Word: wadleigh
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DIRECTOR Michael Wadleigh has insisted time and again that he retained total control over Woodstock. New 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 movie-making. 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 Wodstock 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 policeman 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...
Making the movie was an enormous and sometimes haphazard undertaking. Director-Cinematographer Michael Wadleigh organized a 25-man crew on only a few days' notice, shot over 120 hours of footage, then edited it all down in a frantic seven months. It is no small tribute to Wadleigh's dexterity that the film's three-hour running time passes with the mesmerizing speed of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo. There could comfortably be even more. Using such intricate optical effects as split screen, overlapping and double framing, Wadleigh has expanded and enriched the original musical performances...
Sinuous Color. Wadleigh is equally successful at conveying the sociological aspects of the event through concise interviews with townspeople, festival organizers, police and members of the audience. Everyone from a chief of police to a maintenance man for the Port-O-San portable toilet corporation gets his say. Woodstock, however, is not an unrelieved celebration. For every shot of easy affection in the grass and innocent group bathing in the nude, there is a scene in the medical tent, or the ominous voice of the onstage announcers: "The word is that some of the brown acid being passed around...
...technical expertise used to achieve Woodstock's pulsating, visceral effects should stand as a model of non-fiction film making. Particularly outstanding are the sinuous color photography (a good deal of it done by Wadleigh himself) and the editing by T. Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese-a masterly combination of taste, timing and theatrics. There are sequences -such as one in which John Sebastian dedicates a song to a girl who has just given birth-of lilting simplicity. There is the hysteria of The Who and the pure rhythmic orgasm of Ten Years After. They all help to make Woodstock...