Ashbury Street

Documentary on Claude Brumachon’s production ‘Ashbury Street’, a work about the paradoxes of the hippie movement in the face of the problematics of the 60s and 70s.

Ashbury St. is first a street in San Francisco that witnessed the birth of the hippie movement in the 1960s: it is thus a symbol. The symbol of an entire era. By taking this street as my title I plunge inside it. The street where Janis Joplin dragged her boots with the Capricorn Girls and where the Grateful Dead gave their first concerts. A whole crowd of rock icons have passed through here.

More committed and more polished, Ashbury St. requires from its interpreters another maturity, more militant, more elegant, more profound. I shall seek to flush out the paradox: Flower Power faced with the Vietnam War, the cool attitude, the violent deaths, the young men sacrificed for a nation.