"Everyone has a melancholy Brokeback Mountain in their hearts, and a colorful Woodstock." - Ang Lee
In 2009, on the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, Ang Lee made a film that was very "offbeat" in his list of works: The Making of Woodstock Festival.
The Woodstock Music Festival is a well-known cultural symbol in Western society. In August 1969, a music festival was held near the upstate town of Woodstock in New York, usa, and the music party that was originally intended to attract only 50,000 people suddenly arrived with 500,000 people, most of whom were called hippies, and many years later historians called them Woodstock's generation. To this day, the Woodstock Festival remains the most famous festival in the history of world music, permeating the innocence, uninhibited and ideals unique to that era.
Although "Making Woodstock" was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, it suffered a double cold reception at the box office and the media after its release, becoming one of Ang Lee's least well-known films.
This film is very unique, not a musical, not a biopic, not a documentary, it does not belong to any category, it is a work about freedom, youth and innocence, and of course, it is indispensable to the theme that Ang Lee has been exploring: family and growth.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Family and growth stories cloaked in music, interpreting the cultural symbol "Woodstock" from another perspective</h1>
Making Woodstock Is focused on making, not festivals. From the beginning to the end, there is no direct shot of the classic concert, and even the musical performance passages that appear in the whole film are few and almost flashed. In a 2010 interview with Vanity Fair, Ang Lee said:
"Woodstock is a highly inspiring abstract concept, and you can think of it as a small-scale family drama, which is the best way to interpret this cultural concept."
A coming-of-age story cloaked in rock music. Through the perspective of the young Elliott of the small town, the film witnesses the "manufacturing" process of the Woodstock Music Festival. The story begins very simply, even comically, with the Elliott family running a long-lost motel in a small town near White Lake, New York. After seeing the newspaper that the Woodstock Music Festival had been evicted from the previous venue, he took the initiative to contact the organizers of the festival and was willing to provide them with a performance venue to help his hotel get out of trouble. Unexpectedly, this somewhat utilitarian and somewhat naïve idea became the origin of a revolutionary event. The character of Elliott is very unique, neither a musician nor a hippie, nor a protagonist of the festival, and the film cuts through the perspective of such a bystander, describing the story of his "making" the music festival before and after, recording his growth and transformation.
The rupture and rebirth of a family. Ang Lee's films hardly lack family elements, and showing the family situation of the Elliott family is another narrative line of the film. Elliott was gay, but in the 60s of the last century, it was undoubtedly a taboo topic, and in life he carefully hid his sexual orientation and devoted all his energy to the family hotel, hoping that one day he would save enough money to leave for his parents, and then he could leave the town with peace of mind. It seems that the miserly mother has already saved enough money for the private room, but hides it and does not use it, letting the son smash the savings into the hotel opened by the family again and again, and cannot go anywhere, all of which is just to lock the son around, which is an alternative way for the mother to express love. Faced with all kinds of family conflicts created by his mother, his father became the bond that held the family apart at any time. The arrival of the festival eases the family's conflict, and at the end of the film, the family reaches a settlement, and Elliott can finally leave the town without any worries and live the life he wants.
Ang Lee simply borrowed the cultural symbol of the "Woodstock Music Festival", which has labels of anti-war, democracy, freedom, etc., to tell the story of the division, reconciliation and rebirth of a family, and also describes the story of a young man growing up in a complex historical environment. In Ang Lee's view, those interpretations from the historical and cultural level, those grand narratives are too elaborate, the most important thing in the music festival is not the singer, but the ordinary people on the stage, love and peace is not the rhetoric of the stage, but the mentality of the people offstage, which is the essence of rock music and hippie gatherings.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 The Woodstock Festival is a spiritual utopia in the United States and a sustenance for Ang Lee's search for innocence</h1>
The late 1960s and early 1970s were "the best times and the worst times" for Americans. People are talking about Armstrong's landing on the moon and opposing the Vietnam War, and no one in the Americans could have imagined that the Woodstock Festival would be the beginning of a movement, or even a reversal of the times, a free and innocent era. Ang Lee said: "The innocence and the loss of innocence will always come back to me, and the core is still the same." It's just different in appearance. ”
If the Woodstock Festival is an American spiritual utopia, the film is a sustenance for Ang Lee's search for innocence. Of all the films he's made, Making Woodstock is the only one full of lighthearted, witty, and humorous dialogue, and has been featured in six tragedies in a row, especially the controversial Color. After the Ring, this is also an emotional release for Ang Lee. In the movie, each character seems to exist only in the story, full of personality and vitality, and the plot makes people laugh. The festival was held in the movie as if it were a natural thing, omitting the ups and downs and many controversies, and 500,000 people fell from the sky like a fairy tale. Young men and women from all over the United States, with religious ideals, poured like a tide into the vast pasture with purple alfalfa and lakes, and danced freely with music, from here people forgot the earthly world, forgot the Vietnam War, forgot the repressed life, and this pure joy of freedom and freedom was the innocent era that Li Anxin never returned.
