There was a time when music festivals were defining spaces. The Newport Folk Festival, in Rhode Island, was as much about music as it was about activism. Set between the 1963 and 1966 editions of the event, this film unveils a new generation of American folk music, marked by the rise of artists such as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan. In 1965, Dylan shocked the world by performing three songs with an electric guitar, abandoning his acoustic approach in a moment that would become etched in the history of music.
According to the prevailing myth, an enraged Pete Seeger rushed, an axe in his hands, to cut the power supply. He had to put an end, once and for all, to that betrayal, the disgrace of seeing the young once prophet of folk music converted to the perversion of electric music, of rock ’n’ roll. The venue was the Newport Folk Festival, the year, 1965. That’s the place and time we return to in Newport and the Great Folk Dream. We return not to confirm the myth, but to discover the truth. And the truth is far more complex, interesting and revealing than the myth, which cast Dylan as the scapegoat for something that, in truth, was beyond his control.
Assembled from the 100 hours of footage shot by Murray Lerner, director of Festival (1967), between 1964 and 1967, featuring an impressive gallery of legendary names (Johnny Cash, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, the Staple Singers, Dave von Ronk, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez), Newport and the Great Folk Dream tells the story of a folk utopia, brief and unsustainable, giving way to the world of rock ’n’ roll and its attached counterculture that, in this film, looms before us as surprisingly contemporary. (Mário Lopes)
