From: David Tetzlaff (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jan 18 2006 - 11:31:43 PST
Jack wrote:
> did I mention THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND by Sam Green, which is a great
> film about the US group the weathermen aka weather underground.
I must disagree.
1) I wouldn't call the WU terrorists, as they didn't really creat any
terror. It expands the term too far, I think, and in a direction too
favorable to Bushism: like, you know, Steve Kurtz is a terrorist.
2) Green and Seigal's film isn't very good. Despite the fact they
interview Todd Gitlin, they fall into the same trap Gitlin found in the
contemporary media coverage of the new left in _The Whole World is
Watching_: they stay on the surface, focusing on the spectacle of actions
of 'conflict' without ever explaining the politics underneath the
conflict. Helen Garvey's _Rebels With a Cause_, which some might find too
sympathetic to the WU at least gets underneath the politics, as does
Silber and Brown's _The War at Home_ which focuses on the New Years Gang
that blew up the Army Math Research Center at the U. of Wisconsin and
accidentally killed a grad student working in the building.
Not that any of this is Experimental in any way... I suppose you could
call Emile De Antonio's _Underground_ experimental, based on it's formal
qualities and/or lack thereof, but it wasn't part of that scene...
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