Woodstock 1970
I must have seen documentaries about the Woodstock music festival of 1969, but I don't know that I ever saw the original 1970 movie, extended in 1994 by an extra half hour to get to 3 hours and 44 minutes. The movie has no narration and doesn't tell you much of who anyone is. Instead it shows a number of performances plus footage of stuff going on and interviews, mostly with attendees. It is one way of doing things, but I like fact-filled documentaries. As such, I was constantly reading up on what was going on by referring to the Wikipedia articles about the festival, artists, and the movie itself. Why is Joan Baez talking about her husband being in jail? The movie plays around heavily with the order of the performances. I had no idea that the concert went almost 24 hours a day, with The Who performing at 5:00 AM one morning, followed by Jefferson airplane at 8:00 AM. Jimi Hendrix closed the show at 11:00 AM on Monday after the biggest part of the crowd had left. Because of last minute problems, stage lighting couldn't be supported above the stage like normal, so the only lighting at night was from colored spotlights in front of the stage. I have seen where some people complained the sound was terrible but I was surprised at how great everything sounded in the movie, though maybe partly because they only included the very best performances. A big part of the story is the huge numbers of people who attended, about 500,000, causing all kinds of havoc. There is a famous picture of a couple covered by a blanket embracing in a muddy field. They drove as close to the show as the could, walked two miles, and never actually saw the stage before leaving after a day. Food, water, sanitation, and traffic were giant problems. And tons of people were using drugs, but it seems like things mostly worked out. Sadly, the movie leaves out all that great stuff and instead just presents a first person view of everything (R rated; there was a lot of swearing, nudity, and drug use). It was great that the organizers knew to pay the money to put everything on film. In the end, the film is the only part of the event to make the organizers any money, even paying for all the damages caused by non-paying concert goers. Really this movie is a masterpiece of editing. Taking a 3-day concert and boiling it down to under 4 hours couldn't have been easy. But the way they show the footage from multiple cameras on the screen at the same time is used to great effect and seemingly perfectly synchronized. Not all of the music is that great, but it is always interesting (Sha-Na-Na performed?!) and occasionally brilliant, with great performances by The Who, Joe Cocker, and Jimi Hendrix (Hendrix gets additional footage in this extended version of the movie, with little payoff). Despite the great music, what made Woodstock special was the huge number of people and how they made it through some very difficult conditions, including a really mean looking thunderstorm from which there was absolutely no shelter. It would be neat to track down and follow up with many of the people presented in the movie to see what happened to them. The digital copy I bought did not include any of the extras included in some of the blu-ray sets, just the extended version of the movie. The tragedy is that while Woodstock represented this great coming out party for the youth of the 1960's, it came crashing down soon after, not just with Altamont, but Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix would be dead just over a year later. So it goes.
Written: 13 Apr 2024