Full theatrical version of "Renaldo and Clara"

Voila!

Some of you may have seen the version of Renaldo and Clara which has been floating around on YouTube, broken up into parts. What you should know is that it has been significantly altered to get around content restrictions. In total, it is missing about 35 minutes' worth of material, mostly concert footage. This is not the fault of the uploader—he/she did what was necessary; the videos would've been blocked otherwise—but the end result is very choppy. Plus, the music is an essential part of the film.

The version I have posted here has all of the musical scenes intact. It has everything intact. This is the full "theatrical" cut of Renaldo and Clara, which was shown on European television before being withdrawn from circulation by Dylan in the early 1980s. All circulating copies of Renaldo and Clara are sourced from VHS recordings of one of the European television airings. What this means is that, in terms of picture/sound quality, the film comes in two basic flavours: slightly grainy and very grainy. YouTube version is very grainy; this version is slightly grainy. Until Dylan, Inc. sees fit to grace us with an official Blu-Ray, slightly grainy is as good as it gets.

BOB DYLAN: [Renaldo and Clara] is no puzzle, it's A-B-C-D, but the composition's like a game. ... The interest is not in the literal plot but in the associated textures—colours, themes, sounds.

ALLEN GINSBERG: It's built in a very interesting way. What [Dylan] did was, he shot about 110 hours of film, or more, and he looked at all the scenes. Then he put all the scenes on index cards, according to some preconceptions he had when he was directing the shooting. Namely, themes: God, rock 'n' roll, art, poetry, marriage, women, sex, Bob Dylan, poets, death—maybe 18 or 20 thematic preoccupations. Then he also put on index cards all the different characters, as well as scenes. He also marked on index cards the dominant colour—blue or red—and certain other images that go through the movie, like the rose and the hat, and Indians—American Indians—so that he finally had a cross-file of all that. And then he went through it all again and began composing it thematically, weaving these specific compositional references in and out. So it’s compositional, and the idea was not to have a "plot" but to have a composition of those themes. ... It's a painter's film, and was composed like that. Each time I see it, it becomes more logical—not rational, but logical.

As a companion piece, I would recommend reading this conversation Dylan had with Allen Ginsberg in October 1977, in which he explained at length—and with evident enthusiasm—how he went about putting the film together, and what the finished product meant to him.

 

This is great! Thanks!!