Festival

An invaluable record of the Newport Folk Festival, the most important annual showcase for roots music from the late '50s through the next decade, Festival packs an amazing amount of information into its brief running time. Director Murray Lerner assembled footage he and several other ...more

As a key document of music history, Murray Lerner's record of the mid-'60s Newport Folk Festival, is similar to Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, which documented the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Festival offers a mix of performances and what might be called ambience footage. Lerner is so embarrassed by the rich variety of music presented at these annual tribal rituals that he chooses not to show any performance in its entirety, jumping from one folkie to another. And the film ably documents ...more