Woodstock-Liz Eisler
Michael Wadleigh’s documentary, “Woodstock- 3 Days of Peace and Music,� is a brilliant film capturing a cultural movement towards peace. Throughout the film, differences between youth and their parents during the sixties were quite noticeable, with discrepancies on love, sexuality, politics, relationships, and the overall principle of society. Woodstock, a festival that named a generation, showed people (500,000 people in the concert area with thousands more gathered on the road because they couldn’t get any closer) how cooperation and tolerance could potentially lead to peace, however peace between youth and their parents didn’t come easily. In the article, “Blame it on the Sixties�, Landon Y. Jones is quoted saying, “America’s largest generation was growing up in an age-segregated universe, cut off from outside society and … bound together by their own prolonged adolescence� (43). The youth of the sixties seemed to take on an attitude of spontaneity and experimentation, both of which seemed quite difficult for parents to embrace. A culture once defined by social form was now being taken over by music, leading to political protests, riots against segregation and racism, and a variety of other heated issues.