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MISSION HILL ANDTHE MIRACLE OF BOSTON: A REVIEW by Greg Bush The ideological clash at the base of much recent socio-historical work frequently divides along ill -formed assumptions about the proper definitions, rights and responsibilities of what community life is all about in the modern world. Needs for national defense, the stimulation of what is labeled economic development among widening political and economic boundaries, and the shifting mobility patterns of ethnic, age, labor and status function groups create inevitably conflicting priorities from both natural and human resources. Shoudl those who live on the land, those who have built the local structures, control and direct them? Or should that torch pass to those who possess a more 'sophisticated ' vision of regional development? What, in fact, are community needs at a time when it becomes difficult to feel, see and know them in an increasingly atomized and homogenized landscape? Regional, national and international interdependence calls for control of resources that run across community lines in a myriad of confusing, contradictory and specialized functions and pressures. These have the depressing effect of sucking the life blood from invaluable informal group cohesion that human personalities seem to require. Conversely, many can romanticize the community spirit to the point where the dead control the living, and the translators of communities shape the memories of the living members about their own past. American democratic theory as well as the mediums of popular consciousness seem oddly dated in addressing these complex questions. * Mission HlZl and the Miracle ofa Boston [60 mln/BSW) Is available faon nental at $65 fanom Cine Research Assoc, 28 Fisher Avenue, Boston, Mass. 02120. Gneg Bush teaches hlstony at Stevens institute ofa Technology In New Jersey. 64 A film that raises the questions about the widening control patterns of community life, when done with a sensitivity to the complexity of these issues is a doubly valuable resource because it not only can be influential in informing the political, planning and business specialists . It has the more important value of being a persuasive piece of propaganda for a redefinition and rededication of the community to itself . Neighborhood preservation films are an enormously powerful political and social weapon that are just in their infancy due to the past dominance of the celluloid medium by corporate network funding and expertise. Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston is such a film. It flows from the new social history that is uncovering the richness and texture of ethnic community life that corporate capitalism and modern reform movements have done much to destroy. Producer Richard Broadman and his friends have created an interesting film that unsparingly condemns the process of urban renewal in Boston over the last twenty years. Using Movietone footage, newspapers, local photographs and oral interviews with intelligent and engaging people, Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston presents a visual potpourri of selected aspects of changing Boston over the last one hundred years. Turn of the century photographs contrast the neighborhood oriented, exploited, immigrant labor force with the Brahmin owners of the factories, their $7,000,000 estates in the country and by extension their snobby progeny who are pictured to have fostered much of the support for the vast growth of educational, medical, and financial institutions in the Mission Hill area; the ironic miracle. Although one Mission Hill resident claims that "it's all Harvard 's fault," the real estate interests and Boston College's President C. D. Joyce are also seen to be the enemies of traditional neighborhood life in their collusion to promote an influx of capital in the downtown area. The inevitable gentri fi cation of new professionals is pictured as a disease. Although the film weaves a valuable web of social life in process, there are several minor drawbacks. The producers wanted to keep the narration to a minimum and let the people of the neighborhood speak for themselves. (Many of the residents contributed money as well as interviews to the $13,000 budget for the film.) Yet the viewer has little sense of when certain of the events were taking place, or to what some of the references were being made. The producers' earlier film, Children of Labor...

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