Arena — Season 1, Episode 577: Bob Dylan: No Direction Home: Part 2
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Martin Scorsese delicately balances Dylan's internal world with signpost images from the external as he follows the newsworthy phenomenon of a 23-year-old star laden with expectations - from the old left to become a political activist, and from the media to articulate the concerns of America's youth. But Dylan was already on the move, finding a new musical vocabulary with which to capture the complexity of a seismic cultural shift, injecting a heightened sense of poetry into his writing and committing the crime of adding electricity to his music. By 1966 Dylan's personal world had become a never-ending journey of touring and press conferences - with no direction home.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.