3 Days of Peace and Music. That’s how the now notorious Woodstock festival was advertised and its legacy has lived on as a defining part of the 'hippy' movement; it even lent its name to a whole generation. But it also caused a state of emergency to be issued by the local county. Military airforce transport was recruited to ferry people in and out. There had to be notifications from the main stage about bad acid going around and the schedule was so badly delayed, The Who played at 5 am and Jimi Hendrix played the morning after the festival was due to finish.
Woodstock is a documentary that follows the festival from its hopeful beginning to the wet, muddy, and worn out end with every naked, tripping, loving moment in between. From building the stage to serious warnings about it collapsing on the festival goers. From the optimism of the fresh faced youngsters turning up for the festivities, to those in the medical tent, searching for the ones they love. There’s joy and there’s sadness. Pain and hope. There’s no real narrative, no dominant message or active voice, just a camera drifting through the peace loving chaos that was Woodstock.
It’s a testament to how narratively gripping life can be when pushed to the extreme; when, in essence, you voluntarily create a third world country within wealthy America for the purpose of celebrating peace and love through music. 400,000 people descend on New York which naturally brings with it health issues, social conflict with surrounding areas, and huge practical obstacles for everyone, from the festival organisers up to the government, to have to cope with and we get to watch selected highlights of these unique dramas. Intersperse this with some performances from legendary musicians, and you have three hours of utterly breathtaking film making.
As the morning sun gently shines down on Jimi Hendrix playing his psychedelic, ground breaking, era defining version of Star spangled Banner, you realise you’ve witnessed something historic. This was an event that defined a generation and, like the now diminished crowd on screen, you’re emotionally drained; you’re amazed that this incredibly ambitious event, plagued by almost every challenge known to mankind, came to fruition. More than that, the documentary demonstrates unprecedented foresight and intuition. Released a year after the festival, it captured something powerful on film - something inimitable, a once in a lifetime event. It had its fingers on America’s pulse and sensed the magnitude of what was coming and fought to ensure it was documented.
We talk about capturing the current zeitgeist in good documentaries but none have done it more successfully and, arguably, more powerfully than Woodstock. Woodstock the festival was legendary but fleeting, Woodstock the film: unforgettable.
The largest loss of human life in modern history can almost be directly attributed to one man. A man that instructed the killing of Jewish people by the thousands and started a war with such devestating consequences, we still feel them today. Adolf Hitler was guilty of atrocious crimes against humanity yet was, without doubt, one of the pioneers of political celebrity. He understood the power of the filmed image and even produced astonishing, well crafted, films to push his agenda. How fitting, then, that the medium of film is also one that weakens him and his memory.
Whilst many may only know it for it's famously parodied bunker scene, in full, Downfall portrays an unsettling balance, a likely truth that we would rather not believe. It draws out Hitler the monster but also, even more so, Hitler the man. A man that was kind to his secretaries and loved his dog. A man that suffered from several health issues, physically and mentally. A man that felt the stinging arrow of a friend's betrayal penetrate the vulnerability of his emotional armour. All this to remind us of the horror that it was not, in fact, a monster that thought Jewish people were a plague on the face of the Earth, but a man.
It takes a truly brilliant screenplay to portray Adolf Hitler sympathetically, but that's what we have here. We hear him discuss his plans for the new Berlin, a hub of culture and art, and its not the embodiment of evil that we've come to think of when we think of the Nazi party leader. He's gentle and kind, frail and ill. But he's also madly paranoid, quick to anger, unrepentant in his treatment of those that disappoint him and proud of his headway in the annihilation of the Jewish race. Bruno Ganz plays the Führer constantly on the edge of this kind fragility and mania to make him unpredictable, adding menace to his meltdowns but also a softness in his quieter moments.
It's a delicate balance and one that's needed. The audience need to care for Hitler to keep them in the story, they have to be emotionally involved with his titular downfall, but also distant enough that they're not saddened by it. At the end of it all, Hitler's death is human and deserved. There's no superhuman death matching the superhuman evil, just a bundled up body in a blanket (note - something that the Harry Potter books nailed with Voldemort's death and the films completely missed. A helpful point to see why the slumped body is so effective in the narrative of Downfall) and that's it. After all he seemed to be, after the devastation he instigated, after the hatred he fuelled, here he is: a lifeless lump doused in gasoline to be burned by his final remaining followers.
Do not be mistaken when I describe the treatment as sympathetic - there is nothing here to suggest Hitler and his cohort are redeemable. The mass suicides, family deaths, child soldiers, and violent anti-semitism are all presented here as brutal reality and there's no pretence that the war produced anything positive. But we have to see the humanity of the great dictator to be reminded of the painful truth that it wasn't a supernatural evil that inflicted these terrible events on man, but man itself.
