**** WOODSTOCK
(Masterpiece) Directed by Michael Wadleigh With Richie Havens, Country Joe and the Fish, Joe Cocker, Sha Na Na, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, the Who, John Sebastian, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix.
Astonishingly, some normally sensible colleagues of mine claim to prefer Gimme Shelter–a piece of glib pessimism and dishonest reporting whose ideological agenda continues to appeal to those distrustful of Woodstock’s relatively utopian approach. The official hype back in late 1970, when Gimme Shelter was first released, was that the violent deaths at Altamont exposed the “lie” of Woodstock–as if the “truth” of one event could somehow cancel out the “truth” of another. According to this scenario, the Maysles brothers’ account of a disastrous Rolling Stones concert was enlightened muckraking that countered the hippie propaganda of Woodstock. But anyone who spoke at the time to cinematographer Alan Raymond, who shot the much-discussed climactic sequence–Mick Jagger witnessing one of the Altamont killings on a moviola and responding with anguish–knows that the scene was fabricated: on the day this sequence was shot, the footage of the killing couldn’t be found, so Jagger was asked to fake his reactions. Still, for viewers who felt intimidated by the quasi-revolutionary political implications of Woodstock, there was something comforting about Jagger’s stylish gloom as he “looked death in the face,” even if he was only pretending. In fact the film’s message that human nature and crowd psychology are vile was every bit as much a media concoction as the sunnier message of Woodstock. As Pauline Kael pointed out at the time, Gimme Shelter was “shaped so as to whitewash the Rolling Stones and the filmmakers for the thoughtless, careless way the concert was arranged, and especially for the cut-rate approach to keeping order.”
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Sad to say, Wadleigh has managed to make only one feature in the quarter of a century since Woodstock: the underrated Wolfen, released in 1981. (Even this, a sort of new-age horror thriller set in New York, wasn’t a project over which he had full control; he was replaced before the end of shooting by an uncredited John Hancock, and many writers were brought in as well.) By all accounts Wadleigh has remained a hippie, which undoubtedly has made him less bankable in post-Reagan Hollywood. My knowledge of his pre-Woodstock career is spotty, but I know that he attended Columbia University’s medical school at one point and that he served as cinematographer on Jim McBride’s first two features, underground independent efforts called David Holzman’s Diary and My Girlfriend’s Wedding. Wadleigh was one of the main cinematographers on Woodstock as well, and perhaps partly responsible for the trippy cinema-verite style of much of the camera work. (Martin Scorsese, one should note, was one of the film’s main editors as well as assistant director.)
It’s true that, as historical documents, Triumph of the Will and Woodstock both have the value of imparting to viewers today just what it was that was so appealing to millions of people about Nazism and the 60s counterculture respectively. But it’s questionable whether placing Nazism and 60s counterculture on the same plane clarifies more than it distorts and obfuscates them; the only contemporary public arena in which such an equivalence could be established would be the TV sitcom, such as Nazism on Hogan’s Heroes and 60s counterculture on All in the Family. In short this kind of equivalence is predicated on the Forrest Gump view of 20th-century history, which is pernicious because it reduces complex cultural movements to the level of sound bites and punch lines.
