Educational Media Reviews Online

Like those earlier legendary decades the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties in their turn, the decade of the Sixties must at this point be fast receding from the memories of those who experienced it first hand. All to the good, then, that those remarkable years can be virtually relived in this documentary, made in 1988 and now reissued. Consisting entirely of contemporary footage unmediated by voice-over narration or the coaching of talking heads, the film paints its portrait of the Sixties exclusively through compilations of film identifying a particular totemic event. The footage is accompanied on the soundtrack by a Sixties hit song that either complements or ironically comments on the event itself. (In fact, the only filmed sounds we hear are Jimi Hendrix singing at Monterey and Richie Havens singing at Woodstock.)

Thus, Watts, the Chicago Democratic Convention, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, East Village marijuana madness, Haight-Ashbury love-ins, the Columbia University sit-in, Kent State (the Sixties spilling somewhat into the next decade) all come vividly back to mind and are to some extent viscerally re-experienced in blurry news camera images, as B.B King sings “The Thrill is Gone” (Watts), Janis Joplin sings “Summertime” (Chicago), and so on. But “re-experienced” implies that some familiarity with said events is a prerequisite to appropriately responding to the film, thus limiting, one supposes, its effectiveness with younger viewers; for them, supplementary information would seem necessary. A further weakness of the film is that the footage shown doesn’t always seem to be the best available to illustrate the particular event. For example, a camera closely focused on Richie Havens as he sings a lengthy version of “Freedom” at Woodstock hardly seems the best way to bring that wild weekend to life. An even greater weakness is that, inexplicably, there does not appear to be a single reference to any of the three assassinations that indelibly define the period – John’s, Martin’s, or Bobby’s (as a poignant song of the Sixties put it). The Sixties also happen to be just about the most frequently documented of Twentieth Century decades. Films such as “The War at Home,” “Berkeley in the Sixties,” and “1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation,” then, may perhaps better succeed in bringing the period home to the widest audience.

Recommended