Bob Dylan in Correspondence

On the occasion of Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday—it was, of course, yesterday—it’s worth pondering the surprising convergences of the decisive spirits of the era. In 1988, interviewed by the French magazine Actuel at the time of the release of his film “Soigne Ta Droite” (“Keep Up Your Right”)—a film that prominently features the French pop duo Les Rita Mitsouko—Jean-Luc Godard spoke of the devastating motorcycle accident that he had suffered in 1971. The interviewer chimed in, “A motorcycle accident, like Dylan,” and Godard took up the theme, speaking at length about his own imaginary relationship with Dylan, whom he considered an “equal,” a peer, and someone with whom he considered himself to be in “correspondence.” Godard acknowledged that he did see his own motorcycle accident as corresponding to Dylan’s, from 1966, and added:

I have a great deal of sympathy for him when I read critics who eviscerate him, who call him a “has-been.” Sometimes I read Rolling Stone to get news of him. I want to see whether he’s on the charts. I tried to get him to act in who-knows-what film, a project in the United States, and then all of a sudden he turned toward Christ and I said to myself, “That will happen to me too.” I forgot all about it, but when I made “Hail Mary,” I remembered: “Look, Dylan warned me.”

The movie for which he wanted Dylan was “King Lear” (the chronology got a little mixed up; “Hail Mary” was already finished and released when “Lear” was commissioned, though Godard had already been hoping to do it for several years), and told another journalist, “I’d have wanted Dylan, but the Americans are like kings, they’re untouchable, it’s as if I asked [the French President] Mitterrand to play a small role of a secretary because his face was right for the part, he might want to do it but he can’t.” But Godard did see Dylan’s film “Renaldo and Clara,” which he found “sympathique.”

Dylan, for his part, interviewed in Rolling Stone by Jonathan Cott in 1985, cited a list of his cinematic influences: Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, Tod Browning—and Godard:

I figured Godard had the accessibility to make what he made, he broke new ground. I never saw any film like “Breathless,” but once you saw it, you said: “Yeah, man, why didn’t I do that, I could have done that.” Okay, he did it, but he couldn’t have done it in America.

What Godard couldn’t have done in America—because nobody in America had done it—was to take the American genre film as a basis for, indeed an example of, high art. But, like Godard (whose new film, “Film Socialisme,” opens here on June 3rd), Dylan is also one of the great modern historicists. (One of the most fascinating things in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” is the reconstruction of the young Robert Zimmerman’s impassioned discoveries in his own personal audiothèque.) It’s no surprise that these most radical of classicists are the most extremely self-transformative, endlessly self-revolutionizing artists of their times.

P.S. Maybe Godard and Dylan will yet find another opportunity to work together? It’s worth mentioning that “Film Socialisme” features, in a brief but memorable performance, Patti Smith.

P.P.S. I’ve never seen “Renaldo and Clara”; revival? DVD? When?