It’s a miracle that someone like Wadleigh wound up in charge of the massive enterprise of Woodstock, and it endures because it is the work of someone with a romantic poet’s sensibility, rather than Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music
It’s a miracle that someone like Wadleigh wound up in charge of the massive enterprise of Woodstock, and it endures because it is the work of someone with a romantic poet’s sensibility, rather than Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
Image description: Sly Stone in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music
For me, Woodstock began in 1967 with the independent film David Holzman’s Diary. While nowhere near as well-known as the 1969 music festival or 1970 concert film, David Holzman’s Diary is nonetheless intimately connected, and remains extremely fresh and prescient in its own right.
A work of experimental fiction presented as an autobiographical documentary, it presages the potential and pitfalls of the first-person social media of our present day with startling accuracy. David Holzman, played by co-director L.M. Kit Carson, is a twentysomething film nerd, freshly unemployed and anxious at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam. To cope with this existential crisis, David elects to make a film diary to document and better understand his own life. David begins by talking to his state-of-the-art sync sound camera and roaming his Upper West Side neighborhood, taking in buildings and faces and at one point encountering the victim of an apparent robbery. David shows what he’s got to his friend Pepe, who feels obligated to break it to him that the results are not very interesting. “Your life is not a very good script,” Pepe explains, before advising David to take risks and expose his vulnerabilities to the camera, perhaps even film himself naked. Instead, David becomes something of a creep, obsessing over his girlfriend Penny and filming her sleeping in the nude without her consent. Penny dumps David over this transgression, and he moves on to spying on a neighbor through her window. Later, he follows a woman into the subway and aggressively films her until she snaps, confronting and violently dispatching him. Mercifully, the universe imposes a conclusion on the diary when David’s film equipment is stolen, forcing him to wrap things up with a still photo montage paired with an audio recording where he expresses his disillusionment with filmmaking and signs off. “Like the famous Bartleby the Scrivener, I would have preferred not to do this,” he tells us. “But I did it.” Whether he finds a new job or deploys to Vietnam is left unknown.
Image description: L.M. Kit Carson as David Holzman in David Holzman’s Diary.
The film became an underground sensation, and remains a staple of film school education to this day. In addition to blurring the distinction between fiction and documentary, David Holzman’s Diary demonstrates a character engaging with the array of up-to-the-moment tools and techniques which opened up the prospect of diaristic and experimental filmmaking for so many. At the same time, David can’t resist the dark side of this new self-centered, man-on-the-street style filmmaking, ultimately using his tools to behave in a way that’s creepy, antagonizing the women around him in a way that remains sadly familiar in the social media age. David Holzman’s Diary thus manages to be a celebration of the creative possibilities opened up by these new tools, as well as a warning about their potential for abuse. It was a powerful inspiration to young filmmakers like Brian DePalma, who seized on the film’s vision of freewheeling, diaristic filmmaking.
“When I first got my 8mm sound camera,” he told Film Comment in a 1987 interview, “I’d try to carry it around like David Holzman and try to film everything I did and look at it. My friends and I had cameras all the time and we were all directors.”
The cinematographer of David Holzman’s Diary, Michael Wadleigh, would quickly advance from helping the fictional Holzman hold a mirror to his own life to orchestrating one of the greatest portraits of a generation ever made: 1970’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music. Techniques advanced on David Holzman’s Diary would be scaled upward for a cast of half a million, many of them about the same age as Holzman, many of them worried about Vietnam and their futures, all of them gathered on a farm in rural New York in pursuit of a major experience. And like David Holzman’s Diary, not everything that is revealed by Woodstock’s spectacular mirror is complimentary or comforting.
Image description: Michael Wadleigh, wearing a headband, filming the Woodstock festival. Martin Scorsese is second from the right, wearing headphones.
Wadleigh was not a big name in Hollywood, and so was not an obvious choice to helm one of the great commercial and critical successes of the 1970s for a major studio. He was not hired by Warner Brothers, who released the film, but by the festival masterminds, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. Woodstock itself was underestimated by the media until the week it happened, when it became clear that hundreds of thousands really were making the trip up to Yasgur’s Farm near Bethel, whether or not they had tickets, money, or a way to get home. As a cinematographer with one foot in the New York underground and another in political journalism, Wadleigh had spent 1968 following the Nixon campaign as they coasted to victory over the Democrats, who were left in disarray after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention, where police had brutalized anti-war demonstrators who objected to the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, was still fresh in the minds of Woodstock’s young festival goers. In a sequence showcasing the festival’s payphone area, one young woman tells the camera that she’s calling home to let her parents know it’s not “another Chicago.” While he was no Hollywood veteran, Wadleigh was firmly planted at the crossroads of culture and politics at the end of the 1960s, and brought the underground’s techniques and sensibilities to bear on an assignment that was journalistic as much as anything else. The end result, like David Holzman’s Diary, broke new ground—revolutionizing the concert film.
