Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation (Laura Archibald, 2012): Canada

Reviewed by Laura Wyatt. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2013.

The film starts out quiet abruptly with a “talking head” explaining why you’re crazy if you think the folk music scene started in Los Angeles and not New York.  Greenwich, New York to be exact.

The film, supported by interviews and historic footage goes on to prove that he is right.

The proof is in the history books and record stores. At the time, no one could have predicted how important this time period and gathering of like-minded musicians would be to the growth of folk music. The film chronicles the rise of folk music by going back in time with footage from TV shows, concerts, home movies, and news reels.  The footage shown had rarely been seen before and was an added treat for junkies of that music. Although the main source for informing us is from the mouths of the singer/songwriters themselves.

There are many facets to the evolution of folk music and the film separates them into chapters. Some of these chapters include the importance of coffee houses, how this music changed the world, civil protests and how the black list destroyed lives. The chapters are divided by an animation series which felt completely out of place. The look of it didn’t fit the time and it felt cartoonish in the midst of a serious documentary.

Director, Laura Archibald had lots of people sit down for interviews but apparently not a lot of money or creativity. Where I was left feeling the movie didn’t deliver was with the interviews and the way they were shot and edited. Each contributor was interviewed for a long period of time and then those interviews were spliced together into their appropriate chapters. You never hear any questions being asked but an interviewer and the camera never moves from its one spot.

Woody Guthrie played a monumental role in folk music and although he has long since passed away, his son (Arlo Guthrie) is around and his music lives on. Arlo would have gotten a big kick out of the fact that when his dad’s song, “This Land is Your Land”…began to play, the audience broke out into song and serenaded themselves with tremendous glee.

Archibald did manage to get Susan Sarandon to read exerpts from Suze Rotolo’s memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. She had wonderful insight into those times as a participant-observer as she and Bob Dylan became inseparable in the early years of his career.

In a Q& A after the film, the director said she wanted to leave out Bob Dylan all together, that enough had been documented about his rise in the world of folk music. She soon realized that would be impossible and ended up devoting a whole “chapter” to him.

I learned a lot about a period of music history I knew very little about. I just wish this film had been a little more creative in the way it delivered the information.