Reality Cinema 2002 - 2006 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 31

Thirty-first chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

The first clip contains footage from inside the World Trade Center on September 11, and the third includes images of a violent bus hijacking in Brazil. Neither contains graphic content, but as with the Rodney King footage from Chapter 27, it may not be something people are comfortable watching in this context.

View "Chapter 31: Reality Cinema"

Reality Cinema

This was the age of ubiquituous "reality" - reality TV of course, but also a slew of film documentaries, a form that had never been more popular or prolific. This entry contains more documentaries than any other, from historical subjects to on-the-spot current affairs to raw cinema-verite-style concerts. Some of the non-documentary clips reflect this fascination with reality as well, from ultra-low budget "home movies" to the stylized humanism of a prolific and creative Asian cinema.

Yet there's an element of escapism too, not the old-fashioned bang-bang kind, but something more ethereal and moody - a sort of impressionistic daydream stylization reflecting the era of iPod and internet, in which inner space expanded to swallow up a whole generation. Sometimes the two trends (impressionism and realism) merge, as they do in the last clip, a sad and brilliant sequence mirroring the first clip across an unbridgeable gap of time and space. To a certain extent, today's chapter plays like a fitful waking dream, mixing fragments of memory, fantasy, and reality.

Before reverting to a more straightforward title, I considered calling Chapter 31 "Screening Reality" as a play on words, because this was a time not only of reality onscreen but filters and strategies applied to take the edge off of it.

(continued below, along with NSFW warnings)

Mark Rudd and the Weather Underground

Microphone in hand, impatiently trailing the wire behind him as he paced at the front of the old theater with about forty people gathered before him, Mark Rudd emphatically, if a tad regretfully, declared that he was not a "revolutionary." At least not any more. On Saturday, July 18th, the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH held a seminar as part of the Maine Film Festival entitled "A New Century - A New Activism." The talk began before the screening of The Weather Underground (a 2002 documentary about the radical left-wing group Rudd belonged to in the 1960s and 1970s) but spilled over into a post-film discussion as well.

The Weather Underground

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
-Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

"We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
-"J.J.", member of the Weather Underground, as relayed in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!"
-Bernardine Dohrn, member of Weather Underground, wife of Bill Ayers, on the Charles Manson murders

"They knew they were crazy...Terry [Robbins] and Billy [Ayers] had this Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude-they were blessed, they were hexed, they would die young, they would live forever, and at their most triumphant moment they would look over their shoulders, as Butch and Sundance looked back at their implacable pursuers, and say more in admiration than in dread, 'Who are those guys?' I believe they thought they looked cute, and that everybody would know it was basically a joke. The next minute, they were lost in it and couldn't get out."
-Carl Oglesby

"You don't need a proctologist to know who the assholes are."
-Popular saying amongst Students for a Democratic Society


Ah, the Weathermen. Who'da thunk we'd still be talking about them in a 2008 presidential election? But thanks to Bill Ayers, once a member of the defunct left-wing terrorist group, now a Chicago education reformer who has crossed paths with Barack Obama, the only domestic terrorist group to take its name from a Top 5 hit on the Billboard charts has become a household name again. The Weather Underground, an excellent 2002 documentary, is a decent starting point for anyone curious about the group; though somewhat sympathetic to the radicals (you won't find that Manson quote anywhere in the film) the upshot is that it solicits interviews from many of the Weather big shots. This offers a look into the group and its history which veers from funny to scary to pathetic, but is never less than fascinating.