No Subject

Woodstock Just Isn't What It Used to Be
By CARYN JAMES

As if anyone needed to be told, we've come a long way from Woodstock. The
word itself no longer means simply a town in New York or even the music
festival that took place nearby in 1969. It evokes the peace- and-love
aura  so radical then, such a clichi now  that turned the festival into a
defining cultural event.

"My Generation," Barbara Kopple's engaging, illuminating nonfiction film
about the Woodstock festivals of 1969, 1994 and 1999, goes beyond the
obvious and uses the three Woodstocks as a way to chart the social changes
of the past 30 years. Brilliantly observed and edited, the film has no
narrator but tells an opinionated story nonetheless.

Its bluntest point is that Woodstock has become a commodity. Ms. Kopple's
cameras capture a marketing meeting for Woodstock '94 at Polygram, the
festival's co-producer, while text on screen tells us that Hdagen-Dazs paid
$1 million to be the official Woodstock ice cream, Vermont Water $1 million
to become the official water, and Pepsi $5 million as a major sponsor. Here
is the criticism of corporate America that has defined Ms. Kopple's most
trenchant work, from "Harlan County U.S.A," her 1977 film about a Kentucky
miners' strike, to "American Dream," her 1990 film about a labor dispute at
a Hormel meatpacking plant.

More subtly, "My Generation" reveals how Woodstock took on its iconic
cultural status. (Ms. Kopple's film will be shown on the cable channel
Encore tomorrow night at 8, followed by the expanded director's cut of
Michael Wadleigh's 1970 film, "Woodstock.")

The title refers to several generations, and a single image near the start
of the film reveals the distance separating them. A photo of Jimi Hendrix's
face appears on a computer screen on a Web site for Woodstock '94; one of
the dominant figures from '69, he is recreated with technology that seemed
like science fiction when he was alive.

Though the focus is on '94, throughout the film Ms. Kopple uses scenes from
'69, many of them from the "Woodstock" film and all presented in
black-and-white, so it is easy to know when we're viewing the original
festival. But while the "Woodstock" movie was a concert film with social
observations, "My Generation" is a social document with music constantly
shaping it, from Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," heard in the background ("We
are stardust, we are golden," she sings), to Green Day onstage in '94
(singing, "Sometimes I give myself the creeps") and Rage Against the Machine
in '99.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails calls the first Woodstock "an ancient,
hippie-oriented thing," and other generational changes are everywhere. Henry
Rollins, whose Rollins Band performs in a '94 segment, says he's too old to
deal with tents and Porta-Johns. "I'm 33," he says. "I'm staying at the
Marriott."

At a town meeting in Saugerties, N.Y., site of the '94 festival, residents
worry in advance about violence, rape and guns, all the volatile realities
of the 90's. And when the film intercuts Joe Cocker's '69 and '94
performances of "A Little Help From My Friends," it is evident that the
second festival was highly produced and designed, with a giant logo of a
dove onstage and a costumed MTV look. The '94 costumes include bright blue
hair, tattoos and nose rings, but the '69 concertgoers and performers were
costumed, too. It's just that their tie-dyed shirts and love beads assumed
the pose of having no pose, a calculatedly natural style.

Some things were more authentic. Rain turned the fields of the original
Woodstock festival into mud ponds. When people slide in the mud in the 90's,
they are enacting a ritual, attempting to recapture a moment from the past.
It can't really be done.

A young intern working for Polygram in '94 says of her generation, "We're
already so jaded." By '99, when Woodstock moved to a former Air Force base
in Rome, N.Y., jadedness had given way to random anger. Women in the
audience were groped, and female performers taunted to take off their
blouses. The crowd looted and burned booths selling $3 bagels and $4 bottles
of water. When the film shows helmeted police storming in, the scene brings
to mind the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, a
reminder that no simplistic view of the benign old Woodstock days makes
sense.

At the '99 festival, Dickey Betts, then of the Allman Brothers Band, says,
"It's natural to be a rebel without a cause when you're 16; it just happened
in '69 there was a cause," as the anti-war movement created a coherence the
next generations didn't have. For them, the original Woodstock has been
given an idealistic gloss and absorbed into the culture. And Ms. Kopple, who
has worked on this film since '94, has turned to an anthropological subject
that might be its opposite: she is making a nonfiction film for ABC about
the Hamptons.

MY GENERATION

Encore, tomorrow night at 8.

        -Brian in Atlanta
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