In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Lemisch | Students For a Democratic Society, Heroically Portrayed, Before the Inexplicable Fall: Consensus History in a Left Film Students For a Democratic Society, Heroically Portrayed, Before the Inexplicable Fall: Consensus History in a Left Film Rebels witha Cause. Produced, directed, written and edited by Helen Garvy; 110 minutes; for a schedule of showings, see www.zeitgeistfilm.com Jesse Lemisch As the winds blew outside the Screening Room in Tribeca on a Friday night in November, just after Election Day, more and more familiar faces walked south across Canal Street tojoin the line outside the US theatrical premiere ofHelen Garvy's new film, Rebels with a Cause, a documentary about the 'sixties activist organization, Students for a Democratic Society. As is the custom of my people, I had arrived much earlier than was necessary, but this gave me a good chance to see the gathering crowd. On the line, and then inside, were some notso -familiar faces that my brain had to process for a while to get back to the originals, as well as many immediately familiar New Left faces: Ros Baxandall, Steve Max, Paul Lauter, Marilyn Salzman Webb, Carl Oglesby, Cathy Wilkerson, Joan Wallach Scott, and a theatre-full of others. (Some of these people, talking heads in the film, were to join director Garvy for a Q and A, standing in front of the screen, after the film.) Conversations before the showing, even a kind of left networking, seemed to convey nicely the message that the fellow SDSers who had come had stuck with it, in one way or another. Now they were asking each other for data about treatment of patients in emergency rooms, and about witnesses in police brutality cases, talking about the Nader campaign, demonstrations against the Electoral College , the approaching re-issue of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band's original 1972 record, the yogurt cultures growing in containers on their window sills, and so forth. Aside from myself, people looked pretty good, sometimes stylish, sometimes in the recognizable uniforms of the 'sixties. It seemed the beginning of a fine evening. But the film itself, while often moving and evocative to a participant in the events it describes, with good (although sometimes superficial) interviews and impressive contemporary clips, turned out to be stunningly uncritical and self-congratulatory, and thus at odds with much that the SDS I knew stood for (I was a member of the University of Chicago Chapter). The film rehearses the by now familiar plodding, mainstream narrative beyond which younger historians of the left have been moving. "This is our story," says Garvy in voice-over at the beginning . Whose story? What follows this announcement is consensus history, with most of the conflicts and important disagreements wiped out. Half of the interviewees (and Garvy as well) had been SDS national officers, or had worked in the National Office — the film continues the top-down, N.O. focus on leaders that younger historians have been criticizing. And the list of interviewees is not at all strong on dissenters within SDS. The April, 1966, Assistant ProfessorJesse Lemisch speaks to sit-in against Selective Service in a student-occupied administration building at the University of Chicago. Lemisch was fired later that year. (Looking on benignly is meeting chair Jackie Goldberg, formerly of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, now LosAngeles City Council Member and candidate forCalifornia StateAssembly.) 54 1 Film & History Jesse Lemisch I Special In-Depth Section film is just short of being the voice of what might be seen as a faction in SDS, whose sometime intolerance of dissent within the organization is repeated by the film (at one showing, a critical questioner was shouted down by the audience). Except for brief and misleading attention to sexism in SDS (more below), the history of SDS is presented Whiggishly as a story of ascent and progress until, inexplicably and without prior sign or symptom , Weatherman comes along in 1969, with its Days of Rage and its bombs, and SDS goes under. The Weather Underground, the film says, was bad; but it couldn't have been all bad, since the talking heads include Weather vets Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who are now shown...

pdf

Share