Journey Through the Past

This past February marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Neil Young's Harvest album. Though quite commercially successful, and supported by the two hit singles "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold," critical reception for the record way back in 1972 was decidedly mixed. And with a half-century's difference, though Harvest has gradually become accepted as one of the seminal works of folk rock, it's doubtless that there will still be those who quibble over where it ranks in terms of the prolific singer-songwriter's early catalogue.

Nonetheless, one probably can't discount how significant the album must have become for the young Neil in that same amount of time. Having gradually built his rock reputation since the mid-'60s through his association with the short-lived psych-pop act Buffalo Springfield and the hippie supergroup he formed with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, he was only in his mid-20's when recording sessions for what would become Harvest began. At the same time, Young also became enthusiastic about documenting his processes, adventures, and friendships, collaborating with cinematographer David Myers and producer L.A. Johnson to chronicle the journey of Harvest from initial Quadrafonic Sound Studio sessions in Nashville; to barn recordings with makeshift backing group The Stray Gators at his Broken Arrow Ranch in La Honda, California; to Barking Assembly Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra for the tracks "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World"; and back to the states for overdubbing, last minute additions, touring, and promotion. A substantial amount of this material, as well as some surrealist experimentation, was already incorporated into Young's first film, Journey Through the Past, which saw a very limited release in the same year as Harvest, and received substantially less critical enthusiasm than its sister album. Now, however, a more exhaustive dive into the same archival record has yielded Harvest Time, which played the first of only two limited engagements at select theaters this Thursday, before it ostensibly goes straight to video-on-demand or, quite possibly, disappears behind the paywall of the artist's Neil Young Archives web domain for the exclusive patronage of his most ardent fans. The second "encore" screenings are scheduled for this Sunday.

There's no getting around the limited accessibility of a film like Harvest Time, even as far as music documentaries go. As opposed to Journey Through the Past, which is not necessarily a good film, but is certainly interesting and of its time in terms of Young's idiosyncratic blurring of the lines between observational cinema and the contemporary film avant-garde and underground, this new film looking back on the production of Harvest is presented almost entirely as a fly-on-the-wall document. Though Young and editor Rachel Zimmer occasionally experiment in non-chronological juxtaposition in order to highlight the construction of a particular track, their overall approach in composing Harvest Time is bound to strain the patience even of those fans to whom the celebratory project is narrowly targeted. Though the material they have to work with is extensive in terms of its volume, it is also obviously limited and inflexible to manipulation. For some recording sessions, Myers and camera assistant Fred Underhill could only operate two lightweight 16 mm cameras, but most of the time it's just Myers with his single vantage, clearly approaching his craft with minimal direction or even motivation to a greater vision. I'm tempted to describe Harvest Time as a particularly challenging example of "diary cinema," though "tour diary" or even "home movie" will probably give prospective audiences a more accurate idea of what they're getting into. What much of this archival material amounts to is single long takes of Young and his cohorts jamming, working through rather mundane technical and logistical hurdles in recording the album, or just fooling around. Young and Zimmer, for their own part, have opted to present this document of the Harvest sessions in a largely unbroken and naked way that can't help but characterize the results in terms of the private, intangible affinity for these memories to an audience of the one man for whom they represented a critical point in his creative and professional life.

There is some more recent mainstream precedent for what Young is attempting to do here with Harvest Time. I am of course referring to the Disney+ docu-series The Beatles: Get Back, produced and directed by Peter Jackson. Like Harvest Time, Get Back was composed mostly of unused footage originally intended for a much older documentary project (Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let It Be). At nearly eight hours in running time, and despite many fair critical reservations, it proves to a certain extent the untapped potential of a kind of cinematic document that aims to truly, exhaustively capture the more mundane aspects of pop culture history, especially if it can offer a kind of meta-textual critique of how even supposedly pure, "observational" cinema is manipulated to create compelling, but inaccurate narrative. But, then again, while Harvest is a much beloved record, it assumes none of the ephemeral gravity of Let It Be, which was the final album by one of the world's greatest pop acts before they broke up. There's also certainly no infamous legend underscoring the recording of Harvest or, thus, the contemporary creation of Journey Through the Past, whereas Lindsay-Hogg's documentary painted a very distinctive picture of infighting and creative tension leading to an inevitable breakup, for Jackson to answer decades later with a much more muted story of a long creative partnership simply coming to its melancholy end.

