I Shall Be Released

Some of the greatest concert footage from the ’70s has only become visible over the course of the previous 12 months, and ended up in two films that couldn’t be more different in their approaches, yet are united in presenting themselves as auteurist conundrums. In both cases this also has to do with their convoluted production histories: Amazing Grace finally presents long-unavailable material shot during a legendary live album recording by Aretha Franklin; Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is best described as a somewhat ironic revision of Dylanshot material, some of which had previously been featured in a notorious film maudit which—in a postmodern gambit characteristic of Scorsese’s “Dylanesque” smoke-and-mirrors approach—goes unnamed.

So, in one corner, we have a seemingly straightforward record of the two consecutive evenings over which Aretha Franklin recorded her eponymous and epochal gospel album in front of an audience at Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in January 1972. Those two electrifying performances were captured by a group of 16mm cameramen, overseen by actor-turned-director Sydney Pollack, then just on the verge of becoming a major player after the critical and financial success of his Depression-era drama (1969). However, Pollack—who had understandably accepted the assignment as soon as he heard Franklin’s name—was not familiar with documentary practice. (He would only venture back to that). Incredibly, Pollack and his crew failed to use clappers to synchronize audio and image recording, an embarrassing blunder that rendered the material essentially unusable. So instead of accompanying the release of Aretha’s immensely successful double album according to plan, “the film, because of technical problems, was never finished,” as it is modestly phrased in the opening text of what has become a somewhat different film several decades later.