Wadleigh’s sensibilities were above all poetic, and viewers may notice that his selection of performances in the film does not necessarily favor the artists’ hits. Instead, his curation favors songs that lend lyrical commentary on the festival, and the joys and tribulations of the concertgoers and the working people who made Woodstock possible. Wadleigh was deeply interested in the festival as a feat of production, and the film takes its time getting to the music and musicians. The first twenty minutes are devoted to the festival production crew and members of The Hog Farm collective preparing the festival grounds, along with interviews with locals from the surrounding area weighing in the descending hordes of long-haired pleasure seekers. This unhurried beginning also gives the audience time to acclimate to Wadleigh’s preferred visual format, the split-screen, before he picks up the pace, indulging in languid shots of the shirtless Hog Farm men transporting timber and erecting scaffolding, while their women work and their children play in a nearby encampment. Wadleigh is taking pains to tell his audience, without putting it into words, that this event was made by young people, by hippies. It’s also an opportunity to appreciate the idyllic landscape of the farm before it is transformed into a disaster area, trampled under the weight of a million feet. The next time our attention is directed to this landscape, it will be a wasteland.
Image description: The United States Army was called in to help deliver food and airlift injured people from the festival grounds using helicopters.
More than a wasteland, Woodstock was officially a disaster. The festival’s traffic choked the New York State Thruway to the point where it was shut down, and the United States Army was called in to help deliver food and airlift injured people from the festival grounds using helicopters. Private helicopters became the preferred conveyance for musicians travelling to the festival and for Wadleigh and his crew to receive much needed film stock, care of Warner Brothers. The constant presence of helicopter traffic in the film and at the festival was unprecedented, and portended the 24/7 presence of helicopters that would become the norm after the war, when American police departments adopted the techniques used to police and pursue Vietnamese from the air to police their own countrymen. The juxtaposition of the choppers with the return-to-the-land ethos of the festival and the human drama of half a million spectators camping, eating, loving, and toiling brings to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Painted between 1490 and 1510, Bosch’s masterpiece is a densely-populated triptych that renders the three days of Creation from the Old Testament as a sensual, Woodstock-like riot. Humanity begins in the left panel in the Garden of Eden, and progresses to The Garden of Earthly Delights in the large center panel. In the Garden, corruption and temptation enter the scene to corrupt the innocent, newly minted humans in various ways. From there, Hell is a short distance away in the left panel. Woodstock initially deals in Edenic images of a beautiful landscape that gives way to beautiful young people building stages and skinny-dipping, building to the concert itself, set to the harmonious music of Crosby, Stills and Nash. Eden, of course, is never sustainable, and inevitably gives way to squalor, helicopters, the hard rock sounds of The Who and glimpses of a drug scene, all before the festival’s three days run their course and transform the landscape. Woodstock is Michael Wadley’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
It’s a miracle that someone like Wadleigh wound up in charge of the massive enterprise of Woodstock, and it endures because it is the work of someone with a romantic poet’s sensibility, rather than Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
And like the other great media artists of the Sixties, like Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol, Wadleigh chose to elevate the regular people they encountered to the same level as the stars and celebrities of the festival. The rock stars may have had the stage at Woodstock, but at the movies everyone’s a giant on the silver screen.
Just as miraculous is the team that Wadleigh assembled to help him with his labor, some of whom would turn out to be the greatest talents of their generation. This group included a young Martin Scorsese, who served as an assistant during the festival and an editor afterwards; Wadleigh had been the cinematographer on Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Richard Chew, who would later edit Taxi Driver and Star Wars with Marcia Lucas, worked as a cameraman. Thelma Schoonmaker, who would go on to edit virtually every other Scorsese film besides Taxi Driver, worked alongside Marty and the legendary Walter Murch. Wadleigh’s crew is a who’s-who of craftspeople who were only a few years from making the most beloved American films of the 1970s.
Image description: A split-screen image from Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.
