Woodstock

Peace. Love. Understanding. Finding the three golden words of the hippy era in cinema is easy, if you search for them in films following the standard Hollywood recipe: the hero falls in Love, faces a conflict, then comes to Peace with all of the problems and finds a greater Understanding along the way.

It’s a little harder though to see any cinematic heritage of Woodstock and its time which is in any way comparable to its enormous, ongoing musical influence. Except for a few legendary documentaries - such as Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning Woodstock from 1970, Woodstock has remained a virtually unwritten chapter of film history, until now. Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock is the first major feature film about Woodstock ever to be selected for Cannes.

So what about the lasting ideological impact of the Woodstock era on cinema?

The immediate ending of the Vietnam War was a shared goal for the Woodstock hippies. When it finally did end, the trauma of the war was left to settle for a while - with the exception of the patriotic Green Berets of 1968 - before reaching cinemas in the years of 1978-9, with Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. With them, a new approach to war movies grew stronger. Coppola’s heroes were disillusioned souls lost in the psychedelic jungle of war, chasing enemies amongst and inside of themselves, rather than a foreign threat. Since then, quite a few war-glorifying films have still reached the big screen, but their opposites have also - caressing the peace message by, for example, focusing on the cruel creation of war machines, as in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

The war in Iraq took a faster lane to the cinema than its older war brother. And in films like Brian de Palma’s Redacted and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah, the ties to the Vietnam films of the late 70s, in the sense of war criticism and self-awareness, are strong - themes also evident in last year’s Cannes-competing Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman. Enough about war, what about freedom and love? Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider from 1969 is probably the most famous hippy film of all time, but it wasn’t the first one. Two years earlier, before Easy Rider and the orgies of Woodstock, the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) by Vilgot Sjöman was banned from the cinemas of Massachusetts for being pornographic. With sexual liberation as one of its main themes, Lena and her boyfriends try outdoor sex in a tree and in front of the Royal Castle in Stockholm. From a feminist point of view, part of film’s reality is still not outdated. The free love movement still challenges, and attitudes towards sex in movies keep changing - although John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus wasn’t banned from the cinemas of Massachusetts.

And finally, understanding? Well, the message is easy - there are only three words to remember. Try imagining. Come on, it’s easy if you try.

Moa Geistrand