Woodstock

An Oscar-winning report on all the facets of the legendary three-day Woodstock music festival in 1969, from building the stage to portraits of enthusiastic attendees. Often edited in split screen, the sometimes ecstatic performances by famous artists of the day including The Who, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix alternate with thematically grouped, atmospheric impressions and brief interviews on and around the site. These include a yoga class, children playing, hippies skinny-dipping, rampant acid use, grumbling or pleasantly surprised neighbors, teens calling home, the toilet cleaner and the renowned mudslide after a thunderstorm. There are helicopter shots of congested roads, we hear people worry about food and water supplies and how the artists are overwhelmed by the size of the crowd. From the over 100 hours of raw footage shot by seven cameramen, director Michael Wadleigh edited this classic document of 1960s counterculture with the help of Thelma Schoonmaker and assistant director Martin Scorsese. is about the desire for freedom, happiness, anti-materialism, love and mind-expanding drugs in a turbulent era during which – as a young man explains it – “people are very lost”. The festival embodied the ideal that people could peacefully coexist with the joint objective of simply being happy.