The music movie Roger Ebert called “the best documentary ever made in America”
The impact of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was felt immediately in pop culture. From the second the 1969 festival ended, it had already crossed over into the realm of myth. The following year, with the release of the Woodstock documentary, the festival would forever be canonised as the premiere rock festival of all time. “Woodstock Nation” was born, and one of the converts was none other than legendary film critic Roger Ebert.
“Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock is an archaeological study of that nation, which existed for three days a year ago. Because of this movie, the Woodstock state of mind now has its own history, folklore, myth,” Ebert wrote in his initial review of the documentary in 1970. “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,” he continues. “It’s a documentary about the highs and lows of the society that formed itself briefly at Woodstock before moving on. It covers that civilisation 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 and no hassles, and with a spirit of informal co-operation,” Ebert wrote. “The spirit survived even though Woodstock was declared a ‘disaster area,’ and a thunderstorm soaked everyone to the skin, and the food ran out. But you know all that.”
“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. One local column complained that Woodstock was fun but didn’t really recreate the actual experience,” Ebert observed. “Well, that would have taken a film three days long, and an audience of 400,000, and rain showers inside the State-Lake Theater, and even then, it would only have been a movie. People who go to movies looking for the ‘real thing’ are looking for the wrong thing. They should go looking, instead, for a real movie.”
“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 60 per cent music and 40 per cent on the people who were there, and that is a good ratio, I think,” Ebert surmises. “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,” he concludes. “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.”
Check out footage from Woodstock down below.
