As the very general title suggests, this is a film that believes in its originality. Filmed by a team of four cameramen, Festival captures the Newport Folk Festival in the early and mid-1960s. The documentary provides an intimate insight into the folk revival movement between 1963 and 1966, featuring performances by gospel, folk and country artists such as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins,
Donovan, Bob Dylan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Howlin’ Wolf, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger and The Staple Singers, as well as other outstanding but lesser-known musicians who helped to define the era. Festival is definitely more than just a concert film. It allows us to follow significant developments over several years that would lead to the dominance of youth culture in large parts of society. The film captures the famous moment when Bob Dylan switched from acoustic to electric guitar during his 1965 set – an event that went down in the annals of pop history as an early example of “selling out”, which musicians would be accused of for decades to come (although the myth surrounding this event is definitely greater than what actually happened). Cinematically, Lerner uses a Direct Cinema approach, mixing footage of performances with intimate moments, such as very close encounters between musicians and festivalgoers or interactions between members of the audience. It is through this intimacy that the film succeeds in making the viewer feel as if they are reliving their own youth while watching it. Celebrating the power of folk music to convey politically critical messages, Festival captures an era of optimism, social awakening and activism, and portrays a time when the boundaries between music, politics and culture were becoming increasingly blurred. It also documents a time when years seemed like decades, as social and cultural change occurred on a seemingly daily basis in the US. To come back to the first sentence of the text: Murray Lerner’s Festival is very original, but it was preceded by the amazing and groundbreaking Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1958) which was also shot at a festival in Newport, this time one on jazz.

Karl Wratschko