Filmmakers distill the times, the spirit

I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was at Woodstock. At the time, I inhaled the 1970 Michael Wadleigh rockumentary memorializing the 1969 happening originally billed as "The Aquarian Exposition."

I wasn't at Woodstock, but I took A Walk on the Moon, Tony Goldwyn's steamy 1999 feature starring Diane Lane and Anna Paquin as the Generation Gap-defining mother and daughter who separately and surreptitiously attend the festival with their respective boyfriends.

I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was there in the fine Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin documentaries Jimi Hendrix (1973) and Janis (1974), incorporating footage from their definitive performances there the year before their deaths.

I wasn't there but I look forward to Taking Woodstock (due Aug. 28), Ang Lee's comedy about the real-life guy working at his family's motel in the Catskills who inadvertently secures the permit for the fabled concert.

Does the crystal clarity of Joan Baez resonate in the era of Lady Gaga? Can a long-take concert film keep viewers rapt in the age of the jump-cutting American Idol?

Woodstock (1970), a time capsule that distills the mud, sweat, and beers (and pot, acid, and mescaline) essence of the festival still does it for me.

From Baez, whose throbbing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" serves as a benediction, to Hendrix, whose instrumental performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" sounds both his patriotic and antiwar sentiments, the film is a panorama of what in 1969 was called the Younger Generation.

Director Wadleigh's split-screen imagery gives a kaleidoscopic taste of a kaleidoscopic event.

Working with 16 cameramen and an editing team that included future Oscar winners Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoomaker, Wadleigh powerfully conveys the rapport between performers and audience, festivalgoers and townies. (Sartorially, there's enough fringe on the performers to provide manes for a cavalry of My Little Ponies.)

While there are about as many cuts of the movie as there are of The Godfather and Blade Runner, the canonical version may be "The Director's Cut," available in a three-hour DVD released a decade ago and a 40th-anniversary Blu-Ray version that comes dressed in a fringed vest and includes footage not in the original.

The concert's high points (no pun intended) are the performances by Baez; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Hendrix; Santana; Sly and the Family Stone; and The Who.

When The Who's cherubic Roger Daltrey sings "Listening to you I get the music / Gazing at you I get the heat," it sounds like Shakespeare next to contemporary lyrics like "I wanna take a ride on your disco stick."

The film's peak is probably Sly Stone singing "I Want to Take You Higher," understood in both its spiritual and drug-induced meanings.

"Steam was literally coming out of his Afro," Carlos Santana remembered. Another witness says that "Grace Slick and Janis Joplin were dancing together, eyes tight shut, fists clenched and bodies whipping around. 'Higher,' Sly shouted into the crowd. 'Higher!' they boomed back with the force of half a million voices at their loudest."

Where Wadleigh's Woodstock telescopes the seismic events of Aug. 15-18, 1969, Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon shows their impact on the Kantrowitz family, a middle-class clan that vacations at a Catskill family camp near White Lake where the festival was held.

In her nuanced screenplay, a late '60s bookend to Dirty Dancing, Pamela Gray negotiates the parallels and the chasm between Pearl (Lane) and her sexually curious 14-year-old (Paquin). Is it the free love and sensual music in the air that attracts the married Pearl to an itinerant hippie salesman (Viggo Mortenson)? Is it the hormones or the times that cause her daughter to lie to Mom and run off to a certain music festival?

By the time we get to Woodstock, both mother and daughter are indulging their forbidden lust. But when daughter spies Mom in an unmotherly moment of hedonist ecstasy, both are caught short. The film mirrors the social and cultural changes of the time while honoring the timeless pull of family and responsibility.

Where Woodstock suggests "go with the flow," A Walk on the Moon suggests you need a strong spine to swim against the social currents and be yourself.