Main Cast: Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, Bill Ayers
Release Year: 2003
Country: US
Run Time: 92 minutes
Plot
Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary about a radical group whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government details a valuable chapter in the history of the '60s protest movement and leftism in America. The Weathermen were a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the driving forces behind the period's mass protests against social injustice and the Vietnam War. Frustrated by SDS's adherence to non-violent dissent, the Weathermen broke off and adopted a more combative approach. As the student protests ebbed in the 1970s, the group went underground and shifted tactics, embarking on a terrorist campaign against the U.S. government. For years, the Weather Underground evaded the authorities' grasp, even as it pulled off high-profile bombings against government targets. Their momentum petered out in the 1980s, as one by one the organization's members surrendered after years on the run. The Weather Underground uses extensive archival footage and revealing interviews with the surviving members to trace the group's evolution and place their actions in the context of the period's tumultuous events. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
Review
Sam Green and Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground attempts to cover an awful lot of ground in 90 minutes: tracking the rise of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) from a non-violent civil rights group to America's largest radical leftist organization; explaining how a militant wing of the group first took control of the SDS and then splintered into a violent, revolutionary faction called The Weathermen; chronicling the group's declaration of war against the American government (and later the American people) as they attempted to "bring the war home" through a series of violent actions; and how the revolutionaries learned to "hide in plain sight" until most of them independently made the decision to give themselves up. That it does so as well as it does is remarkable, and if the film is flawed, it's in what isn't there rather than what is. For example, it seems odd that there's not a single mention of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the aggressive side of the Left met one of their most bitter defeats at the hands of the police; and while a handful of former Weathermen speak of their years underground, most are cautiously hesitant to discuss the details of their lives in hiding or how they worked with other radical groups, which isn't difficult to understand, but still leaves a significant chunk of this story untold. Also, while one FBI agent goes on record to discuss how the bureau tracked the Weathermen's activities, we learn little of the covert actions of COINTELPRO, the notorious FBI task force created to ferret out political dissidents. (Its ruthless disregard for due process and the Bill of Rights eventually caused most of the court cases against the repentant Weathermen to be thrown out of court.) As a complete overview of one of the most fascinating and troubling chapters in the political history of Vietnam-era America, The Weather Underground misses the mark, but as an introduction, it's compelling and thought-provoking stuff. Green and Siegel allow their subjects to explain themselves and their actions with little interference and the various degrees of their three-decade hindsight is itself one of the most fascinating aspects of the film. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Cast
Bernardine Dohrn
Mark Rudd
Brian Flanagan
David Gilbert
Bill Ayers
Naomi Jaffe; Todd Gitlin; Laura Whitehorn; Don Strickland; Kathleen Cleaver; Lili Taylor - Narrator; Pamela Z. - Narrator
Credit
Sam Green - Director, Bill Siegel - Director, Sam Green - Editor, Dawn Logsdon - Editor, Mary Harron - Executive Producer, Christian Ettinger - Executive Producer, Sue Ellen McCann - Executive Producer, Dave Cerf - Composer (Music Score), Amy Domingues - Composer (Music Score), Federico Salsano - Cinematographer, Andrew Black - Cinematographer, Sam Green - Producer, Bill Siegel - Producer, Carrie Lozano - Producer, Marc Smolowitz - Producer, David Westby - Sound/Sound Designer
In 1969, a small group of leftist college student radicals announced their intentions to overthrow the U.S. government in opposition to the Vietnam War. This documentary explores the rise and fall of this radical movement as former members speak candidly about the passion that drove them at the time. The film also explores the group in the context of other social movements of the time, featuring interviews with former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party. The documentary also examines the U.S. government's suppression of dissent during this turbulent era. Using archival footage from the 1960s and 1970s, the film also intersperses recent interviews with high profile ex-Weathermen like Bernardine Dohrn, David Gilbert, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Brian Flanagan, who talk about their involvement in the organisation, their experiences, and the trajectory that led them to be placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Quotes
"We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence." -Naomi Jaffe
"Once Richard Nixon was elected president and inaugurated in January 1969, we were targeted, bam, bam, bam, by a very sophisticated, advanced, counterintelligence program; At the same time, by very crude and violent police." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
"This pattern of harassment is going on against the Black Panther Party across the country. On Friday, the Watts office of the Black Panther Party was bombed and demolished. Last week the Des Moines office was bombed. They can't stop anything we're doing as a legitimate political organization so they come in and shoot us and shoot tear gas at us like they've lost they minds." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
"There's no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created. I'm not committed to non-violence in any way." Bernardine Dohrn, The Weather Underground
"Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks." Bernardine Dohrn, The Weather Underground
