Of course the film moved me. It would move anybody. Now do you want to get into an argument with me about it!?!
The folk guitar voice had had its moment. It was time to move on. The only "betrayal" was of cliché and received opinions, which were never what Bob Dylan was about..
That may be confusing. I put “betrayal” in quotes, note. In moving away from acoustic, which was a new direction Dylan personally had to take, he was not betraying anything, but he was rejecting repeating himself. The “folk guitar voice had had its moment” for him. When you ask, “So why was it 'time to move on'? Is the need to speak out limited to only a certain period in one's life?” You tell me. In some cases I guess it is. Dylan identified with topical protest more during the early Sixties, than later. But in his mind he was never quite the protest singer you seem to describe him as. He spoke out against injustice in his songs of that period, but he didn't see that as his role in life. He was not speaking out against injustice in "HIghway 66 Revisited" or "The Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." He had lots of other ideas and themes. He did not wish to be pigeon-holed.
The betrayal was never one of cliché since there was nothing clichéd about anything Dylan sang or sang about.
Here you are simply misreading me. As I pointed out above, my meaning is that he didn't "betray" anything, but he rejected what for him would have been a cliché to go on doing. There was no betrayal of cliché . There was no betrayal at all. And what Dylan rejected in musical style and /or content was not cliché for other people, it's simply that for him to continue doing it would have felt like cliché for him. He was a shape-shifter, and he had to shift shape.
His betrayal was felt by those who believed they had found a voice that would not be silenced.
No, I don't think there was really a betrayal. In thinking Dylan had "betrayed" them, a certain public was mistaken, because he had never meant to be their voice in the first place. He was taken to be the poet of his generation and the spokesman of protest and revolt, but he was really not thinking of himself that way. That was pigeon-holing. He moved on. That doesn't mean that protest is cliché or that folksinging is some kind of moldy-fig thing, since as you correctly point out, a lot of original aritsts were folksingers, or could be seen as such, like Woody Guthrie..