Festival!

Filmmaker Murray Lerner documents the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966. It's in black and white. In addition to the performers, he interviews some of the audiences. The performers include Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. Joan Baez has a good size section which includes her interacting with fans. The most interesting is a small scene with Dylan performing with an electric guitar. There is cheering after his set. I'm not sure if that's the 1965 festival when he first returned to electric. All in all, it's a great time capsule of old performances and artists long gone. It is music history.

Director Murray Lerner makes this black and white documentary of the Folk Music at Newport from 1963 to 1966, entwining interviews with the audiences that highlight the importance of the folk music and performances of artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter,Paul and Mary, Donovan, Howlin' Wolf and Johnny Cash.

"Festival" is a testimony of magic moments of the 60's that will never happen again. Who could imagine in the present days an artist like Bob Dylan asking for a harmonica to the audience to play Mr.Tambourine Man; or Peter, Paul and Mary in trouble with the microphones; or Peter Yarrow changing the tune of his guitar while singing with Joan Baez; or the artists so close to the audience. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Festival"

I spoke with Mr. Lerner in 74 and he said that as a Black & White movie, people wouldn't want to see it. At that time vcr's were not very popular and kcet was the only venue. He offered to let me see it at a showing but we hung up with out my giving him my number. I saw segments of festival on the peter, paul and mary documentary the other night. It reminded me how much I would love to see Festival at Newport 1967. I wonder if it is for sale, these days. This was a very valuble documentary with extrodinary montage effects. It was truly neat to see and I hope it makes a return one way or another.

Paul H. Borisoff

I saw this excellent film on television recently and was knocked out by a dance performance about halfway through. Four male-female pairs of dancers (The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers) go through what I assume is traditional 19th-century (?) clog-dance figures to the music of a small acoustic band including Pete Seeger. The dancing is wonderfully rhythmic with lots of on-the-beat clog-stamping. It's wonderful to watch and listen to, and it looks great fun - the dancers and the musicians are consciously acting out some folk heritage, and pointing out the riches and the enjoyment to be found there ("Folks made their own entertainment then and I purely doubt that you and MTV can show me anything better!"). That's the Newport message, and these few minutes deliver it splendidly.

The strength of this documentary is in its intimacy. We get really up close & personal with the musicians as well as the audience. The Newport Folk Festival was huge, as conveyed in the opening credit scene with a seemingly endless river of people flowing onto the grounds, but for the most part the camera stays tight with the subjects, whether it's Joan Baez signing autographs (and later hi-fiving fans through the window of her car as we ride in the back seat), or eavesdropping on fans camped out, or even on stage during performances where the camera seemed to be within a few feet. Rarely have I seen this approach to filming an event of this magnitude. That's the good.

The bad, or at least the frustrating part, is as I mentioned in my title. While the initial performance (Peter, Paul & Mary) gives us a full song uninterrupted, thus whetting our whistle for more like that, the other acts are cut short. With other big stars like Donovan and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, we sometimes get only 1 verse and the ending of a song. Then we cut back to another performance by Peter, Paul & Mary. I can only guess that there simply wasn't enough footage taken of the other acts. But it's a noticeable flaw in this otherwise all-encompassing taste of what the Festival was like. So if you came here for the music, I'm afraid you won't get your fill. But if you approach it as a talky type documentary with a few clips of performances interspersed, that's what you'll get.