The
Screen:' American Revolution 2,' Story of Chicago '68
By ROGER GREENSPUN
Published: October 21,
1969
AMONG
the major educational experiences of the current decade, the 1968 Democratic
National Convention in Chicago offered so
many lessons that the enterprising communications industry has only now begun
to extract the profit. But even in the movie business, traditionally the last
with the least, the returns have started coming in. We have had Haskell
Wexler's "Medium Cool," and now we have the imperfect but highly
interesting "American Revolution 2," made by the Film Group, a Chicago association
of filmmakers that prefers not to indicate individual credits.
"American
Revolution 2" doesn't so much explore the meaning of the Democratic
Convention or its immediate products, as make use of it and of the shapes and
sounds that emerged in reaction to it. That is to say, the film is less
interested in what it means to call a policeman a pig than how
"pig" sounds when repeated with such insistent reiteration that
individual insult merges into over-all pattern. "American Revolution
2," which opened yesterday at the 55th Street Playhouse,
would have to be counted as failed documentary, if documentary were really
its intention. But I suspect it is after bigger game than merely the
reasonable understanding of events.
The
events begin with the convention, continue through a series of interviews,
some teasingly brief and some maddeningly drawn out, and end with several
meetings of the Young Patriots, an uptown Chicago group of
emigré hillbillys. The Young Patriots are of interest because, with the
voices of the rural poor, they speak the language of urban radicals, and
because, with a minimum of apologetic sophistry, they are able to form what
seems like a viable coalition with Black Panthers from the southern part of
the city.
The
materials are otherwise by now so familiar as ritual to form a radical's
litany: confrontations between young people and "pigs," Mayor
Daley, enraged militant blacks telling you where they think you're at,
putdowns of middle-class liberals, embarrassments for a slightly conciliatory
policeman. Everything really happened, and everything is photographed with
that frantic insistence on zooming in and zooming out that seems to beset
contemporary photographers of real events—as if none of them believed in what
he saw with the level gaze of his own eyes.
"American
Revolution 2" differs not in its searing immediacy—which like searing
immediacy everywhere is a conventional and crushing bore—but in its
willingness to push involvement to such an extent that ultimately form
follows function and the babble of voices and the progression of spokesmen
(most of them carefully not identified) begin on their own terms to move out
of chaotic communication and into hermetic style. Although it is rarely fun
to watch, and is aggressively boring for long stretches, and although its
message will be news only in the last recesses of the liberal imagination,
its approach to the medium is sufficiently inventive (except for the dreadful
zooms) to justify the "revolution" of its title.
The
movie ends with a minor cinematic coup. As the voices continue in claim and
counter claim, the images suddenly cut from angry people to graceful
statuary, from a protest meeting to a cemetery, from indoors to outdoors,
from feverish close-up to studied perspective, from the living to the dead.
The juxtaposition is made quite without comment, and with only the largest,
most humane kind of irony. The point is that if the film can push forward, it
can also draw back, and from the pressures of our miseries it can shock us into
calmness by no more than a change in scene.
AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2,
made by the Film Group Chicago and released by Cannon Releasing Corporation.
At the 55th Street Playhouse,
east of Seventh Avenue. Running time: 80 minutes. (Not
submitted at this time to the Motion Picture Association of America's
Production Code and Rating Administration for rating as to audience
suitability.
©1969-2009
NYT
Link to this
page :
www.cannon.org.uk/lostfound.htm
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