Young, Underground, and Revolutionary

Tonight in my Documentary Film course we discussed and watched films about 1960’s and 1970’s revolutionary movements. Since I go to Columbia University, we watched a film about the 1968 protests and taking of the campus by student revolutionaries. I found the discussion following that film to be unexpectedly fascinating.

Most of the students in the course are 18-21 undergraduates, with some older undergraduates and some Masters students in the mix as well. The discussion basically centered on an argument between the younger and the older as to why we no longer see such protests and radical acts on campus today. The younger students were extremely apologetic and spent most of their time defending themselves with arguments like “we have more of a courseload today;Columbia keeps us busy.” The older students, on the other hand, were basically of the opinion that college youth is self-interested and decadent. The need amongst most of the younger students to justify why they were not storming administration buildings and getting arrested protesting something or other really fascinated me.

The next film we watched was my Haskell Wexler, Emile de Antonio, and Mary Lampson, and it was called Underground (1976). The film chronicles a series of interviews by the three filmmakers of members of the Weather Underground revolutionary group. The revolutionaries have their faces obscured and are in hiding, and the filmmakers cut between their interviews and footage of riots, police brutality, the war in Vietnam, and important related figures (like Malcolm X) speaking. Especially if you find the far left 60’s-70’s revolutionaries abhorrent, I would encourage you to see this film. It is sadly only available on VHS, though, and you might have to search for it a bit (more on that at the end of the post). What I guess I found so interesting in this film was the way that these educated people saw mid-20th century history so differently than I did. Coming from a perspective of those oppressed by the Soviet Union and Castro’s government in Cuba, I have a hard time with people saying that those revolutions freed people and that they were no longer exploited after the Communists took over. If you’re at all interested in this issue, I would encourage the film Before Night Falls (2000) with Javier Bardem, which is about Cuba under the Communists and the struggle of artists and especially of gays and lesbians in that country. It chronicles the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay poet from Cuba. It’s an amazing movie and wonderful performances from Bardem and from Johnny Depp.

So back to Underground. It occurs to me that many of these smaller, sometimes independent, films (like Underground or Columbia Revolt) are probably not in the control of any major studio and are probably not under copyright (if they ever were). These are the sorts of things that really should be digitized and brought to services like the Internet Archive or Google Video. After all, movies that are coming out of copyright (which is not really happening all that often anymore, but that’s for another post), like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) are being put online and are now available for anyone to discover and watch. This really should be done with the documentary and other smaller films from the last 5-6 decades, as those are at this point disappearing with libraries and some boutique video stores carrying old VHS copies.

What to put here?

 

So I’m trying to figure out what to do with this blog.

I have my main site running on my own WordPress installation over at www.greenthinks.com.

I guess I could use this for random stuff that doesn’t really belong over there.

But I don’t really restrict myself on greenthinks, so I’m not sure that makes so much sense in my case.

Oh, here’s an idea. Many times my non-techie friends hear that I have a site and want to go see, but then realize it’s all techie stuff and get turned off. Maybe I should focus this wordpress.com blog on non-techie stuff I’m interested in, like Music and Movies, and perhaps, just perhaps, my engagement — which is just 11 days old now!!

OK, I like that idea. So this blog will be about anything I want, except computers, the internet, and macs. Let’s see what I come up with…