Monterey Pop

🎬 OFFSCREEN CINEMA
Cast: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Otis Redding

Three days, one stage, almost 30 iconic bands, nearly a hundred hours of recordings and one excellent film. On a summer weekend in June 1967, the legend of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix began. It took just three hot days at Monterey Stadium for 27 artists to create a counterculture and give birth to the California dream. Before Woodstock was formed, a hundred thousand people at the Monterey International Pop Festival, fueled by psychedelic sounds, tied a hippie commune. It was a “summer of love.” Scott McKenzie suggested the dress code in his song: “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” People abandoned formal, embarrassing clothes to go barefoot but in bells, tangled with ethnic beads, with flowers in their hair, to gather among the fumes of smoke, not yet knowing what would happen. We will find the answer already in the first seconds of the movie “Monterey Pop”. The enthusiastic hippie delivers a spoiler to the camera: “It will be like New Year's Eve, Easter and Christmas all rolled into one!” The almost levitating representatives of the “flower children”, the psychedelic sounds and the atmosphere of change through the eyes of the camera were captured by Oscar winner D. A. Pennebaker. The movie “Monterey Pop” was supposed to be just a TV show, however, American policymakers were not ready for such a dose of rebellion. Fortunately, thanks to the digital reconstruction of the film, we will see that Pennebaker's work is not only a record of concerts, but also a portrait of an entire generation of counterculture of the 60s, its energy, freedom, wildness and artistic revolution.