Monterey Pop

As a time capsule, this is fabulous. As a film, not so much. So its documentary worth depends largely in how interested you are in the subject -- the time, the place, the people, the performers. As a concert film, it is seminal but not altogether successful. Thirty years on, it all looks very old hat, but at the time it was a first chance for a who’s who of direct cinema -- Pennebaker, Leacock, Maysles et al. -- to bring their cameras to bear on a music festival as a defining cultural moment, with benefit of advanced (for the time) sound recording. Some camera innovations work and some don’t, some of the music is great and some isn’t, some of the performers have lost none of their electrifying power (Janis) and some have turned into a joke (Jimi), but all are utterly redolent of the moment when I, for one, was turning 21. The final performance by Ravi Shankar on sitar is excruciatingly prolonged, but does implicitly signal that the Monterey International Pop Festival was an initial wave in the rising tide of globalism, as well as an advertisement for San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” and the transformative power of youth culture. In the sea of wildly clapping hands at the finale, the camera pans past one guy in gloves clapping only because he’d look like an idiot if he was the only one who wasn’t -- that could be me. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*