at the white faced Dylan and the accompanying painted musicians in rapturous and intensely held close-ups.

Around these musical episodes Dylan has woven a series of multileveled and multileveled scenes — unconsciously echoing similar moments in films by Cocteau, Cassavetes and especially Jacques Rivette — each of which lights up and casts light on all the others. Scenes and characters duplicate and mirror each other, are disassociated and recombined — all of them, in the words of the director, "filled with reason but not with logic." Thus, when Clara (Sara Dylan) says to Renaldo: "I am free ... I can change," it brings back to us the words spoken earlier on by the Woman in White (Joan Baez) to Renaldo: "I haven't changed that much. Have you?" To which Renaldo replies: "Maybe."

And then there are the correspondences and the doubled worlds. The scenes in the bordello — with Joan Baez and Sara Dylan playing prostitutes and Allen Ginsberg playing a kind of Buddhist john — become an image of Vajra Hell — the Tantric Buddhist idea of the unbreakable, diamond bell. And a musician blocking someone's way backstage becomes the Guardian at the Gates.

What is most adventurous and mysterious about Renaldo and Clara, however, is the way it counterpoints music with action, lyrics with dialogue, songs with other songs. In one scene, for example, Rodeo (Sam Shepard) is trying to win over Clara, and on the soundtrack you hear, almost subliminally, what sounds like the chord progressions of "Oh, Sister," but which you later realize is "One Too Many Mornings" — as if the songs themselves were trying to communicate with each other, as if they were saying goodbye to each other:

You're right from your side,
I'm right from mine.
We're both just too many mornings
An' a thousand miles behind.

In another scene, members of the Rolling Thunder Revue join in a reception with members of the Tuscarora Indian tribe, while on the soundtrack we hear Dylan's haunting rehearsal tape version of "People Get Ready." And in finally another scene, Renaldo hurries nervously down a city street — panhandling and making some kind of furtive French connection with the Masked Tortilla (Bob Neuwirth) — to the accompaniment of Dylan's version of "Little Moses," above which we hear powerfully spoken lines from poet Anne Waldman's "Fast Speaking Woman" ("I'm the Druid Woman/I'm the Ibo Woman/I'm the Buddha Woman/I'm the Vibrato Woman").

"Your films make one wonder what's going on in people's minds," says Penelope Gilliatt to Buñuel, to which he responds: "Dreams, and also the most everyday questions: 'What time is it?' 'Do you want to eat?' "And, in spite of the compression and density of most of the scenes in Renaldo and Clara, there is also a presentational immediacy and clarity that fixes the scenes in one's mind — like a very special dream one wants to remember. . . .

"I expect this will be a very small film," Bunuel said during the shooting of his recent 'That Obscure Object of Desire' — which might have served as the title of Renaldo and Clara. "One needs just a hole to look out of," Bunuel continued, "like a spider that has spun its web and is remembering what the world outside was like. This hole is the secret of things. An artist can provide an essential margin of alertness."

Renaldo and Clara is a long film, but it is really intimate and evanescent. "Art is the perpetual motion of illusion," says Bob Dylan in the interview that follows — which took place a week before Christmas in L.A. "The highest purpose of art," Dylan continues, "is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?"