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"The Song Is Love, named after the 1967 song by the trio, is an inspired combination of political documentary and experimental portraiture, organized around personal statements by each band member. Mixing performance footage with candid interviews, musings by the band members in nature and backstage, and footage of the members marching and speaking at political rallies, the film is a meditation on America’s troubled politics, at home and abroad. Interviewed about the film, Hooper averred, “It’s not a documentary, […] and it’s not necessarily ABOUT Peter, Paul and Mary, although they are featured in it” (quoted in Worley 1970).
Several candid moments serve as structuring set pieces, in which the three artists discuss freedom of artistic expression, and the political limitations on that freedom. Hooper parallels these intimate statements with the band members’ more public-facing protests for equal rights.
(...)
Such feelings about the freedom and power of art against the expectations of the industry seem portentously relevant to Hooper’s own career, since the director was politically and artistically second-guessed at every turn. Though Hooper could not have predicted his future struggles inside and outside the Hollywood juggernaut, he fashioned a documentary that consciously blended the politics of freedom and equality with investigations of free artistic self-expression under stress."
Woofter/Dodson, 2021
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