'Woodstock' on Film No Love for Rock

DIRECTOR Michael Wadleigh has insisted time and again that he retained total control over Woodstock. Now if the people who write about movies in this country knew anything about them, he wouldn't dare make that admission; but as it is, the Woodstock movie is being hailed as imaginative moviemaking. It's not; it's poorly shot, clumsily edited, has no new ideas about the event, nor any on how the event should be presented. If you were at Woodstock, you'll know the film for a shuck; if not, you'll suspect.

More than half of Woodstock directly records the musical performances, and considering the ones Wadleigh has chosen the emphasis is fatal (one film we didn't need was a grainier Monterey Pop ). The rest is taken up with sundry interviews in which predictable subjects-freaks, police, old folks, etc.- make predictable commentary (predictable, that is, if you know the Woodstock myth-i.e., the police man will say these are a great bunch of kids, etc.), and a variety of material which aims at revealing the life style of the populace. With the exception of the initial interview, in which an old, largely inarticulate fellow remembers that "there must have been at least a million of em," a romanticized long-lensed shot of a couple lying down to make love, and the mud-sliding sequence, this sociological material is unimaginative in the extreme. A montage of different babies, overlaid with John Sebastian's saccharine ballad to his son, just about sums it up.

I know from the film that Wadleigh and company don't like movies; and you'd have a hard time convincing me that they have any love for rock music either. What's missing from a sound track whose reproduction quality is very fine (and happily played very loud) is precisely the intense visual experience one gets from concerts. Two facts: the best seats at concerts are not the ones besieged by the best sound-they're the ones which afford the freest view, permitting the eye to wander at random; and great groups have great visual styles. This is all obvious, but it dictates how one makes rock and roll movies. In particular it points to a desperate need for establishing the whole group in long shot. Beyond that, the cutting must always keep in mind the relation of any given performer to the rest of the group. Wadleigh has vague ideas about what establishing shots are: that would be all right if his editing were less overbearing. As it is he takes our eye to invariably dull and non-descriptive images, and then insists that these are indeed what's important about a number. The Who are one of the greatest stage acts, but Roger Daltry in close-up just doesn't carry their sets- especially when Wadleigh splits the screen in three parts and gives us, yes, three simultaneous close-ups.

There may be an explanation. Wadleigh claims to have shot more film than any other twenty-seven year old alive, and perhaps if he'd spent less time behind the camera he'd have a better sense of structure. For Woodstock is an object lesson in how important formal control remains in even the most straightforward of shooting situations.

BEFORE the filming began. Wadleigh told his crew that when something turned them on they should stay with it. Now we know that this charmingly democratic principle wouldn't work in say, a stage production or a ballet, and there's no reason to suppose it's responsible for good movies either. Cameramen are, after all, spectators like the rest of us. When you shoot film you naturally want to have something nice and cinematic to look at as long as you're working; therefore cameramen are drawn to certain types of shots. Unfortunately, from the look of Woodstock, everyone was drawn to the same simple events. No one bothered to film the stuff that one needs to edit a good sequence. For instance, to return to the Who, Roger Daltry wore his shimmering white fringe vest, a natural attraction to a cameraman; so everybody must have filmed him in close-up, because they liked the way the light played on that vest and his blonde hair.

To top it all off, the music itself is not very good. There were thirty-five acts at Woodstock, and there are only thirteen in this film. The choices made here remain inexplicable, hence you should go prepared to be bored. A few of the heavies: Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Santana, Sebastian, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, each set more intolerably mediocre than the last and if you start with Baez doing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," you can imagine where that takes you. Where are the Airplane, or the Dead, or even the Band?

WOODSTOCK was an important event, but its importance didn't lie in ad slogans like "three days of love, peace, and music." Or rather it did; at Woodstock, hip culture proudly announced that it was just a young Yahoo America, that those long hair types you folks been fearing out there just want their drugs and music, courtesy of MGM or Warner, it doesn't matter. The ballgame was over for the Vulgar Marxists; that's what Peter Townshend was saying as he clubbed Abbie Hoffmann off the stage (no, it's not in the movie). The game metaphor had won out. Politics is a game, see, and if you play politics you play their game. Controlling your own life is a Western myth, man, part of the free will game, 'cause it's in the stars of your own karma, so you'll just have to let it happen. "I don't want mass change," states one hip type who's been living communally and says "ball" a lot, "cause mass change just means mass insanity. I just want to be who I am." Like, Richard Nixon hasn't found himself.

Someone interviews the man who cleans out the latrines. He is a cheerful man. He likes these kids-they're great Americans. One of his sons is here, he says; the other is over in Vietnam. "He's up in the DMZ, right now, flying helicopters." In my dreams I keep misplacing them. Nick the Helicopter pilot sweeps the hair out of his eyes, puffing dreamily on a joint, and releases forty rockets on the terrain below. Bhammmm! every nerve in Jeff's body overloaded, exploded, curled and died, as the mescaline grains rushed... But it's not true. Jeff strafes the Vietnamese. His brother Nick wakes up late. It is too late to watch the Woodstock movie, so he goes out to score dope, maybe some chicks.