Movie Review: Murray Lerner's Festival

This wonderful film documents performances at the Newport Folk Festival during the years 1963 to 1965. It was directed, written, and produced by Murray Lerner. After its commercial release in 1967 it languished in neglect for many years until the recent Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan used portions of it to illustrate Dylan's infamous electric performance in 1965. A recently released DVD makes the film generally available. Festival prominently features Dylan, but only as part of a larger group. He does not dominate the film. Notable performers are Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Mississippi John Hurt, Howling Wolf, Son House, the Staple Singers, Fred McDowell, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and many others.

Filmed in black and white, Festival is a time capsule of those years during the '60s before Woodstock, before the counterculture had reached full flower. But you can see them coming in the film, both in the performers and the members of the audience. The film is at its weakest in the interviews with performers and audience members. They are asked to talk about folk music, social protest, and problems in contemporary America. Most of the comments are fatuous and uninteresting and, from the 2006 perspective, anachronistic. Son House’s comments on the meaning of the blues, and Michael Bloomfield’s comments on Son House, are exceptions.

The music is not dated at all.  Music gives this film its power. One wishes only for more of it, and that the film did not cut many of the performances short. Among the best are those by Odetta, Son House, Howling Wolf, Joan Baez, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Freedom Singers, the Staple Singers, and many of the others. There is a short but remarkable rendition of “Walk the Line” by a young and probably under the influence Johnny Cash. All of the performances are strong. It is wrong to single any of them out.

A centerpiece of the film is the first number in Dylan’s famous 1965 electric set, “Maggie’s Farm.” I had heard this performance was weak, the music sloppy, but if the film is any indication, it was quite good. Dylan also performs “All I Really Want to Do” and part of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and rehearses “Like a Rolling Stone” — his real break with the folk movement. Each time he stops singing, the audience chants, almost desperately, “More, more!”

Article Author: Hugh Ruppersburg

Hugh Ruppersburg lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

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