‘Close-Up’: The movie Martin Scorsese compares to his Bob Dylan documentary
While the narrative feature movies of Martin Scorsese, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, are the one that often take the limelight when it comes to the best works of the director, Scorsese has also dipped his toes into the medium of documentary, particularly in the musical realm.
For instance, Scorsese directed one of the best musical documentary of all time in the shape of The Last Waltz, which detailed the last ever concert played by The Band. Bob Dylan has also got the Scorsese documentary treatment, too, beginning with 2005’s No Direction Home, which focuses on Dylan’s life from his arrival in New York in 1961 and his first touring retirement in 1966.
Years later, Scorsese delivered yet another Dylan documentary, 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which tells of Dylan’s 1975 tour of the same name, although there is also some fictional material present alongside interviews with the likes of Dylan, Joan Baez and many other important figures of the tour.
Discussing the film on Letterboxd and explaining how he wanted Rolling Thunder Revue to be different from his first Dylan documentary, Scorsese, wrote, “This was the second picture we made about Bob Dylan. Would it be No Direction Home II? Boring. So what to do? We decided to follow Bob’s lead in his own life and music, and create a film in which you were never quite sure what was reality and what was fiction.”
Scorsese had also gone on to point out a film that he had been greatly inspired by, a work from one of his favourite filmmakers of all time, Abbas Kiarostami. “I had a great model in my old friend Abbas Kiarostami’s extraordinary film about Hossain Sabzian, the man who impersonated the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf,” Scorsese noted.
The film in question is Kiarostami’s 1990 docufiction film Close-Up, which tells of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated an Iranian director. Kiarostami had the people involved acting as themselves, which drew the admiration of Scorsese and announced Kiarostami to the international world.
Discussing his impression of Kiarostami’s 1990 film, Scorsese wrote, “Close-Up deals directly with loneliness and the cinema as a community, a family. That’s what happens when you make a film or a series of films. You become a family. That touched me. Hossein tried to become a filmmaker because of his loneliness.”
The legendary filmmaker went on to liken the “community of artists” that Hossein wanted to be a part of to the “travelling troupe of artists” in the Rolling Thunder Revue. “They’re the best of family and the worst of family, but a family all the same,” Scorsese noted. “Close-Up really represents that.”
Rolling Thunder Revue features a number of fictional interviews with actors playing characters who were not actually an original part of Dylan’s tour. For instance, Sharon Stone plays herself, while Martin Von Haselberg plays the fictional filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp, neither of whom was present with Dylan in 1975.
Scorsese’s admiration for Kiarostami is well known, and it looks as though he had the Iranian director in mind when he made his second Bob Dylan documentary. Though Kiarostami and Dylan might be the last two artists to be associated with one another, only someone like Scorsese could draw a thematic parallel when setting out to make his music documentary.
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