I love to watch music festival vlogs on YouTube.
In fact, I enjoy them so much that I started a channel to make them myself.
So it just makes sense that I would love documentaries about music festivals as well.
Not so much documentaries on the history of festivals, but those documentaries that are more fly-on-the-wall types that try and give you the atmosphere.
The Woodstock festival documentary, for example, or the previous Glastonbury documentary, 1971’s Glastonbury Fayre.
Glastonbury the movie in flashback (Which is a dreadful name by the way) tries to capture some of the atmosphere of its festival and create as ground-breaking a film as the Woodstock one was.
Does it succeed in this goal? Truthfully, no.
But thats not to say the film isn’t worth watching anyway.
The Vibe
As a fly-on-the-wall documentary, there is no real focus to the film.
Really it’s just the cameraman wandering through the campsite and seeing what they see.
Some of the highlights include:
- A very strange and stylised hippie car as it drives through the campsite.
- People making food (which looks FAR better than anyone people make at festivals nowadays)
- Lots of people on drugs* (*Not confirmed**)(**But almost definitely)
- A man with some wonderfully large hair
The Music
The documentary purposefully doesn’t show very many acts, and avoids anything too high-profile, seemingly more interested in just showing the hippie vibes of the festival.
We do see some acts like Porno for Pyros, Chuck Prophet and The Lemon Heads.
Personally I think not showing the other bands was a missed opportunity, as some of the bands playing later on in the day would have been amazing to see.
The line-up included bands like Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Red Hot Chilli peppers, The Kinks and Barenaked Ladies.
None of the artists shown even gets announced through a title card, which does help make the experience feel authentic, like you’re really there.
But at the same time, it would be nice to find out who was playing before seeing their name in the credits.
Woodstock ‘influence’
Let me be blunt: Glastonbury the movie in flashback wants to be Woodstock. The documentary, that is.
Although, I suppose in a way Glastonbury the festival wants to be Woodstock as well.
The Glastonbury documentary is a monumental, ground-breaking film, and I am fascinated every time I watch it and love to see the small details of a bygone era.
The miles-long traffic jam as all the festival goers tried to arrive at the festival.
The people washing themselves in a nearby lake.
The very frank and open announcer who spoke about some bad Acid that was going around.
“Now some people have been saying that some of the acid is poison. It’s not poison, it’s just bad acid… if you feel like experimenting, only take half a tab, okay?”
Woodstock announcer
The biggest ‘influence’ the Glastonbury documentary takes from it is the use of split-screen.
In the Woodstock documentary, they used split screen to show twice as much footage because they had so much and wanted the audience to see as much of it as possible.
Even with this effect, the film is over 3 hours long!
Glastonbury the festival in flashback also uses split screen, but the issue is that it never feels warranted. Very little of the footage actually seems worthy of being there, and the film only ends up being an hour and a half long anyway.
90 minutes which outlays its welcome as well. The film could have been a pretty good 60-minute short film, rather than a rather tedious 90 minutes.
I think the issue is that Woodstock was an international news story, and since it only happened the once, it gained a kind of cult stats as The Event of the 60s.
Glastonbury 1995 was not that event, it was just another music festival. I’m sure that the people who went had a great time and they have great memories of it, but it just isn’t on the same level as Woodstock.
Now, just to show that I’m not hating on Glastonbury in flashback (seriously, I DO hate that name though), here’s something I really enjoyed about the film.
Bookends
One thing that Woodstock was missing was a focus point that the audience could use to ground them in the world.
It really is a meandering camera through a fascinating world, but having a person to follow would have helped to keep the viewers interest through the very long film.
Glastonbury has this, though only really through bookends.
Early on in the film, we see a woman putting up a structure. We find out that she didn’t bring a tent and so is building something akin to one using cardboard, plastic and discarded tent poles.
Within the film, either through absolutely superb directing or abysmal attention to detail, we do not find out this woman’s name.
She is just another nameless individual who is part of the crowd. She is no-one and everyone, and she embodies the festival spirit perfectly.
The credits does list ‘Vanessa the Pink Dress Girl’ which I think is her, she wears a pink-and-white dress, but she never gets formally introduced through voiceover or text, so I’m not 100% sure.
Anyway, at the end of the film we catch up with her again as she puts her tent-like structure down again and gets in her car and drives off.
It is a fantastic way to bookend the film, letting us enter and leave the festival with this person – it leaves us wondering who all these people are. Its like leaving a festival in real life, wondering what will become of the friends you made there and if you will ever see the fun-loving strangers you had a chat with drunk at 4am.
The Issue
Glastonbury 1995 is not a perfect documentary; it goes on for too long, lingers too much on rather dull aspects of the festival and definitely could have used some more highlights.
Earlier on, I referred to festival vlogs on YouTube, and I think thats comes into play here as well.
Festival vlogs are great to watch as festival season approaches and you start to get hyped. You want to experience the festival from someone else’s POV.
But YouTube has many, many, MANY festival vlogs, and so the best practices for these videos have become established.
- Make the videos short, interest will drop off after a few minutes
- Keep only the interesting, most exciting bits
- Audiences like to see the person behind the camera, we want to know who’s festival experience this is.
Glastonbury The movie In Flashback doesn’t tend to follow these rules, and thats an issue.
You won’t want to watch this film again for the story or anything, and it definitely goes on for too long. The editing is sloppy and the direction of the film is sometimes nowhere to be found.
However, you may want to experience the atmosphere again, and the film does that well. Just maybe not well enough to really hold your interest for 90 minutes.
Wrap-up
If you are heading to a festival soon, or have just been to one and have the post-festival blues then you may find Glastonbury 1995 a fantastic way to remember your own festival, or just see how they happened over 20 years ago.
If you are the type of person to look at famous photos with a crowd and wonder what one specific person in that crowd was thinking, then this is a film for you.
It’s not perfect a perfect movie, reflected in its pretty average IMDB score of 6.1.
The film is also nowhere near as good, or as groundbreaking, as the Woodstock movie, again reflected in its very high IMDB score of 8.1.
However, Glastonbury the film in flashback definitely has its charm and its certainly worth a watch at least once.
