Unseen Cinema: Is This the Origin of the Theme for Dylan's I've Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You?

A couple weeks ago I picked up a set of DVDs titled Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941. It's a fascinating collection with seven DVDs loaded with 20 hours of rare footage and experimental techniques in what was then a totally new medium. From the start the film industry has been fascinated with exploring the possibilities of film. The 155 short films gathered in this collection 

Here is Amazon's description of the set:

7 DVDs – 20 Hours - 155 Classics of Avant Garde Cinema! "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941" reveals hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad from the invention of cinema until World War II, and offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production. Many of the films have not been available since their creation, some have never been screened in public, and almost all have been unavailable in copies as good as these until now. Sixty of the world's leading film archive collections cooperated with Anthology Film Archives to bring this long-neglected period of film history back to life for modern audiences.

Disc 1 is titled The Mechanized Eye, dealing with experiments in technique and form. The third disc is devoted to music and abstraction. Disc four explores new directions in storytelling. But it's the fifth disc that stopped me. Disc five is titled Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled.

It's New York at a time when skyscrapers were emerging, when the city was flowering. It's the story of a city being told in the language of cinema. Just as music has its own language, so too does cinema, and the creativity involved is quite sophisticated. Keep in mind that this was pre-digital, pre-CGI. Film makers were inventing ways to do special effects. It was an amazing era of discovery.

 

WHAT PROMPTED THIS POST however was this. There is a song on Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways that has a section that sounds almost identical to the first part of a music track here on disc 5 of Unseen Cinema. The parallels were uncanny. 

In the movie it sounds a bit like a string symphony but it has that same undulation as the waves upon which Dylav sings

I'm sittin' on my terrace, lost in the stars
Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars
Been thinking it all over and I've thought it all through
I've made up my mind to give myself to you

For what it's worth, when I listened to this album a couple times, that tune stayed with me for more than a week, something I consider unusual after so few listens.  

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Here's where you can learn more about Unseen Cinema.

Avant-garde cinema remains unseen for all sorts of reasons. Because it's rare. Because it's elusive. Because the mainstream distribution and exhibition apparatus is not designed to serve it (and, arguably, to a large extent is designed to suppress and deny it).

And here's where you can acquire your own copy of Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Here are a couple snapshots from one of the other films. These were produced in the days before talkies... 

 

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Embrace it.