From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jan 18 2006 - 13:06:31 PST
While not wanting to get into a lengthy debate vis the nature of
terrorism / whatever, I did in the post put terrorist / guerilla,
drawing implicit attention to the constructed nature of the terrorist
and terrorism (constructed by some media discourses and so on). I
didn't say the WU were terrorists as a simple statement as you imply.
However, the people who experienced their bombings first hand may well
have been terrorized.
I think there was a degree of explaining the politics beneath the
events in THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND film, but obviously that's a matter
of opinion. Given the length of the film and area covered I think the
movie worked. The other films you mentioned I haven't seen so can't
comment on.
Jack
On Wednesday, January 18, 2006, at 07:31 pm, David Tetzlaff wrote:
> 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...
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.