there's no "self" – I'm not there, I'm everywhere

Each actor represents a different part of Dylan’s (or the media’s perception of his) persona.

- interpretation #1:

• musical nomad (black child Marcus Carl Franklin)
• Greenwich Village prophet (Christian Bale) who tells the truth through folk music
• movie-star-turned-lousy-husband-and-father (Heath Ledger)
• star who neglected his fans (Cate Blanchett)
• confusing man submitting to an uncomfortable Q&A (Ben Whishaw)
• outlaw not unlike Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) living in a fantastic world of his own creation

- interpretation #2:

• Marcus Carl Franklin: embodies the early stages of Dylan’s musical career, imitating Woody Guthrie’s songs while in search of his own voice.
• Bale: personifying Dylan as the character Jack Rollins. When first presented, he is the folk troubadour, the early 60′s folk hero. He becomes a musical legend and the voice of a generation. Then he seems to disappear. Later in the the film, Rollins reappears to the public eye. While still singing, the character is now a born again Christian and pastor.
• Heath Ledger: symbolizes the part of Dylan that attempted to settle down and lead a somewhat normal life. Ledger’s character is often away from his wife and children.
• Cate Blanchett: reproduces the mid-60′s Dylan, the one who defied his fans by going electric, who embraced the art of rock ‘n’ roll, the one who mumbled his way through interviews full of contradictions and sarcastic quips.
• Ben Whishaw: Dylan the poet. Self-aware of his artistic importance, he confidently and eloquently reflects on his role in musical history as he shifted from one character to another.
• Richard Gere: the outlaw, Billy The Kid. A man on the run from his own identity. He lives in an unrealistic world. A symbol for the Dylan that wishes to disappear from popular culture.

- This movie really is about how the media has taken a quiet, loner singer-songwriter and made him into something that can’t be reasonably explained.

- The film almost as a spoof of the biopic genre, since it basically pronounces the entire concept of summarising a person through a series of biographical details to be an essentially flawed one. (kenny: in other words, this is a ANTI-BIOGRAPHY film in disguise of a biography film!)

- What the film is most interested in: the problems arising from living in a media-saturated world, and particularly being a public figure in a media-saturated world.

- The approach of this film is a perfectly succinct representational strategy for conveying the postmodern notion of the self as multiple, and the idea that the ‘true’, ‘inner self’ is essentially an illusion.

- The film is not about giving us an understanding of Dylan, but it tries tell us the very impossibility of such a project.

- Dylan, as represented here, is painfully aware of this function of the media, and undertakes not to allow himself to be fixed or pinned down in one image, instead always shifting and reinventing his persona in an attempt to never be misrepresented.

- Through the way he is presented in I’m Not There, Dylan effectively becomes a sort of unwilling postmodern hero whose almost every move is a sidestep away from singularity and coherence – or, more specifically, away from being represented as coherent or singular.

- We are in a hall of endless distorting mirrors, where identity is provisional and appearance is deceptive: whichever Dylan you think he is, he’s not.

- In a sense these quotations exist to conjure up a period, and specifically a period in which media and representation became widely recognised as a political and ideological battleground

- I’m Not There says, among other things, that the presence of politics in works of art, like the presence of the artist’s personality, is at once unavoidable and virtually inexpressible.

- Gere/Dylan/Billy isn’t shot down, he escapes the 19th-century law and finds the 20th-century guitar that once belonged to Woody Guthrie. This moment, with its strikingly “impossible” temporal logic, celebrates the essentially impersonal freedom of art.

Styles and Influences
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- The documentary-style of Bale’s portion, as well as the continual nods to Godard (the gunshot-cutting of Vivre Sa Vie [1962]), Bergman (the close-up spider of Persona [1966]), and particularly Fellini (the Jude section is shot almost entirely as if it were 8 ½ [1963]).

- Haynes’s references to films like Masculin-Féminin, Petulia, A Hard Day’s Night, 8 1/2, and Darling…serve to underscore that Sixties cinema was always already influencing the cultural-political reality from which Dylan sprang.

- Of course, the earliest, most memorably succinct formulation of this idea—the demolition of a stable, coherent, metaphysically grounded self—came from the 19th-century French poet who inspired Dylan and whom Haynes invokes early on in I’m Not There, Arthur Rimbaud: “Je est un autre” (“I is an other”)

- The film’s commits to devices from the Godard playbook: pastiche, allusion, quotation, the use of actors to construct allegorical or phantasmatic images of people rather than plausibly represent or incarnate them.

- The spiders and Giraffes are a homage to Fellini and Bergman.

Sources:
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http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/im-not-there.php
http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/?2008,2,201
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/so07/imnotthere.htm
http://dev.wsws.org/articles/2007/dec2007/imno-d28.shtml
wikipedia