At approximately 2:30 pm on Saturday 2 December 2000, two members of the Surveillance Camera Players (Gus and Bill) performed Gus's adaptation of the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in front of a web cam in Times Square, New York. The SCP's first in front of a Times Square web cam since the group staged Animal Farm on 22 July 2000, this performance wasn't viewed by anyone who could download a picture and send it to the group. There wasn't time to arrange it. The SCP didn't plan on performing in Times Square and did so only when it was decided that their original location (a public mall next to the offices of SONY, for whom Bob Dylan is a recording artist) wasn't going to work out. Times Square was chosen because it was close-by the original location and because it was sure to be filled with people, despite the biting cold.
Gus has been working on an adaptation of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ever since she first started performing with the SCP. The song or, rather, the ingenious use to which it is put in D.J. Pennebaker's 1965 film Don't Look Back, is absolutely perfect for adaptation and performance by the group. Rather than record a "live" in concert version of the song just for the film or "lip sync" along with the version already recorded, Dylan and/or Pennebaker came up with a novel third option, one clearly derived from silent films. Standing on a street in New York City and, no doubt, listening to a playback of the song, Dylan would be filmed displaying a series of placards upon which the song's lyrics had been printed in letters large and legible enough to be "read" by the camera. Dylan wouldn't pretend to sing the words; he would literally keep his mouth shut and let the placards do his singing/lip syncing for him. Using either a reflection of himself in a mirror or a stagehand to tell him when to move on to the next placard, Dylan would have to do his best to hold up the right placard at the right time. (If they were making a "real" silent film, Dylan/Pennebaker wouldn't worry about discrepancies in the matching, of course, because there would be no soundtrack to which to match the placards.)
In the end, the "trick" worked. Though there are some discrepancies and slips, Dylan managed to match placard with song-lyric for the duration of the entire song. Because certain "poetic" liberties were taken in the making of the placards, which sometimes leave out a word or two so that the line will fit, the little discrepancies and slips between word-as-image and word-as-sound do not seem clumsy or amateurish, but playful and knowing, instead.
As a result, the film, despite its apparent dependence upon the song, could do without the soundtrack and function quite successfully as a silent film.Contact the Surveillance Camera Players
By e-mail e-mail:info@notbored.org
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
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