Film
The Other Side of the Mirror
NR, 83 min. Playing Dec. 2-3 at the Belcourt
It was the early ’60s in Greenwich Village, and the bars were closing down in the wee morning hours. When that happened, Murray Lerner recalls, you went back to somebody’s apartment and kept the party rolling. He’d gone back to the Village digs of Cynthia Gooding, a folksinger bound for Spain, and the gang was giving her a Spanish farewell when in walked this skinny kid with a guitar case. He flipped it open, sang a few vivid songs about life in New York, then without a word to his host or anyone flipped the case shut and beat it.
“I had the feeling that he was extraordinarily exciting, and knew he had a very high level of poetic and descriptive abilities,” Lerner remembers. “I had that feeling instantly—that there was a great talent there.” Just how much talent was clear in 1963, when Lerner filmed the young Bob Dylan on the rise at the influential Newport Folk Festival. He also shot Dylan there in 1964 and ’65—watching the singer transform in just two years from a gifted, gangly Woody Guthrie clone to a leather-jacketed fireball whose electric performance famously scandalized and alienated the festival audience.
Lerner, the Oscar-winning director of From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, will be on hand 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2, at the Belcourt to introduce The Other Side of the Mirror, the film that compiles his long-unseen footage of Dylan from the three Newport festivals. It’s being shown as part of the theater’s Dylan tribute, timed to coincide with the run of Todd Haynes’ offbeat biopic I’m Not There. Lerner’s long career as a documentarian includes two landmark music docs, 1967’s Festival and 1997’s Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival—the latter of which captures Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison shortly before their deaths—as well as the upcoming Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who. He’s also known for his large-form experiments in 3-D filmmaking.
But it’s The Other Side of the Mirror, with its privileged glimpses not
only of Dylan but of a young, devilish Johnny Cash, that brings Lerner
for the first time to Nashville. He spoke from his home base in New
York.
Scene: You’ve been making music films now for four decades. Are you yourself a musician?
Murray
Lerner: No. I am with my camera. [laughs] In my work I think of myself
as a musician; I like to think of my work as being musically structured
in one way or another, not just about music. I think I have music in my
soul, and I’m musical, but I’m not a musician. Maybe I should become
one. [laughs]
Scene: You’ve said that Dylan hadn’t quite
developed his charisma when you first filmed him in 1963, and the movie
bears you out.
Lerner: For people who could respond to it, it
was still very exciting, because it was a fresh take on a traditional
form—like “North Country Blues,” the first song, about the mining town.
It was an unusual rendition of that idea, I thought, and it was
original. But it wasn’t like it was packed into performance or audience
charisma. “[Only a] Pawn in Their Game” is getting close.
Scene: Did the 1965 performance mark some kind of change in the festival, or break with the audience?
Lerner:
The folk festival was different from the [Newport] jazz festival in
that it was a foundation put together on a very powerful ideal: the
equality of all the performers, all getting the same money—I think it
was $50 a performance—and a selective group of performers being like
the board of directors. And the majority, I think, still felt the star
factor should be de-emphasized or negated. There was tension about that
from ’64 on about Dylan specifically, because they saw that his
popularity, charisma and fame were overwhelming the thing. And they
didn’t want that to happen, which I can understand. I think it would
have been better if they had let it happen, and just let all the
different things blossom on their own.
Scene: Could you tell how he felt about the crowd’s hostility?
Lerner:
I think he was flustered, whether he says so or not. You can see when
he comes out—obviously he forgot his harmonica, which is kind of a
symptom. And also you see him sweating during the singing. Maybe I’m
imagining it, but in watching “[Mr.] Tambourine Man,” I can see that as
he reaches the end of it he seems more self-composed. When he comes out
with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” he’s back in total control.
Scene: That last song seems appropriately final.
Lerner:
Absolutely. And that was the end. We didn’t fake it. It was a good end,
I thought—because it had the surrealistic lyrical metaphors that
characterized his change, but it was acoustic. It’s come to me recently
that the message of the electric music—“Maggie’s Farm,” “Rolling
Stone”—was definitely something that audience, if they had listened to
it, would have been extremely sympathetic and receptive to. “Maggie’s
Farm” is about the oppression of boring work—the oppression of workers,
really—in that very American image, the farm. We’re all working on
Maggie’s farm. And the other one, “Rolling Stone,” is about feeling
alienated, misunderstood, not able to function, having your dreams
shattered, and those are real forces in the kids’ lives. But it’s
interesting that a lot of them couldn’t get beyond the medium that was
delivering that message.
Scene: Does it seem strange to still be talking about Dylan almost 45 years later?
Lerner:
It’s sad, in a way, depressing that those lyrics are still very
relevant today. The specific political implications are eerily
relevant. And when he sings “With God on Our Side,” which is
universal—it’s with us right now, isn’t it? [laughs] What are the
lyrics that really amaze me…“I wonder if Judas Iscariot had God on his
side.” That’s a brilliant line. “If God were on our side, he’d end the
next war.” I guess he would! Maybe God isn’t on our side.
Scene: What did you think of I’m Not There?
Lerner:
Why do you ask? [warily] Yes, it’s very interesting. [long pause, then
laughs] You can’t ask me my opinion of it. Call my film “I Am There.”
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