Eat the Document

Eat the Document is a rarely seen 1972 follow-up documentary to D. A. Pennebaker’s 1965 film Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker shot the footage for Eat the Document but Bob Dylan and associate Howard Alk did the editing. Pennebaker intended to direct the film, but when Dylan took over, Pennebaker backed away. Eat the Document records the frenetic, disjointed pace of Dylan’s controversial 1966 concert tour in England. It contains impressive excerpts from some of the performances, but only one or two complete performances. This is an irritation—most of the performances are cut short, interrupted. Someone should go through the footage used to make Don’t Look Back and Eat the Document and reconstruct the complete performances that are there. (According to The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan, Pennebaker owns unreleased footage of a number of complete performances). At no time in his career did Dylan perform more evocatively and powerfully than he did on this tour—his singing seems almost otherworldly. Look at the performance of “Desolation Row” in the Scorsese documentary as an example. There needs to be a more complete public record of these performances.

Eat the Document also contains a number of segments in which Dylan plays guitar or piano and sings in his hotel room and other private settings. These are some of the most interesting scenes in the film because, although this is the period when Dylan was outraging audiences with his rock and roll electronic performances, on his own he was often still playing acoustic folk music. Dylan’s skill as a guitarist has occasionally been disparaged, but in these scenes he plays guitar and piano with much ease.

This film has never been released in any format. The copy I managed to see was purchased on the web. I have no idea whether it actually is the Eat the Document film I have read about. The camerawork is choppy and full of jerky movement. It’s difficult to tell whether some of the amateurish moments in the film—the occasional frozen images, the scenes of static, the gaps--are the result of the haphazard way in which the copy I watched was recorded, or of how the film itself was made. Few scenes develop at much length. In general, based on descriptions I have read, I think I saw the fabled film. The film’s highlight is “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the best performance ever of this song by Dylan or anyone else.

While Pennebaker preferred a measure of coherence in Don’t Look Back, in Eat the Document coherence is not a particular goal. This may well be a reflection of how Dylan edited the film, and of its editor’s disdain for conventional narrative. He may have shaped the film in this way to illustrate how he experienced the constant movement, travel, unsettlement, uproar, confusion, and rare moments of quiet solitude during the 1966 tour. This was a period when the old Dylan was reconstructing a new Dylan, but what one mainly finds in this film is a process of self-deconstruction, with nothing left in the void of the old Dylan except the words and the music. What the new Dylan will be remains unresolved. The main focus seems not to be on telling the story of the 1966 tour, but instead on evoking in pastiche form what the tour was like, the ambience of the concerts, the sometimes hostile atmosphere, the disappointment and anger of fans who came to see one Dylan and got another, quite different person in his place.

The film also suggests, especially in the prolonged and painful sequence with Dylan and John Lennon in the backseat of a limousine, laughing and talking, Dylan so high on drugs and/or alcohol that he seems miserable and often unable to hold his head up, that this was a period in his career when Dylan was running so close to the edge that he could have easily fallen over and been lost forever. The danger, the risk, the willful momentum towards self-immolation and destruction we see in this film is probably why Dylan’s work from this period is so powerful and even haunting.

For Dylan fanatics the film is important as a document of a particular moment from his career, and for the sequences where Dylan sings. But Eat the Document is not a successful or effective film. Some have called it daring and experimental. To me it’s self-indulgent and clumsy. Still, it should be restored and released. And someone should compile and commercially release a video record of Dylan’s performances during the 1960s.