"The Weather Underground"

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Fri Jan 17 08:15:25 PST 2003


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



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