1 film=6 Bob Dylans

Six different actors who play Bob Dylan in Tod Haynes new film

Director Tod Haynes has a new movie opening that has been described as a biopic on Bob Dylan. Unlike traditional biopics, however, Dylan is played by six, yes that's right six different actors. This film is intriguing in a number of ways, as explored in a lengthy New York Time Magazine Artilce, but it is especially interesting considering its unique visual aspects:

"Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand....And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan."

This film which construes Dylan as a six-actor-composite and shifts through a coterie of directorial modes and homages from Fellini to Pennebaker will surely be rich ground for studying the visual rhetoric of public persona, celebrity, popular artistry, etc...

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