The film features Brian. morality. The Parma-style screen segmentation processing of events in different locations at the same time, using semi-documentary techniques, such as restoring the 4:3 screen ratio lens to shoot certain scenes, trying to restore the holy era in the hearts of literary and artistic youth, and also showing the chaos and diversity of this gathering. This 3-day music festival invited Joan. Baez, Jefferson Airplane, Jimmy. Hendricks, Who's The Band and other popular singers and bands. As the crowd grew, various marginalized figures – transvestites, nude troupes, hippies, drug addicts, homosexuals – joined the party, and the stars on stage and the audience on the stage had many political demands, and the festival became more and more chaotic in the next two days. The film skips these highly controversial topics and fictionalizes a utopia of harmonious coexistence in which marginalized characters are no longer ostracized by their families or society, and they take off their masks and move towards the masses and themselves.
Ang Lee even conceptualized and abstracted this ideal and innocence through film art. The climax of the film is the illusion of Elliott taking medicine: in an instant the picture is gorgeous, the oil paint begins to melt and flow, the girl whispers like an angel, the music becomes soothing, the grass becomes clear, the faces of the men and women are blurred, the colors of the Indian religious style are overflowing, and suddenly the whole hill and the ground begin to rise, the purple pink fog rises on the stage in the distance, and a lotus-like flower fire covers everything in front of you, and the whole world is so gorgeous and intoxicating. When it was all over, Elliott stumbled home, when he became his true self, and he had the courage to face his mother and tell the repression and pain he had been in.
The interlacing of illusion and reality is very short-lived, the plot falls from heaven to the ground, in Ang Lee's view, the Western rescue "utopia" does not exist, and all the hustle and bustle eventually falls silent. So why have people been thinking about this music festival for more than 50 years? As that cool girl Tissa said: "The little views of each of us close our universe". Everyone has "a colorful Woodstock", everyone has their own understanding and fantasy, China has two sentences: "seek common ground while reserving differences", "harmonious symbiosis", the world is destined to be so complex, this diversity may be the reason why the world is wonderful.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 American carnival, Chinese introverted - the implicit same-sex love element in the movie</h1>
This is Ang Lee's third film with gay elements after "The Wedding Feast" and "Brokeback Mountain". Why does Ang Lee love this subject so much?
I think that gay people, as representatives of rebellion against authority and the pursuit of freedom, reflect the individual struggles and human conflicts of the director's own cultural identity, and for a director with a Chinese and Western cultural background like Ang Lee, there is no more direct expression of the contradiction and confusion of identity than the gay theme.
However, compared to Brokeback Mountain, The Making woodstock Festival is more restrained and subtle. There is a lot of space in the original novel describing Elliott's homosexual identity, as well as the famous "Stonewall Incident" and other same-sex affirmative action-related protests, but in the film, Ang Lee considers the background of the times, abandons the direct reproduction of gay identity, and instead shows Elliott's struggle between hiding his identity and longing for a free life through a series of metaphors, coupled with family ethics and other factors, which then becomes a generalized, universal love.
There is a scene in the movie that shows the combination of American exuberance and Chinese delicacy and introversion, and then the dramatic tension that erupts. In the hotel bar where Elliot lives with his family, the girls push Elliot to the dance floor to dance, a girl is about to kiss him but is pushed away, and then a man grabs him and kisses him. At first he broke free without knowing who the other person was, but then he saw the boy clearly and continued to kiss him. This is a crucial and turning scene in the whole film, because Elliott reveals his homosexual identity in front of his father, which is a brave declaration after Elliott has suppressed for a long time, which triggers the test of family ethical relations, the conflict expected by the audience does not occur, and the elderly father gives acquiescence and smiles. This anti-climactic treatment is reminiscent of the relevant plot in "The Wedding Feast", but the calm contains a thousand words of two generations, but everything is in silence.
Unlike the loneliness and coldness of Brokeback Mountain, the same-sex theme of this film is placed within a cultural carnival, no longer a homosexual indictment of family and society, but an experience of self-discovery of value. Ang Lee is well aware of the charm of gay themes in art films, and also knows the suppression of subcultural groups in the mainstream market, he has adopted a Chinese-style middle way, so the appearance of this film is cold and loose, and the core is passionate, which makes this work so different in many gay movies.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > written at the end</h1>
Ang Lee is one of the few Chinese directors who penetrates China and the West, not only making works with oriental values and aesthetic cores such as "Eating Men and Women" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but also making masterpieces such as "Reason and Emotion" and "Brokeback Mountain" that make Western audiences praise.
The tone of "Making Woodstock Music Festival" is warm and introverted, and it seems to be incompatible with the era of freedom, chaos and liberation. There are so many documentaries about the Woodstock Festival, and behind the raucous rock music, Ang Lee uses another perspective to observe this cultural event, recalling the youth and innocence that have passed away, and can still impress the audience again.
Thanks for reading.
Note: Several of Ang Lee's original words in the text are from "Ang Lee: My Encounter with Woodstock"