Hold On to Your Neighbor

It is happening all over again. Woodstock, last summer's "three days of love and peace," has been re-created in a joyous, volcanic new film that will make those who missed the festival feel as if they were there. Those who actually were there will see it even more intimately. But Woodstock is far more than a sound-and-light souvenir of a long weekend concert. Purely as a piece of cinema, it is one of the finest documentaries ever made in the U.S.*

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 so that, in many cases, they seem to be almost superhuman.

Woodstock's most obvious attraction is the music, and rock has never sounded --or looked--better than it does in the movie. "Hold on to your neighbor," says an onstage announcer at one point early in the proceedings, and moviegoers should be sure to take the same precautions. The sound track comes rushing out of a four-track stereo system that manages to give the exhilarating sensation of total immersion in sound. Joe Cocker gives a gutsy, driving interpretation of the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends. Performing part of the rock opera Tommy, Peter Townshend of The Who tames his guitar like some wild electronic animal, while Santana makes the theater seats vibrate, and Alvin Lee of Ten Years After comes close to tearing down the movie screen. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sound slightly out of tune ("It's only our second gig," says Crosby, explaining the group's nervousness to the assembled 500,000) but Arlo Guthrie comes over with a sureness and command only intermittently evident in Alice's Restaurant. Sha Na Na offer a neat, affectionate and very funny send-up of '50s rock with their strutting, snarling, pomaded version of At the Hop.

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 is very bad stuff . . . Will Helen Savage please call her father at the Glory Motel in Woodridge?"

The 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 as unique on film as it was in fact, "the mind blower," as John Sebastian puts it, "of all time."

*Presumably because of some nudity and some rather raucous language, Jack Valenti's industry watchdogs have awarded Woodstock an R rating. Besides giving the whole thing a slightly salacious air, this means in effect that many young people who attended the festival cannot go to the movie without their parents.

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