‘Renaldo and Clara’: the bizarre 1978 movie that became Bob Dylan’s strangest endeavour
Every so often, Bob Dylan fancies himself as an actor. After making his acting debut in the now-lost British television play Madhouse on Castle Street in 1963, he wouldn’t appear in another movie until Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid a decade later, for which he also composed the score.
The film would give us some Dylan classics, like ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, but it would also open the musician’s eyes to the tumultuous world of filmmaking, with director Sam Peckinpah clashing with the studio and even pulling a gun on Dylan and Harry Dean Stanton when they messed up a scene.
Despite this intense experience, Dylan wasn’t put off the idea of making a film of his own, resulting in the most bizarre endeavour of his career, his one and only directorial credit, Renaldo and Clara. Released in 1978, the movie clocked in at 232 minutes and featured many familiar Dylan associates, like Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, and Stanton, with Dylan playing Renaldo while his wife, Sara, played Clara.
The movie is split into three, with concert footage, fictional segments, and interviews weaving together to create, well, a bit of a mess. Renaldo and Clara was incredibly ambitious and rather pretentious, to be honest, and even dedicated Dylan fans weren’t convinced. He tried to base it off epic French masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis, but clearly, Dylan is no Marcel Carné.
Despite the fact that Dylan had poured his time into the film and clearly thought he’d made something impressive, he soon had to reckon with such poor critical reception that the movie’s theatrical run was dramatically cut.
I mean, who wants to sit in a cinema for that long watching a poor attempt at filmmaking? He eventually realised that Renaldo and Clara wasn’t working, and pulled the film from distribution himself, and today, it remains an incredibly elusive part of Dylan’s oeuvre. In fact, few Dylan fans have seen the whole film, which predominantly exists in the form of bootlegs taken from several rare TV broadcasts that were aired back in the ‘80s.
You can see clips of the film in various Dylan documentaries, too, but if you want to subject yourself to the entire almost-four-hour movie, you’ve got to seek out an unofficial copy. I’d say it’s only worth it if you’re an absolute Dylan obsessive. Otherwise, you’re going to be in for a long and boring ride.
You’d think that this whole ordeal would put off Dylan from ever making a film again, but in 2003, he collaborated with Larry Charles to write Masked and Anonymous, in which he also played the main character, Jack Fate.
Similarly to Renaldo and Clara, Masked and Anonymous was received poorly. It was just too ambitious, and Dylan didn’t have the prowess to pull these ideas off. Clearly, Dylan is much better off doing what he does best – writing and performing songs. He hasn’t returned to the silver screen since then, apart from in the form of documentary appearances, and it seems like he needs to keep it that way. Some people just aren’t cut out for making movies.
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