Glas­ton­bury the Movie (In Flashback)

As the open­ing logo of Glas­ton­bury the Movie (In Flash­back) explodes on to the screen like some sort of car­toon fire­ball, we could be for­giv­en for think­ing this is an overblown film ver­sion of the wall-to-wall TV cov­er­age the music fes­ti­val receives every year.

How­ev­er, with the excep­tion the occa­sion­al edi­to­r­i­al annoy­ances, Robin Mahoney’s doc­u­men­tary offers Glas­ton­bury up as an essen­tial­ly ethe­re­al expe­ri­ence, one that is best left to wash over you.

Orig­i­nal­ly filmed in 1993, the last year before TV cam­eras invad­ed, Mahoney has gone back to the draw­ing board with his pre­vi­ous release and re-edit­ed his footage from scratch to cre­ate a new film. Rather than being an inter­view-dri­ven doc (although there are a few), the film instead attempts to evoke the par­tic­u­lar, oth­er-world­ly atmos­phere that Glas­ton­bury seems to whisk up.

To this end, the film achieves its aims remark­ably well. Observ­ing the var­i­ous odd­balls and eccentrics that mill around the fields makes for a fas­ci­nat­ing spec­ta­cle: men play­ing gui­tars upside down; giant bub­bles; crowd­surf­ing and young fes­ti­val-goers rev­el­ling from an ele­vat­ed JCB scoop.

Curi­ous­ly, the film works best when it isn’t focus­ing on the major bands occu­py­ing the large stages, but on the micro-cul­ture that devel­ops with­in the con­fines of the fes­ti­val itself. As folk hur­tle around in mul­ti-coloured vehi­cles and men on giant stilts stalk the land­scape, dry and dusty from the sum­mer heat, it resem­bles a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic waste­land where every­one is hav­ing a great time.

While also cap­tur­ing the depth and range of the fes­ti­val, and what can be a quite mag­i­cal expe­ri­ence, the humour of the fes­ti­val goers is also dis­played through the care­ful revis­it­ing of cer­tain ​‘char­ac­ters’ throughout.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the film’s overzeal­ous edit­ing detracts from this the­mat­ic through-line. At a num­ber of junc­tures, main­ly when cov­er­ing main stage per­for­mances, the film makes very heavy use of split-screen images (per­haps a nod to 1970s Woodstock).

If the inten­tion is to por­tray the sheer vari­ety of char­ac­ters and dis­play the fes­ti­val in some sort of par­al­lel-edit­ed Rashomon mash-up, it doesn’t real­ly work. At one stage, the split screen appears to show iden­ti­cal images, and at anoth­er, the right image also has cross-fad­ing images. This is sim­ply too much to pile on screen and still appre­ci­ate, which, giv­en some of the images on offer, is a shame.

In its more aes­thet­ic flights of fan­cy, Glas­ton­bury the Movie (In Flash­back) is visu­al and aur­al delight. As a win­dow on pre-Brit­pop Glas­ton­bury, it makes for fas­ci­nat­ing and often cap­ti­vat­ing view­ing. Though it too often it wrench­es you away from the action just as it’s get­ting inter­est­ing. Much like Glas­ton­bury itself these days, the film is a frus­trat­ing mélange of the poet­ic and the prosaic.