... let the good times roll...

... Just watching this great documentary on the highly-underrated TCM...

Let The Good Times roll is a documentary about the Rock-n-Roll movement in the 1950s. It was made in 1973, One of the earliest rock docs there is. At least of its kind. It is preceded by films like Lonely Boy and Don't Look Back (one of my favourite films around)

But this documentary is not Cinema Verite, as the others are. Pennebaker and Koenig were chronicling a revolution, a celebrity with their cameras. They determined the film by being present at the moment the images were captured.

Let The Good Times Roll is great because itstitches together live concert footage of a 1973 Rock Revival concert tour with news footage, educational reels, photos and clips from the era in which the bands were most popular. The acts range from Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Shirelles to Bo Diddley... everyone who began the revolution of rock and roll. And it speaks, FROM the 1970s ABOUT the 1950s by reaching back in time and creating a picture of a certain era using the cultural products created at the time. The films message has to be defined entirely through curation and editing.

And watching this film in 2010 adds so much perspective to that type of act of creation. It forces the viewer to become aware of its structure. The construction of the film, the choice of photos, the images from the present (in 1973) laid next to the pieces of the past show just as much about 1973 as it does about 1956. the message the filmmakers seem to be trying to send to Americans living through Vietnam, the Bicentennial and musical revolution in a post-Woodstock america seem to be that this future was inevitable, but that hope was to be found in rebellion.

The film seems to say that this "Wild and crazy hippie movement" was not so unexpected. The seeds of a life of love and passion, music and Life with a capital L, had been sewn over 20 years earlier. When those who passed laws, sent boys overseas and silenced protests were still young, just screaming mobs of high school students doing the Twist.

watch it....