Which way the wind blows
Midwestern revolution takes Sundance
with "The Weather Underground"
Ray Pride
Documentaries are tough enough to finance, even
when they're not about a group of young people
who bombed the U.S. Capitol.
Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather
Underground," a feature-length portrait of the
ambitions and failures of the radical group, turns
out to be more topical today than the pair had
imagined, with the parameters of protest against a
potential, unpopular war once again under
discussion.
In October 1969, several hundred activists in
football helmets, carrying baseball bats and lead
pipes, wreaked forty-eight hours of mayhem on
Michigan Avenue, hoping to start a revolution
against the Vietnam War and racism. A core
group went underground, and waged war against
the U.S. government, notably breaking Timothy
Leary out of prison and bombing a number of
federal facilities. "The Weather Underground"
charts both the ideas and outrage of the group in
interviews with Underground members who have
moved on to other careers, including Northwestern
University Law School faculty member Bernardine
Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers, author of
"Fugitive Days," his memoir of time spent hiding
underground. It also chronicles the tale of those
who didn't make it over to the other side, including
David Gilbert, serving a life sentence for his
participation in a 1981 Brink's truck hold-up.
The complex, mostly chronological narrative took
four years to complete. "There are two reasons it
took so long," Green, the San Francisco-based
director of the accomplished documentary, "The
Rainbow Man/John 3:16" says. "Finding people,
connecting with people, and gaining their trust,
took a long time. The only way people would talk
about it is that if we knew the history."
The filmmaking partners met in New York in 1990,
when Siegel, the Chicago-based director of school
programs for the Great Books Foundation, who
contributed to documentaries such as "Hoop
Dreams" and "Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story,"
was at grad school at Columbia. They worked as
freelance researchers on the Ali doc.
Green and Siegel discovered a mutual affinity for
where-are-they-now stories as well as a
commitment to left-wing politics. Of the
Weathermen story and their terrorist actions,
Siegel says, "We knew it included strident political
convictions, that we'd had our own adolescent
fascination with the sex and violence aspects of
the story. But we realized that the generation or
two younger than us had little to no idea of
Weatherman's story. We also didn't know whether
we could get any of the former members to
participate." Most did, as well as contrarians like
NYU prof Todd Gitlin, who was a member of the
radical youth group Students for Democratic
Society until the mid-1960s, before the
Weatherman split.
While researching at the Library of Congress in
D.C., Green surveyed a Senate report and found a
couple of pages with all the members' mug shots,
which is flashed at the beginning of the film. "They
haunted me," he says. "They look really tough, and
the same time they look like middle-class white
kids trying to look tough. When I was looking at
them, I also realized I knew one of the people."
When he called him up, his friend conceded,
"`Yeah, you found out about my secret life."
Siegel's blunt about why the film had to be made.
"Since 9/11, dissent has only been further beat
back and narrowed. Altogether, I see the film
exploring more questions than answers. Why do
people turn to violence to bring about social
change? Is violence in the service of a cause ever
justified? What responsibility do `we the people'
have to challenge governmental injustice? Those
questions strike to the core of the current climate,
and are also at the heart of our film."
"The thing that interests me is that it's a morally
ambiguous story. It's interesting because most of
life is morally ambiguous, in my opinion," Green
says. The film's most striking moment comes at
the end when group member Naomi Jaffe, married
with children, reflects the inevitable sorrow of a life
long-lived. Her beliefs hadn't changed so much as
the times; if not for her family she'd do it all over
again.
"These were people in their early twenties who
most people said were crazy or terrorists, and in
some ways they were," continues Green. "But at
the same time, there were such horrific things that
this country was doing. In the film, Bill Ayers says
something like, everybody says that if they were in
Germany in the 1930s, they'd kill Hitler. Or if it was
in the 1800s and they were in the South, they
would oppose slavery. That's so easy to say,
because you're not in any of those positions, but
these were people who really felt they were in that
kind of position and they had to do more than just
protest. They had to put everything on the line. In
some ways, I think that's very admirable, that
impulse."
Siegel asserts that "Weather Underground" is
more relevant after September 11 and impending
plans for a war against Iraq. "The need for the film,
and a broad-based discussion of the issues it
raises, is acute. There's also the fact that the story
of the Weather Underground is not easily
understood, much less articulated on film, or even
in any other way. Yet because it is so complicated,
painful, inspiring, or maddening depending on how
it strikes you, I hope it can be a vehicle to get
discussion going. We'd love to reach the
generations of young people who don't have any
idea that not so long ago, a group of young, sharp
and committed U.S. citizens tried to overthrow this
country."
"The Weather Underground" debuts at the
Sundance Film Festival. It should hit theaters or
PBS this fall.
(2003-01-15)
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy