This weekend and next week, the Toronto “Hot Docs” film festival will feature a film called “How Many Roads,” directed by the Dutch documentarian Jos De Putter. It provides portraits of 12 American fans of Bob Dylan. I mentioned it previously when it debuted at the Amsterdam Film Festival last November. It holds a particular interest for me, since I’m one of the 12 (hmm, “one of the 12;” can’t get more portentous than that!). I have seen a DVD copy of the version that debuted in Amsterdam. It was then 11 characters. It was a fascinating film to me, naturally enough: low-key, meditative, poetic in parts, a road movie, an oblique but revealing angle on America and certainly a dramatic illustration of the influence Bob Dylan’s music has had on people, in many disparate ways. My own part seemed to me one of the lesser ones. I don’t travel anywhere (while most people do) — I just sit in front of my computer screen and babble. (That is, in the movie. I do travel places very occasionally in real life.)

The director had gotten in touch with me after seeing this website (actually I believe Ronnie Keohane had alerted him to it — she is also in the film and makes one of its most striking segments, I think). He felt my angle on Dylan would fit right in with what he was trying to do. I remember that he liked my line that “Dylan’s work belongs to all of us.” I was naturally hesitant. It’s not hard to make someone look bad in a film, and, in my case, the challenge is more in avoiding it. Yet, Jos struck me as sincere and interested in making a non-judgmental kind of movie. A couple of good omens suggested I should go through with it. Firstly, Ronnie’s involvement, since I’d already been very impressed by her insights on Dylan, and she also felt positively about the movie and the director. Then, a strange coincidence: I need to start with the fact that back when I was magnanimous enough to allow commenting on this site, I probably had about 10 or 12 people who came back and left comments more than once. Well, Jos and his film crew were in, I believe, Georgia, at a Dylan show, and struck up a conversation with two girls who were waiting in line. It turned out they had written a song to Dylan, and one thing led to another and Jos and the crew ended up filming them reciting the words of the song into the camera. It makes one of the warmest and most humorous moments of the film, in the version I’ve seen. Well, one of those girls was named Molly, and she was one of those dozen or so people who used to comment on my postings. It was news to her that RWB was slated to be in the film, and it was very startling news to me that Jos and his colleagues had somehow randomly bumped into a regular reader and commenter in this way. How could I not do my bit cheerfully after that?

So, it went. I was very impressed by Jos and his crew — their professionalism, their concern for getting things right, and their knowledge and love of the subject matter. The film I saw had a lot of sensitivity in it. I haven’t seen the reworking of it, and I won’t be able to travel to Toronto to see it this weekend, but as I understand it, it sounds very good, and I hope to see it soon. I also hope it does well for Jos, and that it gets picked up for distribution in the States.

Jos De Putter has been making documentary films since, I think, 1993 or so. I saw several of them last fall at a series in Brooklyn. I’m no film expert, but it seems to me he has a great eye and a great ear, and knows how to give his subjects room to occupy their own space, if you know what I mean. It’s a very particular style of film-making. To illustrate: my own favorite segment, in the version I saw, is probably that of Janet, a woman who is also a school teacher — a normal, upstanding citizen — who attends as many Dylan concerts as she can practicably reach. And she’s willing to drive quite a long way. There’s nothing startling about her story — it’s really very understated — and yet, it’s poignant and symbolic and powerful in its way, and beautifully edited.

So, if you’re in Toronto over the next weekend or so, by all means check it out.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• He’s better when he’s “Not There”
• Well There Was This Movie I Seen One Time
• “Stop Loss” loses