Without rubbing our face in visual gimmicks like split-screens, Monterey Pop captures the sweaty, bodacious force of a live rock concert-the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Director D.A. Pennebaker does not try too hard to increase the performances' liveliness; why would you try to increase the liveliness of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Mammas and the Poppas, and Simon and Garfunkel? Instead, he films them with a wonderfully gritty photographic style, zooms in to so we can see their perspiring faces, and then lets them do the rest. As for 'defining a generation', the film doesn't do so in the kind of exhaustiveness of Michaek Wadleigh's Woodstock but it does give us a feeling of the life of a sixties radical. If there is one problem with the film, it is Pennebaker's idiotic choice of showing us the confusion as to how the massive audience will be able to be fed. This behind-the-scenes moment shows Pennebaker trying to do what Woodstock did. He shouldn't. He shouldn't let the music stop at all; what is so marvelous about this film is not its ability to capture the feel of a generation through interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, but, rather, through the looks in peoples eyes when the music starts.
Review of Monterey Pop
