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The best documentary award became part of the Oscars in 1942, and the list of winners is genuinely fascinating. In the category\u2019s early years, the State Department and various branches of the U.S. military were routinely nominated, and even won. As time wore on, films critical of the government and its policies \u2014 whether the focus was labor, nuclear war or the surveillance state \u2014 were more likely to take home the prize. At the Oscars, the documentary category might tell us more about America than any other.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite winners is from 1970: Michael Wadleigh\u2019s \u201cWoodstock\u201d<\/a><\/strong> <\/strong>(for rent on major platforms<\/a>). It ran more than three hours when it was first shown; a 1994 director\u2019s cut stretched to nearly four. The film is a document of the seminal 1969 music festival near Woodstock, N.Y., which has in the decades since taken on almost mythic proportions in American culture, a touchstone for boomers and everyone after.<\/p>\n What\u2019s clear from the movie is how Woodstock was very nearly a catastrophe, logistically speaking. Far more people showed up for the three-day festival than anyone had expected. There wasn\u2019t enough food to go around, and the whole unsheltered crowd nearly fried in an electrical storm. It\u2019s easy to imagine violence breaking out, or some other terrible event that would consume cultural memory. In fact, that did happen a few months later, when a teenage Rolling Stones fan was stabbed and beaten to death at the Altamont Speedway, an event captured by Albert and David Maysles in their 1970 film \u201cGimme Shelter<\/a>.\u201d (\u201cEverything that people feared would happen (but didn\u2019t) at Woodstock happened at Altamont,\u201d the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote of that film.)<\/p>\n \u201cWoodstock\u201d is a mesmerizing watch, as the cameras roam from the stage to the organizers\u2019 chaotic approach to managing the crowd to the many ways that attendees figured out how to take care of one another. (And there is, of course, the music.) Just as the festival threatened to veer out of control at any moment, the filming was a skin-of-the-teeth operation, with a team populated by many young and relatively inexperienced filmmakers. Perhaps that\u2019s why it ended up working.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In fact, that\u2019s why I\u2019ve been thinking about it: out there in the mud holding a camera was a very young Martin Scorsese, fresh out of film school. According to cameraman Michael Chew in a Rolling Stone article<\/a> about \u201cWoodstock,\u201d Scorsese tried to nap under the stage in a pup tent, knocked over the pole and got stuck in the tent. \u201cHe had claustrophobia and was screaming for somebody to help him,\u201d Chew said. \u201cBut he wasn\u2019t Martin Scorsese yet, he was just some schmuck from Little Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n Scorsese, of course, went on to become someone. This year his drama \u201cKillers of the Flower Moon\u201d is nominated for 10 awards at the Oscars \u2014 and one of those is for Thelma Schoonmaker, his longtime editor. She and Scorsese began their work together in 1967, with their first feature, \u201cWho\u2019s That Knocking at My Door.\u201d Soon after, she worked as an editor on, you guessed it, \u201cWoodstock.\u201d For moviegoers, the documentary\u2019s legacy stretches far beyond its subject.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n