Art is the eternal movement of illusions. The highest goal of art is to inspire. What else could you do for someone but to inspire them! These words were uttered a long time ago by Bob Dylan.
Although best known as a musician and songwriter, Bob Dylan has excelled in other arts over the past four decades. Many of his admirers know Dylan well, painter, actor, director, writer…
Bob Dylan, the “main character” of about five hundred books, is himself praised as the first rock and roll poet to write several books. He tried his hand as a fiction writer with the book “Tarantula”, and his impressionist memoirs “Chronicles” (“Chronicles Vol. 1”) were enthusiastically received by critics. Hence, in addition to the highest awards in the world of music, from the Grammy Awards to entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 2016, as the first rock singer-songwriter to receive the highest literary recognition.
Not a movie Bob Dylan he was not a stranger, although he once said that he did not like to see himself on the television screen, and that the camera was “scary, because it makes people ghosts”.
However, later on, the possibilities of the film camera attracted him very much. His music has been used in more than 300 film and TV productions. And in 2001, he was awarded the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Song – “Things Have Changed” from the movie “Wonder Boys”.
Bob Dylan’s film debut
Dylan’s film “debut” happened in 1965 in Penebaker’s film about his tour in Great Britain “Don’t Look Back”. He encouraged himself, so the following year he directed the documentary “Eat The Document” about the tour with the “Band” on the Island. Already in 1973, he starred in Sam Pekinpo’s film “Pat Garrett and Bill The Kid”, for which he also wrote music, and then the famous song “Knockin ‘On Heaven’s Door” was created, and today one of the greatest hits of the American musician.
He also appeared in his own production of “Renaldo and Clara”, an impressionistic documentary on his 1975 “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour. And under the pseudonym Sergei Petrov, he wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film “Masked and Anonymous”, in which he also starred.
17 years ago, the famous director Martin Scorsese, fascinated by the personality and work of the American musician, made a biographical film “No Direction Home”, which focuses on the period from Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and the meteoric rise to a car accident five years later. which forced him to temporarily withdraw from the scene.
One of the works in which Dylan did not play, and which is a kind of homage to the artist, is Todd Haynes’ film “I’m Not There”. Dylan from different phases was interpreted in this 2007 film by six actors: Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Vishaw, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett.
Dylan as an artist
Dylan loved to draw since he was a child, but he had his first exhibition of his works of art only in 2007 in the German city of Chemnitz. At that time, 140 paintings by musicians were in front of the audience – portraits, nudes, landscapes …
The last exhibition of his paintings opened in Miami last November. Named “Retrospectrum”, it was the greatest look at the art of musicians in an American gallery.
Asked once about his art work, he answered why he is attracted to a brush and a drawing pencil:
– Painting provides me with order in a world without order!
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