Wadleigh’s record of the 1969 festival is still the concert film all the others have to answer to, and its split-screen cutting is as sharp as it ever was. It is also 224 minutes long and never once off the festival’s side.
Michael Wadleigh took a film crew to a dairy farm near Bethel, New York, in August 1969, and came back with the concert film every concert film since has had to answer to. It runs 224 minutes, and for long stretches nobody is playing anything. People queue for the telephones, sleep in cars, wash in a pond and explain themselves to the camera with the seriousness of the young. That is deliberate, and it is the best thing in the film.
We recommend it, warmly, with two caveats. It is long, and there are sets in the second half where we started counting. And it is entirely on the festival’s side. Every problem the weekend throws up, the rain, the food, the roads, the drugs, is met with a shrug and a shared blanket, and the film never goes looking for anyone who had a bad time.
The famous thing is the split screen, and it deserves to be. Wadleigh cut the film with Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Warnow, Yeu-Bun Yee and Jere Huggins, and between them they turned one wide frame into two or three narrow ones. A guitarist’s hands on the left, his face on the right. The stage in one panel, the hill in the other. Malcolm Hart and Michael Margetts are credited with the photography, and the 16mm grain, the flare when a lens swings into a light and the moments when the operator is plainly being jostled are why it still looks like reporting.
The music is uneven. Richie Havens opens it, soaked in sweat, thrashing at his guitar until he runs out of songs and has to make one up on the spot, and the split screen holds his boot and his face at once. Joan Baez sings to a field so dark the camera can barely find her. Country Joe McDonald leads a sing-along, and Wadleigh prints the words along the bottom of the frame so the cinema can join in, which we found funnier than we expected. Joe Cocker sings With a Little Help from My Friends as if trying to pull something out of the ground, hands clawing at nothing. The Who are the fiercest thing here: Pete Townshend’s arm comes round like a windmill in three panels at once and Keith Moon looks about to fall off his stool. Country Joe and the Fish, without the sing-along, are where we felt the length.
What got to us was not a song. Between sets Wadleigh cuts to the people around the music: farmers, shopkeepers in the town who cannot decide whether they have been charmed or invaded, a couple who met on the road in, the men keeping the place clean and fed. They talk to the camera plainly, without trying to be liked, and we were moved by them more than by anyone on stage, because they are the only people in the film who are not performing. Without them this would be a long album with pictures. There is one stretch, later, which we will not describe, where the film admits that 400,000 people in a field with no shelter is a dangerous thing, and it admits it for about ten minutes.
The rosiness is a real fault. Warnings about bad acid come over the PA as a joke; the food runs out and the town bakes; the traffic is a lark. Nobody is frightened, nobody is robbed, nobody is bored, and we do not believe it. Gimme Shelter (1970), made the same year about the festival at Altamont that went wrong, is the film to watch straight after this one, and it is the harder film. It could not exist without this one. Wadleigh and his editors worked out how concerts would be filmed from then on, and Scorsese took the lesson with him to The Last Waltz (1978).
See it in a cinema if one near you ever shows it; the split screens need width, and on a television the third panel shrinks to a postage stamp. At home, allow it an interval. Certificate 18, 224 minutes, and the first half hour is mostly people arriving.
