DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Martin Scorsese’s love of ’60s and ’70s rock music frequently works its way into his films, and also led to the seminal rock performance documentary of the ’70s, his concert film of The Band, The Last Waltz. When Scorsese next headed back to the world of music documentaries, it was more than 25 years later, but his subject was one of the memorable guest stars of that 1976 concert: Bob Dylan. Scorsese’s film fixes its sights on a short, but important segment of Dylan’s career, his movement from West Village Guthrie-worshipping folkie to electrified bona-fide rock star, during the years 1961-66. It was a potentially risky venture: this period of Dylan’s career has already been subjected to endless chronicling and analysis, and one undeniably classic documentary had already come out of this period, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back.
Scorsese’s picture could have been a tired retread of the same old archival footage we’ve seen a hundred times before, but the director did an impressive amount of legwork, assembling a roster of interviewees essential to understanding Dylan’s private, public, and musical life at the time: Dave van Ronk, Allen Ginsburg, Joan Baez, and many others. But most importantly, the film features the voice of Dylan himself. Though usually interview-shy in later years, Dylan’s manager convinced him to sit for ten hours of audio interviews, which form the basis for much of the film. Using modern-day hindsight to give meaning and context to not only Dylan’s early years, but also to America in the 60s and the crossover of folk and protest music into rock and roll, Scorsese turns simple biography into an essential cultural study.
View the trailer.
Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the New York Avenue Metro. This is this summer’s first screening in the NOMA Summer Screen outdoor film series.
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One of my favorite entries in last year’s SILVERDOCS documentary film festival was this Czech film about a tourist who finds a bag of undeveloped film in a discarded suitcase in Sweden. When the film was developed, it revealed a series of pictures depicting a group of Asian men travelling through Scandinavia, but with no real clues as to who they were or why they were there. The filmmakers wondered whether it might be possible in the modern, interconnected world, to track down this group of men armed only with these prints. This self-described “detective documentary” is whimisical in its approach, and the particulars of the search are entertaining enough that it really doesn’t matter whether or not they actually track down the men in the photos. But the movie takes dramatic narrative turns near the end of the sort that documentaries only rarely luck into, and the filmmakers nimbly remove tongue from cheek as they react to the unexpected way in which the climax of the film unfolds. What began as a lark becomes a fairly serious and nuanced political documentary that delivers far more than the audience — or the filmmakers — ever expected. It’s a shame the movie never found U.S. distribution for a proper theatrical release, but documentaries can be tough sells as they are, let alone foreign ones. It’s nice to see The Avalon is picking this up for its ongoing “Lions of Czech Film” series, even if it’s just for a single screening.
View the trailer. A working knowledge of Czech helps with this clip; the actual film is subtitled.
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Avalon.
