Festival! - The Newport Folk Festival

Product Description ------------------- Murray Lerner’s film "Festival" is a cinematic synthesis of four Newport Folk Festivals in which the art of folk music is pictured in transition during its most crucial years. The range is from Bob Dylan performing "Tambourine Man" and Joan Baez doing "Farewell Angelina," to country artists like Johnny Cash playing "I Walk the Line" to the Georgia Sea Island Singers. The range is also from the high-priced professionals like Peter, Paul, and Mary to the authentic folk dignity of living legends such as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt. Joan Baez, Donovan and Judy Collins are all on view, as are Pete Seeger, the Ed Young Fife and Drum Corps and numerous others that give a feeling of community with the whole American present, and continuity with the American past. Indeed, the long-haired Newport audiences pictured ing on beaches and on the grounds, in sports cars and battered station wagons, plunking banjoes and guitars, swapping tunes between formal concerts, and talking about folk music, seem not a rupture with the American past, but an expression of carrying forward an American idealism and social concern. .com ---- It's the big names--like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Peter, Paul & Mary--who command most of the attention, but they aren't what director-producer Murray Lerner's Festival!, a 97-minute, black & white chronicle of the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival in 1963, '64, and '65, is really all about. In fact, while those artists were the face of that era's folk boom, their music hasn't aged especially well; with the exception of Dylan (who appears both solo and with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who helped him break the sound barrier in '65) and Cash, their songs were so earnest, their delivery so pristine and humorless, that these days they evoke squirm-inducing parallels to Christopher Guest's folk satire A Mighty Wind. It's the clips of, say, the Blue Ridge ain Dancers, with their virtuoso square dance moves; the high, lonesome bluegrass of the Osborne Brothers; the deep gospel of the Georgia Sea Island Singers and the Ste Singers; the down home Delta blues (or, as he spells it, "b-l-u-s-e") of Son House, or even the astonishing Cousin Emmy, who plays "Turkey in the Straw" on her cheeks, that remind us that "folk" encompasses a great deal more than protest singers strumming acoustic guitars. As for Lerner's stated intention to "make a film about something bigger than music… a film that was an expression of this new culture," sure, whatever; there are plenty of interviews with artists and concert-goers alike to back that up. But Festival! revolves around the music, and therein lies its major flaw: namely, the lack of complete performances of any songs, which reduces the film's status from essential to merely interesting. --Sam Graham

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