Festival

• Director: Murray Lerner
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: Music
• Movie Type: Social Issues, Biography
• Main Cast: Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Donovan, Bob Dylan
• Release Year: 1967
• Run Time: 87 minutes

Plot

An invaluable record of the Newport Folk Festival, the most important annual showcase for roots music from the late '50s through the next decade, Festival packs an amazing amount of information into its brief running time. Director Murray Lerner assembled footage he and several other cinematographers shot between 1963 and 1966 at Newport. The folk music boom that began in the late '50s with rise to popularity of groups such as the Kingston Trio reached its peak during these years, thanks to one man, Bob Dylan. But Dylan also undid the folk revival when he chose to plug in his guitar at the 1965 Newport Festival and play new, rock-oriented material accompanied by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. That moment is captured here, along with performances by many of the folk movement's leading lights, among them Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Donovan, Judy Collins, and Richard and Mimi Farina. Festival also shows how other genres of music were welcome at Newport, with the inclusion of Johnny Cash, Howlin' Wolf, Son House, the Staples Singers, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sonny Terry. In the case of several veteran blues musicians, Newport provided their first exposure to a white audience outside of the South. The emphasis here is on presenting as many acts as possible, so no numbers are shown in their entirety. There are brief interviews with some of the musicians, but the information on them is largely imparted through their performances. Lerner's cameras also capture the youthful exuberance of the audiences, some of them seen jamming on their own instruments between shows. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Review

As a key document of music history, Murray Lerner's record of the mid-'60s Newport Folk Festival, is similar to Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, which documented the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Festival offers a mix of performances and what might be called ambience footage. Lerner is so embarrassed by the rich variety of music presented at these annual tribal rituals that he chooses not to show any performance in its entirety, jumping from one folkie to another. And the film ably documents that "folk" music also included gospel, country, and blues, just as Stern's film showed that 1958 Newport was an event broad enough in its scope to include such non-jazz performers as Mahalia Jackson and Chuck Berry. Through it all, a mostly youthful supporting cast of audience members look rapt, earnest, playful, and above all, innocent. Drugs, alcohol, and rowdy behavior had no place at Newport in its early years; these college kids, who go from clean-cut (1963) to slightly shaggy (1966), are too serious about the music to get wasted and miss something. Lerner sacrifices information for immediacy; there is no narration, so we're never sure what edition of the festival we're watching. Thus, there is little context for Bob Dylan's revolutionary 1965 electric performance, which is shown clearly shaking up a lot of people in the audience. But the movie imparts such a strong sense of an era that such details aren't really missed. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Cast

Joan Baez; Paul Butterfield; Judy Collins; Donovan; Bob Dylan

Credit

Murray Lerner - Director, Murray Lerner - Producer

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