Featuring:
Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Santana, The Who, Sha-Na-Na,
Ten Years After, John Sebastian, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Country Joe and the Fish, Arlo
Guthrie, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix
Directed by Michael Wadleigh and produced by Bob Maurice.
Review
Defense Attorney: "Where do you live?"
Abbie Hoffman: "I live in Woodstock nation."
Defense Attorney: "Will you tell the court and the jury where it
is?"
Abbie Hoffman: "Yes, it is a nation of alienated young
people. We
carry it around with us as a state of mind, in the same way the Sioux Indians carry the
Sioux nation with them. … "
Michael Wadleigh's WOODSTOCK is an archaeological study of that nation,
which existed for three days in 1969. Because of this movie, the Woodstock state of mind
now has its own history, folklore, myth. In terms of evoking the style and feel of a mass
historical event, WOODSTOCK may be the best documentary ever made in America. But don't
see it for that reason; see it because it is so good to see.
It has a lot of music in it, photographed in an incredible intimacy
with the performers, but it's not by any means only a rock-music movie. It's a documentary
about the highs and lows of a society that formed itself briefly at Woodstock before
moving on. It covers that civilization completely, showing how the musicians sang to it
and the Hog Farm fed it and the Port-O-San man provided it with toilet facilities.
And it shows how 400,000 young people formed the third largest city in
New York State, and ran it for a weekend with no violence, in a spirit of informal
cooperation. The spirit survived even though Woodstock was declared a "disaster
area," and a thunderstorm soaked everyone to the skin, and the food ran out. The
remarkable thing about Wadleigh's film is that it succeeds so completely in making us feel
how it must have been to be there. It does that to the limits that a movie can.
WOODSTOCK does what all good documentaries do. It is a bringer of news.
It reports, it shows, it records, and it interprets. It gives us maybe sixty percent music
and forty percent on the people who were there, and that is a good ratio, I think. The
music is very much part of the event, especially since Wadleigh and his editors have
allowed each performer's set to grow and build and double back on itself without
interference. That is what rock music in concert is all about, as I understand it. Rock on
records is another matter, usually, but in the free form of a concert like Woodstock, the
whole point is that the performers and their audience are into a back-and-forth thing from
which a totally new performance can emerge.
We get that feeling from Jimi Hendrix when he improvises a guitar
arrangement of "The Star Spangled Banner," rockets bursting in air and all. We
get it from Country Joe, poker-faced, leading the crowd through the anti-Vietnam "I
Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." We get it in the raunchy 1950s vulgarity of
Sha-Na-Na doing a tightly choreographed version of "At the Hop." And we get it
so strongly that some kind of strange sensation inhabits our spine, when Joe Cocker and
everybody else in the whole Woodstock nation sings "With a Little Help from My
Friends."
This sort of participation can happen at a live concert, and often
enough it does. But it is hard to get on film, harder than it looks. It is captured in
WOODSTOCK, maybe because Wadleigh's crew understood the music better and had the resources
to shoot 120 miles of film with sixteen cameras. This gave them miles and hours of film to
throw away, but it also gave them a choice when they got into the editing room. They
weren't stuck with one camera pointed at one performer; they could cut to reaction shots,
to multiple images, to simultaneous close-ups when two members of a band did a mutual
improvisation.
And of course they always had the option of remaining simple, even shy,
when the material called for it. One of the most moving moments of the film, for me, is
Joan Baez singing the old Wobbly song "Joe Hill," and then rapping about her
husband David, and then putting down the guitar and singing "Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot," with that voice which is surely the purest and sweetest of our generation.
Wadleigh and company had the integrity to let her just sing it. No tricks. No fancy camera
angles. Just Joan Baez all alone on a pitch-black screen.
But then when the occasion warrants it, they let everything hang out.
When Santana gets to their intricate rhythm thing, Wadleigh goes to a triple-screen and
frames the drummer with two bongo players. All in synchronized sound (which is not
anywhere near as easy as it sounds under outdoor concert conditions). And the editing
rhythm follows the tense, driving Santana lead. The thing about this movie, somehow, is
that the people who made it were right there, right on top of what the performers were
doing.
Watch, for example, the way Richie Havens is handled. He is supposed to
be more or less a folk singer—a powerful one, but still within the realm of folk and
not rock. So you would think maybe he'd seem slightly less there than the hard-rock
people? Not at all, because Wadleigh's crew went after the power in Havens's performance,
and when they got it they stuck so close to it visually that in his second song,
"Freedom," we get moved by folk in the way we ordinarily expect to be moved by
rock.
We see Havens backstage, tired, even a little down. Then he starts
singing, and we don't see his face again, but his thumb on the guitar strings, punishing
them. And then (in an unbroken shot) down to his foot in a sandal, pounding with the beat,
and then the fingers, and then the foot, and only then the face, and now this is a totally
transformed Richie Havens, and we are so close to him, we see he doesn't have any upper
teeth. Not that it matters; but we don't usually get that close to anybody in a movie.
Moving along with the music, paralleling it sometimes on a split
screen, are the more traditionally documentary aspects of WOODSTOCK. There are the
townspeople, split between those who are mean and ordinary and closed off, and those like
the man who says, "Kids are hungry, you gotta feed 'em. Right?" And the farmer
who made his land available. And kids skinny-dipping, and turning on, and eating and
sleeping.
Wadleigh never forces this material. His movie is curiously objective,
in fact. Not neutral; he's clearly with the kids. But objective; showing what's there
without getting himself in the way, so that the experience comes through directly.
With all that film to choose from in the editing room, he was able to
give us dozens of tiny unrehearsed moments that sum up the Woodstock feeling. The
skinny-dipping, for example, is free and unself-conscious, and we can see that. But how
good it is to see that kid sitting on a stump in the water and turning to the camera and
saying, "Man, a year ago I never would have believed this was the way to swim. But,
man, this is the way to swim." What you're left with finally, though, are the people.
I almost said the "kids," but that wouldn't include the friendly chief of
police, or the farmer, or Hugh Romney from the Hog Farm ("Folks, we're planning
breakfast in bed for 400,000 people"), or the Port-O-San man, or the townspeople who
took carloads of food to the park.
Wadleigh and his team have recorded all the levels. The children. The
dogs (who were allowed to run loose in this nation). The freaks and the straights. The
people of religion (Swami Gi and three nuns giving the peace sign). The cops (eating
Popsicles). The Army (dropping blankets, food, and flowers from helicopters). WOODSTOCK is
a beautiful, complete, moving, ultimately great film, and now that many years have come to
pass and the Woodstock generation is attacked for being just as uptight as all the rest of
the generations, it's good to have this movie around to show that, just for a weekend
anyway, that wasn't altogether the case.
