The Great Movies III

Anna visits old Billy every day, and one day Billy's hand touches her cheek and then falls slowly toward her breast. Anna removes it, and tells Martha, "Billy tried to touch my breast.""Oh, dear, why didn't you let him?" Martha says. "What difference does it make?"This conversation results in a later scene that is sweet, sad, and quietly moving.

When I say that Florance's performance is courageous, I do not mean simply that she made the movie even though she was dying. That took strength and resolve, but what takes courage is to reveal her character as she does, to let us see Martha stripped of vanity. All women, actresses especially, want to look their best; Florance shares her frail body with us like a sacrament.

The character's vanity, we realize, is expressed not through her appearance, but through her independence, through her determination to fight through every day without giving up and going off to an institution to die. That she cares for Billy and Anna and Miss Inchley and the girl on the talk radio is her reason for holding on: she can still be of use, and that's worth living for.

Paul Cox is one of the heroes of modern cinema, a Dutch-born Australian who makes his way independently of the mainstream production and distribution channels. In a world of fiercely marketed product and manufactured cinematic artifacts, his films embrace all the wonder and complexity of everyday human life. Consider his Man of Flowers (1983), also starring Norman Kaye (who is in most of his films), as a particular and eccentric man who lives alone and pays for sex in a way that, once we understand it, becomes touching (to know all helps us to forgive). Or his Vincent (1987), one of the best documentaries ever made about an artist, and his Diaries of Vaslav N~jinsky (zoos), an almost surreal effort to penetrate the mind of the great dancer. Or his wonderful Innocence (zooo), with its evocation of a romance that begins between two teenagers and continues when they meet again in old age.

His film The Human Touch played at Cannes 2004. It deals with a love affair, but a very particular one, between an uneasily married woman and a brilliant older man who is impotent, but whose caresses excite her as never before. All well and good, but who but Cox would think to transport his characters from Australia to France, and send them into a cave that is iio million years old, where they are awed by the distance between their brief lives and lusts and the overwhelming span of time that humbles them? Directors like Cox validate the cinema in an age of commercialism; his struggle to carry on making his films his way shows the same kind of courage that Martha has in A Woman's Tale. He knows he can be of use.

Abbie Hoffman: I live in Woodstock Nation.

Defense attorney: Will you tell the court and the jury where it is?

Hoffman: Yes, it is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind, in the same way the Sioux Indians carry the Sioux Nation with them.

hat's how I began my review of Woodstock when it opened in 1970. Twentyfive years later, when it was revived in a director's cut, here is how I closed: "And look what happened to the Sioux."

After another ten years, I wonder how many people even remember who Abbie Hoffman was? Those who were twenty at Woodstock are sixtyone, and many of those who performed are dead, not least Jimi Hendrix, whose electric guitar solo of "The Star-Spangled Banner" folded protest and patriotism within its anguish.

It is perhaps necessary to note that for three days in the summer of 1969, a rock concert was given on an upstate New York farm, and four hundred thousand people attended-far more than were anticipated, far more than paid, far more than could be fed or sheltered or cared for after injuries or drug overdoses. It rained, there was mud, all traffic in and out was gridlocked, and the music continued, night and day. It was filmed by a director named Michael Wadleigh and a team that included a young Martin Scorsese and the editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who would later edit all of Scorsese's movies. They exposed i2o miles of film, shot with sixteen cameras.

Had it not been for this movie, Woodstock would be vaguely remembered as a rock concert that produced some recordings. Wadleigh's Woodstock created the idea of "Woodstock Nation," which existed for three days and was absorbed into American myth. Few documentaries have captured a time and place more completely, poignantly, and, for that matter, entertainingly. It has a lot of music in it, photographed with a startling intimacy with the performers, but it's not simply a music movie. It's a documentary about the society that formed itself briefly at Woodstock before moving on, showing how the musicians sang to it, the Hog Farm commune fed it and the Portosan man provided it with toilet facilities.