The clas­sic fea­ture doc­u­men­tary Wood­stock cap­tures the full expe­ri­ence of the near-mythical 1969 fes­ti­val of the same name, from sep­tic tanks to traf­fic jams to brown acid. It remains an impor­tant record of one of the most peace­ful spon­ta­neous gath­er­ings in human his­tory, not to men­tion the brief-lived spirit of the hip­pie move­ment as a whole.

The orig­i­nal ver­sion directed by Michael Wedleigh, with a young Mar­tin Scors­ese as assis­tant direc­tor and edi­tor and Thelma Schoon­maker as edi­tor, was released the fol­low­ing year and played con­tin­u­ously in the­aters for years. Oddly, it is the only film that the last sur­viv­ing human on earth (Charl­ton Hes­ton) chooses to watch repeat­edly in The Ωmega Man. A Director’s Cut added 40 min­utes of addi­tional footage in 1994, but the new 40^th Anniver­sary edi­tion is a whop­ping four hours long, “Inter­fuck­ing­mis­sion” included. It’s unclear whether or not Scors­ese and Schoon­maker were involved in either of the expanded editions.

The film is exper­i­men­tal in for­mat, extend­ing even to the aspect ratio. Nearly the first ten min­utes are win­dow­paned, lead­ing me at first to sus­pect some­thing was wrong with the DVD. But the movie then alter­nates from win­dow­pane to widescreen to splitscreen. The only other movie I can think of off the top of my head that played as loose with aspect ratios is the open­ing sequence to Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It.

With a leisurely four hours to fill, the first full 25 min­utes con­cern the arrival of early fans while the stage is still being con­structed. A surely ironic mural on one of the famously psy­che­delic car­a­van buses reads “even God loves Amer­ica.” One of the festival’s most iconic images — a pair of nuns flash­ing a peace sign to cam­era — may have been in fact par­tially staged (as alleged in Ang Lee’s Tak­ing Wood­stock). Based on the mem­oirs of Elliot Tiber, Lee’s film goes on to tell a con­flict­ing, largely dis­counted, ver­sion of events in which a small town mis­fit mid­wifes the fes­ti­val, which in turn frees his iden­tity and trans­forms his family.

The first per­for­mance footage in Wood­stock is an extended unbro­ken close-up of Richie Havens’ intense solo per­for­mance. Finally, the cam­eras turn the other way around and look out at the stag­ger­ingly huge crowd. Indeed, as later scenes make clear, so many peo­ple arrived that the ear­li­est arrivals couldn’t phys­i­cally leave. That such a large num­ber of peo­ple coex­isted peace­fully while quite lit­er­ally being trapped is a minor miracle.

Every­body knows the tale of the gar­gan­tuan crowd, but I under­es­ti­mated the scale of the con­cert itself. In my mind, I always pic­tured a tiny stage dwarfed by throngs of hip­pies, but in actu­al­ity, the fes­ti­val itself would have been a large pro­duc­tion even if the crowds hadn’t mate­ri­al­ized. Before sim­ple logic forced the orga­niz­ers to waive the ticket fee, the fes­ti­val had a multi-million-dollar bud­get foot­ing a mas­sive stage, huge tow­ers, power, food, light­ing, and sound system.

Not all the acts would nec­es­sar­ily be known to later gen­er­a­tions watch­ing the doc­u­men­tary, but there is some sur­pris­ing vari­ety in genre; Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie’s folk, Sly and the Fam­ily Stone’s funk, and Sha-Na-Na’s retro pop went a long way towards break­ing up the some­times tedious stretches of blues-rock jam­ming. Some key per­for­mances either weren’t filmed (such as The Band, at their request) or shot but excluded from the film (par­tic­u­larly The Grate­ful Dead, whose per­for­mance was com­pro­mised by heavy rain and tech­ni­cal issues), and some of the era’s top acts were absent alto­gether (most notably The Bea­t­les, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones — but Scors­ese would later catch up with all three of them in his own doc­u­men­taries Liv­ing In the Mate­r­ial World, No Direc­tion Home, and Shine a Light). Per­son­ally, I most liked see­ing The Who and Jimi Hen­drix at the height of their pow­ers, and was pleas­antly sur­prised by an obvi­ously ner­vous Crosby, Stills and Nash. CSN claimed it was only their sec­ond gig, and they seemed vis­i­bly relieved to receive applause. Each act was allot­ted only 1–2 songs each, even in the extended ver­sion of the film, which for many of these artists is not enough. I would have liked to see more Who footage, espe­cially the famous moment where the often tem­pes­tu­ous Pete Town­shend famously booted coun­ter­cul­tural icon Abbie Hoff­man off­stage: “Fuck off! Fuck off my fuck­ing stage!”

Inter­views with audi­ence mem­bers dur­ing the con­cert demon­strate that they were already self-mythologizing the event as it was occur­ring around them. A leg­end quickly spread that the gath­er­ing was the equiv­a­lent of a spon­ta­neous city. Not quite, but the actual total of 500,000 peo­ple was noth­ing to sneeze at. But they were all cor­rect that it was noth­ing less than a mir­a­cle that that many peo­ple could gather in one place and sur­vive a mas­sive storm on the sec­ond day, all with­out vio­lence. That is, aside from Town­shend again: “The next fuckin’ per­son that walks across this stage is gonna get fuckin’ killed!”

The film includes co-organizer Michael Lang and con­cert­go­ers fac­ing hos­tile inter­view­ers deter­mined to express their bias that rock music is empty and mean­ing­less. Scors­ese empha­sized sim­i­lar con­fronta­tions in No Direc­tion Home, where Dylan is dogged by con­de­scend­ing reporters deter­mined to under­mine his polit­i­cal and social import.

Wedleigh’s cam­era often seeks out nude young women. The bla­tant scopophilia misses the point of the bur­geon­ing equal­ity between the sexes by the late 60s — not only are the hip­pies embrac­ing free love, they’re also obvi­ously com­fort­able enough in each other’s com­pany to bathe together like chil­dren in a bath­tub. I can’t believe I’m com­plain­ing about the sight of naked girls, but Wedleigh’s cam­era is often just plain lustful.

Aside from free love and unashamed nudity, the next most alien aspect for con­tem­po­rary post-War-on-Drugs view­ers is the prag­matic atti­tude towards con­trolled sub­stances. One of the first peo­ple seen bran­dish­ing a joint onscreen is none other than Jerry Gar­cia, despite his band not appear­ing in the per­for­mance footage. Everybody’s heard about the infa­mously dodgy brown acid, but dig this emi­nently prag­matic announce­ment issued from the stage: “Hey man, it’s your trip, don’t let me stop you, but if you feel like exper­i­ment­ing, try half a tab.” In con­trast, we see a huge crowd prac­tic­ing Kun­dalini yoga, which the guru espouses as an alter­na­tive to drugs.

One of the most strik­ing sequences is when the doc­u­men­tary steps back from the pro­ceed­ings to take in another angle that wouldn’t ordi­nary be cov­ered in a typ­i­cal con­cert doc­u­men­tary. Wedleigh takes the time to meet a Port-O-San main­tainer with one son attend­ing the fes­ti­val and another fly­ing heli­copters in the Viet­nam DMZ.

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

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