Post by Admin on Jan 18, 2013 16:40:35 GMT -5
Shamelessly plagiarized from Mudcat.
Laura Archibald is a Canadian filmmaker who has been working on this documentary for several years. A friend of mine in New York City was a participant in the interviews and sent me links to a couple of reviews this morning.
The film is Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
New York Times
When They Hammered Out Justice in the '60s
From the NY Times review:
"This multifaceted survey jumps haphazardly from theme to theme. There is a lot of Greenwich Village lore, including documentary footage of a confrontation between musicians and the police when singing was banned in Washington Square Park. Cursory chapters deal with folk musicians and the civil rights movement and the House Un-American Activities Committee's harassment of left-wing musicians. And at a certain point, the film abruptly jumps back to the late 1940s and '50s to bring in the Weavers."
Slant Magazine film review.
From the Slant review:
"But there is no organized chronology or analytical overview of those times beyond the remarks of those who were present, and too many of those are snippets of nostalgic boilerplate. The movie gives only the sketchiest description of the roots of acoustic folk music and the story of how it was absorbed into the pop mainstream.
"Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation" at least evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread."
That said, the Slant review concludes:
"The film is short on details and fatally long on obvious generalities such as "They were as much reporters as they were musicians" and "We came to find an idea of a new tomorrow." It's obvious that Archibald's participants, who've been giving interviews for years, haven't been asked questions that offer the possibility of coaxing them out of their comfort zone, and as a result the filmmaker fails to capture the intoxicating despair and outrage of the best American folk music. Archibald's approach is fatally safe: She often turns poets into self-congratulatory windbags."
If you see the film, and if you lived in this political folkie cauldron of Greenwich Village, I hope you'll report in.
SRS