DVD review: Woodstock: Ultimate Collectors Edition

Published on Thursday 18 June 2009 14:54

Woodstock: Ultimate Collectors Edition (Warner Bros, DVD: £19.56, Blu-ray: £24.45)

WAGS LIKE TO JOKE THAT IF YOU remember Woodstock, you weren't there. In which case, here, finally, is the ultimate memory aid for any ageing hippie who made it to upstate New York in 1969 to celebrate three days of peace and music. Reissued to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the landmark music festival, Woodstock: Ultimate Collector's Edition must surely be the last word on the Oscar-winning film.

Replete with a couple of hours worth of extra performance footage from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joan Baez, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, as well as an exhaustive new making-of documentary featuring recent interviews with the likes of Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick, director Michael Wadleigh and editors Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker , there can't be much more interesting material left to be uncovered. Certainly some of the flimsier extras here, such as an embarrassingly trite five-minute promo for the Woodstock museum, suggest that everything has finally been said that needs to be said.

The good news is that the new documentary, though unimaginatively made, does provide a fascinating insight into the whole production side of the phenomenon, particularly how critical the new lightweight 16mm cameras of the day were in capturing the chaos of the event with so much energy and skill. Indeed, thanks to the bands never sticking to their set-lists and the crew not having enough money to film each act in its entirety, it's a wonder so much astonishing footage was captured. Having said that, they still ended up with more than a quarter-of-a-million feet of film, which Scorsese, Schoonmaker and other up-and-coming filmmakers had to cut down to a manageable length. The battles the producers then had with the suits at the film's backers, Warner Bros, as well as with the exhibitors who wanted a two-hour film, are also well documented here.

This, together with the new archival material – watch out for the previously unseen footage of Jimi Hendrix tearing through a dawn rendition of Spanish Castle Magic – adds an extra dimension to the film itself. That's important, because even in its previously released four-hour director's cut (and a re-mastered version of that cut is the one featured here), the ubiquity of Woodstock's images in other movies, documentaries, TV shows and news reports about the 1960s have made it something of a reductive visual catchall for the era. Watched in this new context, though, it's easier to appreciate the fine job director Michael Wadleigh and his team did in crafting a film that actually told the whole story of the event and, without the benefit of hindsight, did justice to its cultural importance.

It wasn't just about capturing the music (some of which was, to be blunt, awful). The in-the-moment reflections from the attendees about what it all meant, the euphoria and desolation the roving cameras captured, the warnings about the brown acid, the noble ideals, the misguided paranoia, the way local hostility gave way to acceptance – it really was and remains an astonishing snapshot of a moment in time and is of far more historical value than the hugely profitable myth-making industry that has grown up around the event in the years since. In short: the film reminds us why Woodstock is worth remembering.