The festival season is upon us. Get your warm overpriced cider out and check out my top ten music festivals in film list for Grolsch Film Works. Let me know what gems I’ve missed on the list! And here’s my review of Robin Mahoney’s ‘Glastonbury: The Movie in Flashback’ (2012) for Cinevue.
love these images
i recently did a post about festival style, im obsessed with it at the moment!
Robin Mahoney ‘s retooled version of his 1996 documentary strolls in like the last, straggling remnant from the furthest field on the site. It comes swaddled in tie-dyed fabric, its head whirling with visions of the bands of yore (the Lemonheads, Ozric Tentacles), spinning garrulous tales of campfire communions and dreadlocked debauchery. It’s baggy, it’s meandering, it’s altogether uncritical. For all that, the film’s giddy, carnival-esque air proves infectious. Mahoney ushers us jauntily back into the past, between the rows of tents, to view the fireworks.
In 1995, Mike Leigh said of this visually vivid documentary look at the 1993 Glastonbury music festival “it’s a masterpiece”. High praise indeed, coming from one of Britain’s finest filmmakers. Now it emerges again, from the chrysalis of the first film, with director Robert Mahoney (also doubling as producer and editor) adding “new performances, funny little moments unseen material found among the rushes”. The Cinemascope cinematography is ravishing with Michael Sarne among the credited cameramen. The editing – old and new – brings the brawling, sprawling affair vividly to life, opening with a scene of rural calm featuring cows looking languidly at the camera and segueing into sequences as the fields fill with cars, people, tents and louche, lively and occasionally naked people living the good life and enjoying the musical acts. Music knits the visuals together but given the likelihood that today only the most devout music fanatics will remember Omar, Lemonheads, Porno for Pyros and Stereo MCs among others, the film works best as a fascinating moment in musical/social history frozen in celluloid. Luckily the original directors, Mahoney, Matthew Salkeld and William Beaton, were blessed with something currently missing from the British summer, beautiful weather, beautifully photographed, (It’s hard not to feel really sorry for the festival attendees currently wallowing in mud and rain on the Isle of Wight). Fine use of the split screen adds impact, jugglers, stilt walkers, clowns, drunken dancers and assorted amiable weirdos add colour, and the pacing is fast. When someone comments as they clear the traces of the festival from the fields, there is “such a nice vibe”. (Best of all, perhaps, is that in 1993, the currently far too omnipresent and ubiquitous Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard are nowhere to be seen).