Review
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
Featuring Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd and Todd Gitlin
Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel
Opens Friday, December 19
Uptown Screen
Of all the different subdivisions of the American left in the heady days of the 1960s counterculture, the most furious, subversive and dangerous was the Weather Underground.
Faced with a U.S. regime that they perceived to be responsible for tremendous violence and injustice both at home and abroad, the Weathermen, as they were also known, famously broke ties with the pacifist Students for a Democratic Society to pursue the violent overthrow of the American government.
The Weather Underground, a new documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, chronicles the rise of the organization during a period in American history that would already seem to have been documented ad infinitum. Yet, for once, we’re shown the complexity of a situation that left some activists frustrated enough to declare war on their own country. Awareness of this little piece of mostly unknown history reveals something that should be of interest to anyone concerned about the state of dissent in our society – which is that the left was, and still is, much more fragmented than it often appears to be.
This is one reason why cultural critic Todd Gitlin, who appears frequently throughout The Weather Underground, is highly critical of the Weathermen’s extremist methods. Like Gitlin, many in the pacifist left believed the group was counterproductive and allowed right-wing critics and the establishment to tar all leftists as terrorist kooks. Ultimately, even the militant Black Panthers, whom the Weathermen tried to embrace as brothers and sisters in arms, sought to distance themselves from this group of mostly white, middle-class radicals.
Watching The Weather Underground, which combines rare newsreel footage, archival photos and present-day interviews with several of the principal figures in the organization, I was reminded of parallels to another documentary about a more recent protest movement. In the NFB production View from the Summit, which documented anti-globalization protests at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, there is a scene in which various movement leaders meet before a march to discuss their respective ideologies – and, except for a few anarchists, almost everybody is worried about the potential for violence.
In some ways, not much has changed in 30 years. The left is still made up of individuals, and groups of individuals, who espouse extremely divergent philosophies about the nature of effective dissent. In this sense, The Weather Underground reveals much more than the aberrant behaviour of a group of disillusioned idealists. We must be careful not to isolate their moment in history from the continuum on which it rests. Even if we don’t know it, we’re still living with the legacy of their actions, and there’s a great deal to be learned from both their successes and, more importantly, their failures. |
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