Woodstock: The Director's Cut [1969] [DVD]

Everyone has their own ideas about Woodstock: the high-point of a golden age of optimism, a chaotic, badly organized mess, an uneven mixture of performers and performances, a clash between the conservative townspeople and a vast invasion of hippies, a religious experience... the list goes on. This movie does an excellent job at capturing all these aspects (and others) of the event, sometimes using multiple images to represent more than one of them simultaneously. The intermingling of the performances with other scenes creates a well-rounded picture, and makes this much more than just a concert film. Sometimes the juxtaposition is magical - one of my favourite moments is, while one camera is showing Carlos Santana as he grimaces his way through a characteristically melodic guitar solo, another is focussed on a girl in the audience as she responds to - it seems - each and every note.

There are other buried treasures in here as well - for example, I'd never realised how beautiful Grace Slick was (probably because I'd heard so many tales about her unpleasant personality) or, for that matter, how much Janis Joplin reminded me of Ozzy Osbourne in his earlier days. To be sure, some of the music is more dispensible than others (and some of the performances have clearly been cleaned up - or completely overdubbed - after the event): I could never see the point of Sha Na Na, and I still find myself nodding off during Ten Years After's "Going Home" (sure, Alvin Lee's a fantastic guitarist, but he seems to spend 90% of the song not playing it). But they're more than made up for by the magic: Country Joe getting the crowd on its feet with his impromptu "Fixin' To Die Rag", Pete Townshend swaggering through "Summertime Blues", Joe Cocker's catarthic "Little Help From My Friends" and Hendrix's appearance right at the end, as if just descended from a spacecraft: "I see that we meet again, hmmmm...".

People gripe about the quality of the sound, the picture and about having to sit through too much footage on crowd scenes, etc. They are missing the point of this movie.

For starters, this was filmed towards the end of the sixties, the technology used at the time was as good as it could have been. Obviously by today's standards it falls short. Regardless, a momentous event was recorded. This was the last cry of the Summer of Love. The movie is a much about the people who attended as those who performed on stage. This is typical of a festival goer's experience. The world had not seen anything like if before and probably will never again. As Dickens would have put it: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".

Enjoy this movie for what it is, not what you would like it to be.

Surely this was filmed 100 years ago? It was certainly another world. The innocence and kindheartedness of nearly all the people in the film is what strikes this cynic the most.

The promoters who accept they are going to "take a big bath" when they realise they have to take down the fences and make it a free concert for safety reasons.

The landowner who can't believe the amount of people who have come to his farm

The locals (most of them anyway) cheerfully giving food and water to the kids and commenting about how respectful they are

The kids going to a music festival but for some reason expecting and getting so much more - and then queuing to phone home and tell the parents they're okay!

The performers who knew something special was happening and did their bit to make history.

At more than 3 hours the film could have seemed too long but it doesn't as the performances and interviews with concert-goers mix perfectly. There are few interviews with the performers as the director recognises it was really all about the kids.

It would be interesting to see present day interviews with people in the film to see their current day view on what happened at Woodstock but in the meantime we can only enjoy this living piece of history.