The following is an excerpt from Armond White’s 2002 essay accompanying the Criterion Collection’s edition of MONTEREY POP.
“A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking. That’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s MONTEREY POP. When Pennebaker and his 16mm filmmaking team came on board to cover the 1967 festival, director Pennebaker (then age 42) was older than most of the participating musicians, yet he shared with organizers John Phillips and Lou Adler a vanguard belief in encouraging American pop culture’s — not simply youth culture’s — divergence from the old, familiar performance and theatrical traditions. This was not only the period in which the Hollywood movie musical waned but also when rock concert promoters had found a countervailing way to bring artists and performers together, as if to justify entrepreneurship by celebrating a social and artistic spirit. Yes, it was the “Summer of Love” for hippies expressing a pacifist alternative to middle-class strictures and the Vietnam War, but it was also the era of the French New Wave and the New American Cinema pursuit toward more realistic filmmaking. Purpose, innovation, and exuberance combusted in one rocking, Northern California site.”