In all, seven editors transformed an estimated 120 miles of footage into the final three-hour film, which is nothing short of an editorial masterpiece. Scorsese is credited for the electric Sly and The Family Stone sequence, and for the bouncing-ball lyrics that were added to Country Joe and The Fish’s upbeat sing-along number about heading off to die in Vietnam. Wadleigh himself is responsible for my personal favorite sequence, Santana’s Soul Sacrifice, which makes dynamic use of two- and three-panel multi camera split screens. The vogue for split screens had arguably begun three years earlier with Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, although Warhol achieved this effect using multiple projectors rather than using optical printing techniques to arrange multiple images within a single frame. Woodstock also makes extensive use of superimposition, employed memorably in Jimi Hendrix’s virtuoso performance at the film’s climax. I can’t confirm it, but I like to believe Wadleigh and his team were turned on to the psychedelic possibilities of superimposition by Ron Rice’s Chumlum, a shimmering cascade of superimposed images of languid, psychedelic characters. One also feels the leering energy of David Holzman at times, when the camera lingers a little too long on the nude bathers and lovemakers, captured through a long lens, likely without knowledge or consent. Aside from Warhol, the editorial team’s most obvious formal influence is TV news coverage of the Vietnam War. No matter the flights of editorial fancy, the narrative always returns to the reality on the ground of Woodstock as a disaster area, albeit a fun-looking one, a party in a funhouse mirror version of a warzone. Wadleigh’s fusion of experimental and journalistic techniques remains breathtaking and peerless today.
Image description: Santana performs “Soul Sacrifice” in Michael Wadley’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music.
Cinematically, the spirit of Woodstock would be carried into the seventies and beyond by Martin Scorsese, who undoubtedly applied what he learned from Wadleigh’s film to his own, The Last Waltz, a document of The Band’s final stand at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day of 1976. While Wadleigh may have regarded Woodstock as a group portrait at the end of an era, The Last Waltz is a more self-conscious act of closing the book on the Sixties, achieving apotheosis in The Band’s iconic performance of Forever Young with Bob Dylan. By 1976, most everyone celebrating The Band on the Winterland’s stage was fated to grow old, and to remain rich and successful. The same cannot be said for the stars of Woodstock.
The future at the end of Woodstock is uncertain and unknown, much as it is at the conclusion of David Holzman’s Diary.
I find it uplifting in a way that’s hard to put my finger on; perhaps it’s because the editorial decision to close on the festival’s unvarnished aftermath makes me feel like I’ve witnessed something authentic and wild. Others make a convincing case that the film’s end is a depressing moment, the comedown from the high. Wadleigh himself is in this camp, claiming that the festival put him in an apprehensive frame of mind by its conclusion. In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, he recalled walking through fields of mud and trash in the wake of all the revelry.
“T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was one of my favorite pieces of poetry, and I was thinking about it at the time. I got out there and started filming that as if it were a war zone. And that’s why you see people in casts on their arms and legs, hobbling down in the dirt. I felt like the Sixties were ending, and we were going to head into more-depressed times, and that a lot of our ideals were not going to work out.”
Image description: Jimi Hendrix is isolated and superimposed on himself by the editing in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music.
In the gauzy Monday morning light, Jimi Hendrix appears on screen in extremely tight detail—he’s mostly hands, guitar, and a flash of leather fringe. Jimi is allowed no crowd reaction shots, and virtually no coverage of his band. Wadleigh has isolated Jimi Hendrix, as if he were playing his soul’s music to the trash, the leftovers, and the stragglers—people on crutches, a woman with a crudely bandaged foot, and a barefoot man with his arm in a cast, like characters out of a Brueghel painting. Another man scavenges a discarded pair of shoes from the mud, and slides them on his feet. The Hog Farm’s cleaning crew arrives on the scene; they were here first, and they’ll be the last to leave. The words to describe Jimi’s performance are beyond me, except to say that it is divinely inspired and would be impossible to follow with anything else, the only logical conclusion to these three hours. Jimi finishes, says “Thank you,” and, through the magic of editing, the festival crowd reappears from the vantage of a helicopter, chanting for more. One more magic cut, and Max Yasgur’s farm is restored to the Edenic state in which we first laid eyes on it.
This editorial return to innocence, however, never sticks in my memory, and came as a surprise as I revisited Woodstock to write this appreciation. The true and honest ending, in my heart anyway, is Jimi offering the music of his soul to a wasteland that had only recently hosted a generation’s biggest party. By the time Woodstock had claimed its Academy Award, Jimi was gone, along with Janis Joplin and others. Where did the half a million go, and what did they do afterwards? Fifty-six years later, we have some perspective; but I like to imagine that these questions were still hanging in the air when Woodstock was first playing in American cinemas.
Inspired by Michael Wadleigh, I’ll leave you with words from Eliot’s The Waste Land…
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street”
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?”
“What shall we ever do?”
MATTHEW CARON
DIRECTOR
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