Film Review by R. G. Davis
[originally published in: Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1
(Autumn, 1990), pp. 58-60]
Berkeley in the Sixties
Produced and directed by Mark Kitchell.
Cinematography: Stephen Lighthill.
Editor: Veronica Seiver.
Kitchell Films, 2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710.
As a a participant in radical work in the sixties, I found this film
better than I had feared it would be. Though it is structurally a
simple-minded documentary, alternating talking heads with historical
news footage, it's filled with enough memories to make initially
appealing sense. Only upon a second look, and a listen to the sound
track, does it become clear that it is also a musically literal,
cinematically linear, and timidly liberal interpretation of the sixties.
The opening section, taking us from the first protests against the
House Un-American Activities Committee's visit to San Francisco through
Mario Savio's famous speech during the Berkeley campus Free Speech
Movement, exaggerates the role of Berkeley students in the San Francisco
events; San Francisco had had a strong old left for decades, in both
labor and civil rights areas, and it was these people and their children
(through SF CORE) that were mainly responsible for the first auto-row
and hotel-discrimination actions. The narration by Susan Griffin, with
text by Griffin, Kitchell, and Steve Most, is guilty of historical
hubris here.
Nonetheless, the first 25 minutes of the film makes a sound
connection between the southern Civil Rights experience and the northern
campus civil-liberties issues of the FSM. The climax of this liberal,
pre-radical section comes after Mario Savio is seen delivering his
impassioned declaration:
We don't mean to be made into any product, be they the government,
industry, or organized labor. . . . There is a time when the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at
heart, that you can't take part; you can't even possibly take part,
and you've got to put your bodies on the gears, upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it
stop, and you got to indicate to the people who run it or who own
it—that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from
working at all.
The radical feeling of Savio's words is immediately undercut by Joan
Baez's warbling of "We Shall Overcome'' as we see students lethargically
walking up a staircase. Sit-in shots and demonstration shots, along with
speeches by UC President Clark Kerr lead to the apex of the film's
interpretation of this period: philosophy professor John Searle's
recalling, "So when the faculty marched out into this cheering mob of
students, we knew that that was it. We had achieved everything we had
set out to achieve in FSM." To which Griffin's voice adds "Victory in
our struggle for civil rights and free speech made us confident that we
could change the course of history.''
From this juncture onward, the film takes as its implicit task the
dissecting of the radicals, the elimination of the Communists, and the
ignoring of major figures in the Berkeley and Bay Area political scene
who do not fit into the neat picture of campus protest. Searle (now a
dean) considers that "the radicals had no program, vision, concrete
program" while Ruth Rosen (now a professor) believes "we were beyond the
Cold War." A student observer named John Gage (now a corporate
executive) serves as a kind of audience identification figure who felt
"We were too far from the Newport Beach people I wanted to reach." By
the end of the film the straight guys and gals come out ahead, all clean
and tidy; there are no reds, no gays, no hippies, no freaks, no Trots.
The film's timid proposition is that the system can only be fiddled with
from within.
True, radical organizer Frank Bardacke is allowed some time on screen
for less sanitized views, with a small assist from Jack Weinberg, but
they are quickly buried under the "reasonableness" of the liberals'
considered opinions. Omitted are major figures of the non-liberal left:
Bettina Aptheker, influential Communist on the FSM steering committee;
Bob Scheer, Vietnam War activist who ran for Congress; Ann Weils,
feminist and communist, who organized troop-train stoppages; and well
known figures including Michael Lerner, Jerry Rubin of the Vietnam Day
Committee, Robert Hurwitt, even Ron Dellums (now Berkeley's congressman
and then a radical city council member). There is no reference to the
important role of KPFA-FM, which did broadcast the revolution, nor to
the underground paper The Berkeley Barb, another critical institution of
Berkeley in the sixties.
All of the above do not fit into the cast of scrubbed-up student
activists, nor were they engaged only in civil liberties issues, and
most important, none was above or beyond the Cold War. Most of the
omitted figures supported the victory of the Vietcong. The ''Wild in the
Streets'' activists though they could "bring the war home," and to some
extent they did, but the only aspect of this that figures in the film,
through Bardacke, was the attempt to close the draft board offices in
neighboring Oakland.
The film's music is a further evidence of a tepid interpretation of
the events chosen; it too eradicates any traces of the radical wild or
chaotic in favor of a kind of liberal musical tourism. There was
adventurous music in the sixties (Riley, Reich, Oliveros, Sobotnick,
Sender, et al.) but all Kitchell and his academic advisors give us are
sound-track pop, folk, and rock 'n' roll tunes that "illustrate" the
visuals. The final lines by Griffin carry the authority of voice-over:
Having gained the freedom to see the world freshly and the
ability to act for change, we carried what we learned into the rest
of our lives, from personal issues to planetary concerns, we
continued to explore the potential for change. And, as we watch
activists for human rights and democracy around the world challenge
the powers that be, we know that each generation has the chance to
make change and that no generation can do it alone.
This statement, accompanied by the singing of good old safe Pete
Seeger, could have been made by Jimmy Carter—or Gus Hall, for that
matter, longtime head of the US Communist Party—both of whom were
regarded as enemies by the New Left and by militants of every color: red
(native American), black, brown, and white.
Where The Big Chill was Hollywood's corporate put-down of the
rambunctious sixties, Berkeley in the Sixties is the academic liberals'
interpretation without intellectual insight. (All of Kitchell's
"advisors" were University of California faculty members: Leon Litwak,
Todd Gitlin, Troy Duster, Ruth Rosen, Reginald Zelnick.) And while some
might be thankful that they didn't try to support their simplistic
sociological approach with deconstructive or semiological jargon, they
could have used the more handy and historically appropriate cultural
critique of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer-not to
mention Leo Lowenthal, who still lives in Berkeley).
The radical objective of an historical analysis, after all, is to
assess the past in order to understand successes and failures and
sources of present conditions—to inform present and future actions. This
film merely celebrates the very institutional and thought structures
that the majority of "the movement" rebelled against. The sixties were
far more disruptive than this film suggests. Not only were the students
ready to break out, so were composers, painters, theater people, artists
of all kinds along with young people of many colors who decided not to
be tracked into jobs, home, and apple-pie roles. The period generated
the women's movement, midwifery, alterative education
projects, the environmental movement. Capitalism got its lumps, and the
"brightest minds" were staying clear of the corporations. The
rebelliousness and rejection of so many institutions and accepted rules
of law and order were breathtaking and chaotic, sometimes downright
messy and stupid. But it is a big mistake to elevate liberal campus
civil liberties issues above resistance, bringing the war home, and
other challenges to corporate society. In a country where selfishness
and greed have become terminally entrenched, the sixties deserve honest
remembrance as a time of mockery, love, sharing, nonconsumerism, and
antiwar militancy, along with some adolescent chaos. Not an easy
subject for a film, admittedly, but Berkeley in the Sixties is like a
corpse on a life-support system. It's well preserved and brain dead.
R. G. Davis
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