The late summer, three-day Woodstock Music & Art Festival of 1969 was held in Bethel, New York. Costing some several million dollars to produce, not to mention untold thousands of hours devoted to its cause and purpose, it represented an extremely ambitious and complex promotional effort. Despite the best laid plans, though, it very nearly resulted in tragedy after a passing rainstorm washed away all service roads and rendered the landscape a morass of mud and filth on the second day of the concert.

Located a good distance from any metropolitan center and showcasing the talents of rock gods, folk and pop heroes, soul and R&B funk masters and some several hundred thousand excitable festival-goers, the festival took on the guise of an epochal transition. Ever since it has been the happily remembered capstone of the 1960s, at least literally if not figuratively since it may have taken the fall of Saigon in 1975 to end the period inaugurated with JFK's presidency.

Michael Wadleigh and Bob Maurice, the director and producer of the 1970 documentary Woodstock, tagged their film with an invitation to remember. "Experience the Event That Named a Generation." In so doing their cinematic representation of perhaps the most important musical event of the twentieth century surpassed the usual boundaries of documentary form and style. Their picture moves beyond established patterns of worshipful concert movies and trippy head films to become a potent punch of artistry commingled with touching observations of a pivotal moment in time, all of it captured with a stereophonic soundtrack and split-screen technique showcasing multiple, simultaneous camera setups and points-of-view of the action at hand.

Punctuated by blasts of you-are-there verisimilitude with the sights and sounds of the festival, numerous interviews, asynchronous panning and tracking shots, helicopter vistas and the omnipresent power of the music, Wadleigh's film is more than a viewing experience. It's a record of a lost time and its value as a document of space and place cannot be understated. Nor can the importance of its director's cut reissue in 1994 when considering its extra 30 minutes of footage expanding the picture's enterprise to promote the possibility of attending the event itself through echoes of unwinding videotape or laser light scraped DVDs.

Opening with background footage of the festival's stage and grounds creation, musical waves wash over Baby Boom desires and introduce the character types, fashion, icons and sounds of 1969. Woodstock trades on the nascent tensions and idealistic discoveries of its moment in America's story to convey a deep unsettled longing for pleasure and togetherness by not just the concert's promoters but also its minions of attendees and admirers from afar. Under the toll of Vietnam, through the covetous indifference, fear and sympathy of a Depression-era establishment living just to one side of the festival as parents, guardians and critics of free expression, into a world riven through with the beacon of music as a new religion on par with no other power save that of youth and sex, both of which are amply displayed as sideshows to the musical acts at the event's center, the footage of the event is positively amazing.

Announcements about bad acid making its way through the crowd are made. Marriage proposals are offered and accepted. A baby is born. A concertgoer dies. The National Guard airdrops food and medical supplies for the desperate audience cut off from civilization by the freak late-summer rainstorm. Excited concertgoers trample fences marking off the farmland-turned-festival location. Outhouses are cleaned. Angry year-round Bethel residents complain of inconvenience and noise. Adult attendees smoke pot, drink beer, skinny dip, take meals and sleep. Children play in the nude. Day turns into night turns into day and through it all various camera crews, interviewers and sound technicians give special attention to the people and events surrounding them with a prescience born not of assuming the importance of Woodstock in history but of feeling its wave of influence and translating that feeling of magnitude into film.

Suggesting one closed state of mind before hand, then refiguring it through the, "3 days of peace, music...and love," at least one generation was named with this extremely memorable marketing slogan since borrowed by soft drink companies and contemporary concert promoters to brand their respective ideas and products with the legitimacy of association with Woodstock. Wadleigh's film thus attempts to capture the festival's overall feel, depth and multi-dimensionality, not to mention the many layers of inconvenience, serendipity, both good and bad, and kindness produced in the event, largely succeeding due to the grandeur of scale that was the concert. At the end of all such descriptions, however, Woodstock is a telling tribute to the bands and artists who people the plywood-cobbled stage to produce the purpose of an impromptu city in upstate New York.

Highlights include several moving acoustic songs by Crosby, Stills & Nash, a night-time show of stadium rock power by The Who, an oddly out-of-place though still somehow entertaining '50s throwback in Sha-Na-Na and the usual twitching weirdness of Joe Cocker & the Grease Band. Canned Heat plays a raucous set. So too does John Sebastian with the best of his protest songs. Ten Years After earns a rightful place of special memory in a magnificently realized split-screen performance but the film's undeniable highpoint must surely be the nighttime set of Sly & The Family Stone and the entirely awe-inspiring, improvisational fury of Santana.

In these records of live performance, as is true of any live performance be it music, theater, poetry or prose, much of what's exciting is the detail of imperfection and spontaneity possible in uncontrolled circumstances. That virtually every performer, band and speaker in the film is brilliant is perhaps attributable to the film's editors, including Martin Scorsese. Still, there is something to Woodstock as an event in our cultural memory and Woodstock as a film in our cinematic archive that expresses what's possible at the convergence of art and commerce colliding, head long, with a musical pop religion magnified by natural disaster and made complete by good vibes and joy.

Following suit Wadleigh's movie is terrific. As a background score for other activities, excuse for remembering bygone times, signpost to the habits, attitudes and fashion sense of the '60s or as a collection of spot-on performances, it's a worthy reason to spend an afternoon watching a movie. Especially a movie with lasting value and meaning as pieces of American history.