Todd Haynes' "...Not a Bob Dylan Movie"

Speaking of hybrid and shifting identities, inner logic, quoting, self-conscious representation, nebulous time, films within a film, metaphor, metanarrative, etc.—the new film by Todd Haynes loosely based on Bob Dylan, "I'm Not There," sounds like a fluid montage that could be good inspiration for making nonlinear film. The character of Bob Dylan is played by six different actors, including Cate Blanchett. The process of making the film is compared to painting while stoned. An article in the NYT:

This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie, Robert Sullivan, NYT Oct. 7

Haynes generally makes films one of two ways: either with a story line or as a collage of ideas; the latter he once compared to painting while high. “I used to love getting stoned, playing music, getting lost in that canvas and not knowing what it was going to be,” he has said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted paintings, made cards filled with quotes from Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New Testament. “I will open my mouth in parables,” Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew. “I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” He copied down pages and pages of quotes from social commentaries, from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his notebooks, under the heading “governing concepts/themes,” he wrote: “America obsessed with authenticity/authenticity the perfect costume/America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.” For Robbie, Heath Ledger’s Dylan, whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, “A relationship doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not unlike Vietnam, which it parallels).” The notes themselves can seem like a great cache of insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with colors and graphics, reeking of time spent cramming. “I feel like anytime I’ll work on a film, it’s like a giant dissertation, a gigantic undertaking, and this is probably the biggest one,” Haynes told me. “Probably the Ph.D.”