Folk, Verite, and the Failure of the Word

by Christopher Bruno

In her essay on D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, Jeanne Hall makes the argument that Pennebaker's 1967 film -- and, in fact, much of cinema verite in general -- confirms the assumption that what documentarian Robert Drew referred to as "picture logic", exemplified by the observational forms of direct cinema, is inherently more truthful, and thus better, than "word logic", the attempt to explicate through spoken or written language.  Citing Drew's 1960 film Primary as a landmark work which helped to usher in the verite movement in America, Hall makes the case that Pennebaker, despite claiming ambivalence towards any sort of message or intentionality in his filmmaking, uses a number of editorial strategies to allow his subject, a young yet already famous Bob Dylan, to make Pennebaker's point for him.

While Hall's arguments are, for the most part, both thorough and sound, there is additionally a greater narrative to be drawn regarding Dylan's own thorny relationship with the written (and henceforth sung) word, and there is perhaps no more appropriate phase of Dylan's long and storied career than that depicted in the film to illustrate it.  1965 saw Dylan's fame continuing to grow even as many of his earliest fans criticized him for abandoning the earnest folk of his earlier years in favor of a raw, electrified sound which carried with it increasingly fractured, impressionistic lyrics.  Dylan was always known for ripping a song or two straight from the headlines (even if those headlines were a few decades old); but where once he was literal, carefully delineating character, cause, and event, now he was oblique, preferring to obfuscate his meaning through free association, non-sequiturs, and abstract poetical devices.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues", being the first track from his first album in this vein, is as good a candidate as any for the exemplar of this style, and it remains not only one of his most loved songs, but also emblematic of the first of what would ultimately be many stylistic shifts and evolutions.  Pennebaker was no doubt cognizant of this when he chose to open his film with the iconic sequence of Dylan flipping cue cards of the song's lyrics in time to the recording.  Dylan, the cipher, remains tight-lipped as he presents his lyrics to the audience, as though his art were a barrier rather than a window into the artist.  And as the song progresses, the cards play fast and loose with the lyrics, intentionally misspelling or paraphrasing the words -- a sacrilege to a Dylan adherent -- while no less a wordsmith than Allen Ginsberg hangs in the background, speaking inaudibly to Bob Neuwirth, himself a noted singer-songwriter.

Gone is the young, hungry troubadour who championed the literalism and didacticism of Woody Guthrie, and one need look no further than the film itself to see so.  Pennebaker appropriates footage of a younger Dylan concertedly singing his composition "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a voters' registration rally in 1963 as though his life depended upon it before cutting to a contemporaneous performance of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" from the Royal Albert Hall that is rote and noticeably lacking in passion by comparison.  Hall quotes Joe Morgenstern's Newsweek review of the film, which states, "Dont Look Back is really about fame and how it menaces art," a summation which is borne out in the juxtaposition of these two performances.  Dylan did not wear his fame comfortably, often reacting antagonistically to corporations, the press, and to individuals who did not follow his whims as mercurially as he himself did.  Aside from the many instances of Dylan baiting and battling with reporters, humoring his teeny-bopper fans, and ignoring the company of his compatriots which Hall enumerates, viewers can see this attitude in Dylan's changing relationship to his own words; as the stakes and the stages alike grew, the connection between his words and his fans stretched to the point of tenuousness, and Dylan would react by tossing off any and all sense of political responsibility -- and lyrical clarity.

Throughout the sixties, Greenwich Village was host to a multifaceted folk revival that would nurture and present to the world such disparate acts as Simon & Garfunkel, Dave Van Ronk, The Fugs, Peter Paul & Mary, and of course Dylan; and in April of 1961 -- only a few short months after Dylan himself had arrived in New York City -- Washington Square, long known as a haven for folksingers to congregate and perform, became the setting of a epochal showdown between the police and the peaceful protestors of the Village folk scene.  Following an injunction to ban folk singing from Washington Square, Israel Young encouraged all local folk musicians to come down to the park on April 9 to sing songs in defiance of the town's orders, an act, he insisted, was protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Dan Drasin, who was himself only 18 at the time, captured the protest and the subsequent riots on film.  Painstakingly compiling and synching audio recordings from the day to his footage, he compiled the film Sunday, which in its own way addresses the issue of "picture logic" versus "word logic" and finds the former lacking.

[Note: Dan Drasin himself posted the full documentary to his YouTube channel on May 1, 2013.] 

Drasin opens the film with shots of children playing in the park before slowly introducing footage of the young adults who will be taking part in the protests, establishing a sort of universal innocence and inherent right to be present, underscored by the use of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on the soundtrack.  Drasin emphasizes the point by ending the film with a shot of a child playfully running around the park wearing a sign that reads "I want to sing too!"  In between, however, he fills Sunday with a stream of law enforcement officials and folk musicians who talk in circles at one another, reiterating the same rhetoric without getting anywhere or solving anything.

There is, furthermore, a sort of self-reflexive, Ouroboros-like overtone to the entire protest, which exists solely to assert its own right to exist.  Folk music has a history of being by and of the people, concerned more so than any other musical idiom with the plight of the underprivileged, yet you wouldn't know it from the crowd assembled in Washington Square Park on this particular Sunday.  Most of those gathered are well dressed collegiate sorts, indicative not so much of the beatniks as of those who studious read and attempted to emulate them.  The folk music depicted in Sunday is by and large toothless, and while all the other jam sessions in the park before and after may well have been about something, the narrow focus of Drasin's film can't help but depict a scene that is both earnest and empty.  One protestor, when asked if he is the leader of the group, sums it up: "No, I just happen to be first."

It is ironic then that both Sunday and Dont Look Back make at least some claim to champion the folksinger, he himself the champion of words, for both films systematically attack the established norms of verbal communication as outmoded and incomplete.  While Drasin may have unwittingly exposed his subjects, Pennebaker and Dylan seem to be in collusion; for while the well meaning young folkies in Sunday probably arrived with the best of intentions, Dylan stepped in front of his documentarian's "fearsome machinery" primed to dismantle the old guard, and Pennebaker was more than willing to let him.  As Pennebaker himself has said, "If I just watch what is happening, it will happen right in front of me."