It has often been said that movies from the past are like time capsules. Few however are as much so as so as
Monterey Pop. For 78 minutes you feel like you have been transported back to the 60's. What may come as a surprise to some watching this film is to see the huge melting pot of people that attended this festival. While the excepted very hippie looking people are there, there are also Hell's Angles and average everyday people. However once you think about this it could not make more sense. Just like you don't have to be a hillbilly to enjoy country music or a highbrow to like classical music, you don't have to be a hippie to enjoy the music here. The scenes with just the audience are essential to this film's personality as it helps give you the feeling that you are there with them. Little things like a women who says she is cleaning the chairs because she is lucky, audience members in tents and sleeping bags (this was a three day festival) and how much the audience is visually moved by Ravi Shankar's performance, help make this movie more than just a concert film. However while everything feels peaceful in the audience (despite a police offer worrying that something might happen at the movie's beginning), there are some true acts of rebellion on stage. At the end of a loud rocking performance of
My Generation, The Who go completely crazy causing much destruction including of their own instruments. Jimi Hendrix during his band's performance of
Wild Thing humps a guitar amp and then his guitar itself (in case any of you thought this was a family film). Yet even this is counterbalanced by the rather tame performances of Simon and Garfunkel and The Mamas and the Papas. Just like the audience on stage the performers are just as much a melting pot. The feeling of pure sixties is enhanced by the psychedelic images behind many of the performers.
When I first saw this movie, I was surprised by just how much music there was and how we did not see these performers off stage. The reason I was surprised by that is that I was only familiar with director, D. A. Pennebaker for his Bob Dylan documentary,
Don't Look Back (1967) which did not spend much time on stage but a lot of time with Bob off stage.
However Pennebaker still gets to show a lot of his groundbreaking film-making style and this is certainly a well directed movie. Also with this great of music you want to listen to it.
While this is not the first concert film, it is the one that made this a popular type of movie for many years. Still compared to later films like
Woodstock (1970),
Gimme Shelter (1970) or
The Last Waltz (1978), this movie can seem a little primitive. The technology used to record this film is far behind the ones used for those later efforts. As such the sound and picture quality feel more like footage for a newsreel instead of for a full blown feature film.
The 78 minute run-time, proves to be much too brief. After watching these talented artists give a great performance of song and want to see more, they leave never to be seen in this movie again. This was a three-day music festival and we wish we weren't missing out on all the great music we did not get to hear. Likewise the scenes with the audience are too brief to have the effect of, say,
Gimmie Shelter. Still we feel this way because what we got was so darn good despite being way too brief.
While this may not live up to later concert films, it remains a much watch for anyone interested in 60's pop-culture or music and a darn entertaining movie for others.
-Michael J. Ruhland
