Wattstax

20 August 1972, Los Angeles. The Stax record company puts on a concert at the Memorial Coliseum. Tickets are one dollar. The date was chosen: the Watts uprising had happened in the same month seven years earlier and the concert was set against its memory. Close to a hundred thousand people come. The Stax roster is on stage and Isaac Hayes closes. The film gives the concert recording together with conversations with people living in Watts. Mel Stuart directs. What it is best known for is what happens off stage: Richard Pryor's passages between sections are the narrative's second voice, and what he says is harder than the concert. Jesse Jackson opens the concert and reads a text along with the crowd; that section is the most quoted moment in the documentary. What the narrative builds is not a concert recording; the camera keeps moving between the stage and the neighbourhood and the music is never separated from its context. Isaac Hayes's stage costume and performance entered the visual memory of the period. Because of rights problems some songs were changed in later versions and the film was long unavailable in its full form. The documentary is a record of American black music and of the social condition of the early seventies at the same time. Who it is for: viewers who like soul music and documentary of the period. Who it is not for: the structure is loose, the talking sections cut into the concert, and the sound carries the limits of its time.