Glastonbury (2006)
Julien Temple's documentary on 35 years of the annual festival, assembled from hundreds of hours of punters' home movies. Featured artists include Nick Cave, David Bowie, Joe Strummer and dozens more
Glastonbury: sacred meeting ground for Albion's scattered tribes, tie-dye apocalypse for face-painted stoners, or just 100,000 people getting trashed in a field? Since its inception in 1970 Michael Eavis' annual knees-up has meant something different to everyone who's ever stumbled through though the gates or clambered over the fence. Julien Temple's exhilarating documentary acknowledges that at Worthy Farm it's the bands that come to watch the punters rather than the other way round, and captures the delirious rush that accompanies four days spent in the festival's parallel universe.
Temple began working on Glastonbury in 2002, when he put out a request for festival-goers' home movies. What he got was 900 hours - a mind-blowing range of material from across four decades that enables the film to recreate that shattered attention span, what's-round-the-next corner vibe so redolent of the festival experience. Watch naked hippies cavort in the grass. See the Mutoid Waste Company recreate Stonehenge with cars. Dream of jacking it all in to go and live in a yurt. There's also ample interview footage of Eavis - who even as a young man sported that unusual beard - discussing the Herculean task of staging the event every year.
This isn't the first attempt to capture the festival on film. In 1971 Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam were among the team who made Glastonbury Fayre, a fascinating if ramshackle period piece, outtakes from which appear here. Myra Breckinridge director Mike Sarne also contributed to 1995's unaccountably prosaic Glastonbury: The Movie. Temple, whose The Filth and The Fury remains the definitive film about punk, is on home turf here, mixing festival-goers' moments of blissed-out epiphany with random weirdness, archive news reports and inspired - if not always disciplined - performances.
Among the many forgotten stories unearthed is the plight of the 'peace convoy' - the rag-tag army of bus-dwelling hippie-punks who so exercised the 'Daily Mail' in the 1980s. Eavis, broadly sympathetic to their cause, allowed them on site for free, but his relationship with them was never easy. Violence and rioting in 1990 necessitated the rigorous approach to security with which the festival is now associated. In 1970 12,000 turned up to see Marc Bolan and Al Stewart for free, Eavis giving away milk from the farm. Thirty-four years later 150,000 attended. The festival's infrastructure now matched that of a town the size of Bath but, notes Eavis sadly, "the fence had become king".
Some may quibble with a line-up of artists that draws heavily on the 1990s (where are Hawkwind when you need them?), but with Primal Scream, Stereo MCs, The Levellers, David Bowie, the Chemical Brothers, Joe Strummer and dozens more all featuring, if what's on stage doesn't float your boat, there'll always be something else along in a minute. Short of spending four days at home living off cider and chips, smashing your own cistern and then listening to a transistor radio buried under a pillow, this is the closest anyone's going to get to re-creating all the magic and the madness of the world's greatest festival.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
Temple began working on Glastonbury in 2002, when he put out a request for festival-goers' home movies. What he got was 900 hours - a mind-blowing range of material from across four decades that enables the film to recreate that shattered attention span, what's-round-the-next corner vibe so redolent of the festival experience. Watch naked hippies cavort in the grass. See the Mutoid Waste Company recreate Stonehenge with cars. Dream of jacking it all in to go and live in a yurt. There's also ample interview footage of Eavis - who even as a young man sported that unusual beard - discussing the Herculean task of staging the event every year.
This isn't the first attempt to capture the festival on film. In 1971 Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam were among the team who made Glastonbury Fayre, a fascinating if ramshackle period piece, outtakes from which appear here. Myra Breckinridge director Mike Sarne also contributed to 1995's unaccountably prosaic Glastonbury: The Movie. Temple, whose The Filth and The Fury remains the definitive film about punk, is on home turf here, mixing festival-goers' moments of blissed-out epiphany with random weirdness, archive news reports and inspired - if not always disciplined - performances.
Among the many forgotten stories unearthed is the plight of the 'peace convoy' - the rag-tag army of bus-dwelling hippie-punks who so exercised the 'Daily Mail' in the 1980s. Eavis, broadly sympathetic to their cause, allowed them on site for free, but his relationship with them was never easy. Violence and rioting in 1990 necessitated the rigorous approach to security with which the festival is now associated. In 1970 12,000 turned up to see Marc Bolan and Al Stewart for free, Eavis giving away milk from the farm. Thirty-four years later 150,000 attended. The festival's infrastructure now matched that of a town the size of Bath but, notes Eavis sadly, "the fence had become king".
Some may quibble with a line-up of artists that draws heavily on the 1990s (where are Hawkwind when you need them?), but with Primal Scream, Stereo MCs, The Levellers, David Bowie, the Chemical Brothers, Joe Strummer and dozens more all featuring, if what's on stage doesn't float your boat, there'll always be something else along in a minute. Short of spending four days at home living off cider and chips, smashing your own cistern and then listening to a transistor radio buried under a pillow, this is the closest anyone's going to get to re-creating all the magic and the madness of the world's greatest festival.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