There are many interesting and even elevating parts of Harvest Time. The troublesome Barking sessions are a particular highlight, with Young, who is not classically trained and can't read sheet music, struggling to work with conductor David Measham to adequately synchronize the more rigid LSO to his own playing. But much of the ephemeral appeal of the film is constricted by the decidedly non-dramatic background of the album's construction, epitomized by a moment in the recording studio where Young concludes that the Stray Gators probably could play a particular track better, but that he actually prefers the raw, imperfect version that they have. If I have to get vulgarian about it, get really vibes-based with it, then I would say that Harvest Time is probably one of the "chillest" movies I've seen in a long time. And I find myself rather earnestly vacillating between respect for, even unqualified sympathy with, its elder stoner-statesman approach to music and memory, and then catching myself in a generational flip where I'm incensed by these damned hippies and their flagrant lack of motivation.

Harvest Time is a challenge, there's no question about that. But, nevertheless, I find myself drawn to its long, mundane passages, as well as its minuscule, only intuitive, though never quite meaningful interventions. And I can at least confidently say that this affinity is not coming from a place of fanaticism for Young (either his music, or his cinema), nor meta-nostalgia for the facades, fashions, and sounds of bygone Americana. If anything, I find myself much more appreciative of Young's virtually unalloyed "home cinema" than something like Jackson's signature technical self-indulgence when applied to the most over-trod of celebrity subjects, even if the latter is, in conventional terms, more competent. You're not going to watch Harvest Time and gain any greater appreciation of either Young's music or the more eccentric aspects of his creative persona that you didn't already have going in, or that you couldn't get a better handle on by watching, say, his concert film Rust Never Sleeps. But if you're like me, you may find in Harvest Time an unlikely repository for something that you didn't even necessarily know you wanted until you let the movie happen to you. There is a certain pleasure to be derived in so much mundanity, so much unpretentious nothing, because you really get the feeling like you're having access to a genuine, though not in any way conscious, exploration of the human condition, viewed through a very particular and limited window. It goes from being an at first brutally functional, and then quietly transcendent kind of cinematic experience, precisely because deep down it harbors the beauty of that which is not made for anyone, except whoever you may be in a very special moment.

There's one point in the film where Young is laying in a field, listening to the rolling hills of La Honda echoing back the recordings he and the Stray Gators have made in his barn, describing the process of writing the song "Alabama." Despite the title and recurrence in the chorus, Young claims that the song isn't really about the state. Rather, he only picked it out of all fifty because he felt it best described what he was trying to hide. Myers notes that Young doesn't seem like the type of person who has a lot to hide, and Young agrees, but there's something searching and noncommittal in his gaze as he looks off into the fields of his private paradise away from it all. He chose the word correctly. In the act of creation, even the most humble and transparent artist - perhaps they, most of all - masks something else through metaphor and artifice. Harvest Time feels at first like such an open project, so transparent in its modest aims; but its calculatedly limited engagement, and the meta-textual tension the film itself produces, in which we wonder if this is really a cinema for us, or a very private cinema expressly for those who made it, transcends notions of mere pandering to the fandom or personal self-indulgence. In as much as it reveals, its stagnant plainness in time also hides something, attempting to protect it from the perfidy and corruption of the outside gaze. In as much as it is a time capsule, Harvest Time can, after all, not really be about a "journey through the past." The past itself is a mask, a metaphor to shield and protect something vulnerable in the present, something beautiful, fragile, and in jeopardy of imminent loss, even as it is superficially celebrated.