AllMovie

As a key document of music history, Murray Lerner's record of the mid-'60s Newport Folk Festival, is similar to Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, which documented the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Festival offers a mix of performances and what might be called ambience footage. Lerner is so embarrassed by the rich variety of music presented at these annual tribal rituals that he chooses not to show any performance in its entirety, jumping from one folkie to another. And the film ably documents that "folk" music also included gospel, country, and blues, just as Stern's film showed that 1958 Newport was an event broad enough in its scope to include such non-jazz performers as Mahalia Jackson and Chuck Berry. Through it all, a mostly youthful supporting cast of audience members look rapt, earnest, playful, and above all, innocent. Drugs, alcohol, and rowdy behavior had no place at Newport in its early years; these college kids, who go from clean-cut (1963) to slightly shaggy (1966), are too serious about the music to get wasted and miss something. Lerner sacrifices information for immediacy; there is no narration, so we're never sure what edition of the festival we're watching. Thus, there is little context for Bob Dylan's revolutionary 1965 electric performance, which is shown clearly shaking up a lot of people in the audience. But the movie imparts such a strong sense of an era that such details aren't really missed.