Dylan Revisited: Eat the Document (1972)
Revisiting the lost Bob Dylan documentary set during the infamous electric tour of 1966 that, aside from some festival screenings in the early 1970s, has never had an official release.
This is a series by DylanRevisited based on former Twitter threads, now available here in an easier to read and longer lasting format.
Eat the Document opens with a shot of Bob Dylan snorting something off a tabletop then asking, "Have you ever heard of me?” An ego indulging itself is an apt introduction.
The film reunites Dylan with Dont Look Back director D.A. Pennebaker, who had been given free rein to capture the singer’s 1965 UK tour for that first film. But for the following year’s return to Europe, Dylan wanted more control over the filmmaking process.
Though Pennebaker shot most of the footage, it was often under Dylan’s direction. Rather than quietly capturing real events, Dylan wanted to stage certain scenes, like (I suspect) an inane moment of a plate being passed around a restaurant table.
Pennebaker put together a rough edit of the footage but Dylan decided that it was too similar to Dont Look Back. The singer worked on his own cut during his post-motorcycle crash stint out of the public eye in Woodstock, with help from his friend and filmmaker Howard Alk.
A co-founder of the legendary Second City improv theatre group, Alk had booked Dylan for one his first Chicago live shows in 1962. He then moved into film, helping Murray Lerner to edit the Newport documentary, Festival, before assisting Pennebaker on Dont Look Back.
But Pennebaker had little interest in Alk’s ideas about filmmaking. Once it became clear that Alk was leading the direction of Eat the Document’s latest edit, Pennebaker quit the project.
While Dont Look Back notably put you in the middle of a scene without providing context, the action and editing allowed you to start making sense of things. Alk’s idea was to remove even that, instead giving the viewer mere fragments of events, including the music.
In 1965, Pennebaker was more interested in the off-stage antics than Dylan’s live performances. But he understood that in 1966, the action was most definitely happening onstage where Dylan and his new electric ensemble The Hawks were outraging folk purists with their loud, raucous rock’n’roll.
Alk and Dylan’s final edit of Edit the Document hardly reflects this conflict. The first live performance we see is Tell Me Momma, played against the backdrop of a large American flag, so presumably it’s the Paris show. Yet this short scene fails to convey the noise and intensity of the electric set's wild opening song that you get from the live audio recordings.
Later, footage of Tom Thumb’s Blues is interrupted by a “conversation” between Dylan and a mute Robbie Robertson. Then we follow the duo as they wander aimlessly through some waste ground.
The show-stopping climax of the live shows, Like a Rolling Stone comes early in Eat the Document. We only hear the first couple of lines before another sudden cut to those infamous reactions from fans – though the film seems more interested in their faces than words.
The best live footage is of Ballad of Thin Man, whose centrepiece presence suggests that the song has become Dylan’s definite statement about the world as he was currently experiencing it.
After staying close-up on the singer for a mesmerising minute, the film inevitably cuts away to a strained conversation with a French journalist. When it returns to Thin Man, we see Dylan from a distance, before cutting again to critics, this time more outraged British fans.
Next is a funny juxtaposition of hearing Dylan singing a mighty “ahhh” while the scene cuts to footage of him yawning. This is the most coherent section of Eat the Document, where its compulsive edits and fractured narratives are used to describe Dylan’s discombobulation.
It may be unfair to criticise Eat the Document for not focusing enough on the music when Dont Look Back did the same. But the latter made up for it with a great cast of characters. Unfortunately, Eat the Document also lacks enough personality, even when it has two big ones on screen together.
Like when Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan are sitting at a piano, harmonising on Cash’s song I Still Miss Someone. Despite the poor sound quality, this scene is a highlight of Eat the Document. But it's interrupted by someone reminding Dylan that he’s due on stage.
Dylan may be making a point here. I’d love if the film had more of Dylan and Cash together. Perhaps he’s showing us that he too wished that life on the road had more space for meaningful connections. But at this point in Dylan’s life, he didn’t have time to just hang out. There was always something to do or somewhere to be.
He makes this exact point later, saying“I just go where I’m supposed to go” in a scene that cuts between him and manager Al Grossman on the phone. (Grossman is talking to his Dont Look Back co-star Tito Burns).
Dylan edited Eat the Document throughout 1967, a time of growing resentment towards Grossman. This scene seems to be making a point about his manager’s demands on Dylan's time and energy.
