50 years later, the celebrations and contradictions of 'Wattstax' still resonate

Time capsules are funny things. They preserve a moment, a still shot of a time and place. We, the future, look at it and think we know not just that one moment, but everything that lives along the edges, outside the frame. It's wishful thinking, of course. One snapshot, one item, can hardly tell us everything we need to know about all of the names, faces, sounds that make up history. But there are some projects that try to, projects that try to give their time a shape, make it three-dimensional, and make it easier for the future to understand it.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of its 1973 release, the film Wattstax will be returning to theaters. The documentary, itself a time capsule of a city in flux, captures the Watts Summer Festival concert hosted by Stax Records at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Aug. 20, 1972. It will be joined by several albums' worth of music from and surrounding the event, packaged together as . And while the music and the film are great opportunities to revisit a moment, this re-release is also a chance to reflect on the edges, the things that lay beyond the frame, to understand why the music, the film and the moment they captured still resonate so strongly.