Sadly, it is one of the few glimpses we get of Grossman. Eat the Document suffers from a severe lack of compelling characters like him, as highlighted by the repeated appearance of a blonde woman, who haunts the film’s opening section.
She first appears at end of a press conference scene, where Dylan, when charged with no longer singing protest songs, memorably responds “all my songs are protest songs”. But the encounter ends cordially with none of the Dont Look Back drama.
As the film continues, the woman’s face pops up repeatedly. She has nothing to say or do, other than smile and look pretty. Even the film acknowledges this frippery as we hear Dylan say, “you’re looking too much at her, she’s not going to help you.”
You’d imagine the appearance of John Lennon would liven things up. But the short scene of Dylan and the Beatle in the back of a limo is a ham-fisted attempt at humour that Lennon has to force while Dylan seems too out of it to contribute.
While Eat the Document features just a couple of minutes of Lennon and Dylan together, you can watch the full 20 minutes of footage online. However, I found their half-baked efforts to improvise a variety of offbeat sketches excruciating. At least Lennon has the grace to look extremely embarrassed by the whole thing.
Robbie Robertson appears on screen a lot, which may be because he helped out with the edit. But as noted earlier, he’s often a silent gormless presence. Though he does have a sharp collection of pin-stripe suits.
In an early scene, Dylan is in a hotel room, playing his guitar and singing What Kind of Friend Is This. It’s a great performance where Dylan is trialling his softer Nashville Skyline voice.
But the camera inevitably drifts away to Robertson, not quite playing along on his guitar. We do get a short burst of the real Robbie during a live performance of Baby Let Me Follow You Down, where his guitar playing is on fire.
Eat the Document ends with a similar hotel room scene, where Dylan and Robertson are writing a song together. But then Dylan flips to director mode, turning to the camera and instructing Pennebaker to move around a bit. Instead, the pictures freezes and the film ends.
Once again the thing that most of the film’s intended audience, what people with an interest in Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, music, creativity and collaboration would want to see – two artist working together on a song – is avoided. Is Dylan making some sort of point here or is it just bad filmmaking?
Given the events that the film purportedly set out to capture, Eat the Document could have been the Godfather II of music documentaries. Except Dylan didn’t want that. To be fair, the idea of not repeating himself is there in the title of the first film: Dont Look Back. And the title of this second film suggests that nor was he particularly interested in documenting that time or those events.
Dylan wanted to make a movie that was different, not just compared to its predecessor but fly against the whole idea of a typical documentary narrative. But to deconstruct a format, you must first understand it and as Pennebaker later said "he didn't know any of the rules". Even with Howard Alk’s guidance, Dylan was too inexperienced a filmmaker to reinvent the music movie, like Pennebaker had done with Dont Look Back.
Yet, actual experienced filmmaker Todd Haynes loves Eat the Document, because it's “so bizarre, frenetic and twisted.” Of course, he was promoting his own oddball Dylan film, I’m Not There, at the time, so maybe he was overstating things.
Eat the Document was originally commissioned by ABC television, but they hated Dylan's edit, describing it as "incomprehensible". Aside from some film festival screenings in the early 70s, Eat the Document has never been officially released. Naturally, bootlegs found their way into people’s hand and you can now watch it online.
Photo by Johnny Haddo
Thankfully much of the footage was rescued and reused in Martin Scorsese’s much more conventional and hearteningly excellent film No Direction Home.
Unlike that film or Dont Look Back, both of which I can watch repeatedly, I’ll gladly never see the incoherent, conceited and frustrating Eat the Document again.
What do you think of the film? Let me know in the comments.
DylanRevisited is the work of writer and longtime Dylan fan Colm Larkin, who is revisiting Bob Dylan's back catalogue one album/bootleg/live record at a time.
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Thanks very much for this. I just watched Eat... after reading your article, and maybe it was coming to it with low expectations based on everything I've read and heard about it, but I actually quite liked it much more than I was expecting to. Things like the car scene with John - I've watched the whole 20 minutes previously and agree it is cringingly stilted. However here it came across more as a quick-fire, quite funny Monty Python-ish skit. I wouldn't mind seeing a Peter Jackson-type refurb of the whole thing.
It’s as if I made a video about me. Not even I’d want to watch it. In recent years has Dylan ever said anything about it.