The Weather Underground

Dirs: Sam Green and Bill Siegel
2003
This was up for an Oscar for best doc (didn’t win). A well done history of the Weather Underground, the “Days of Rage” that sprung out of the frustrated anti-war movement, and what happens with middle-age and reality catches up with student radicals. The Weather Underground is one of those historical docs that reframes history so that not only does its subject become the center of attention, but alters how you look at its surrounding people and places. Green and Siegel succeed in making the actions of the radicals, though in the end futile, seem initially creditable. They did manage to explode bombs without killing anybody (except when it was themselves), they did do it for a reason (all bombings were in protest to some grave injustice by the police or the governemtn), they did successfully elude capture and become some sort of political force.
One of the interesting points it brings up about the Weathermen is even in the radical/neo-terrorist movement, their white skin offered them privileges. Whereas they were surveilled and tracked, members of the Black Panthers were assassinated outright.
Green and Siegel use a nice blend of footage, and don’t blink from showing us the atrocities that Americans were subject to through the TV of our foray into Vietnam. In fact, this is the first time that I’d seen the full footage of the assassination in Hanoi (TV, if it shows it at all, cuts right after the gun goes off–actually the cameraman continues filming as the blood spurts out of his head in a drinking-fountain arc). They use amateur animation and a soundtrack full of Aphex Twin and Sonic Youth.
The film ends suggesting that the ’80s curdled the dreams of the ’60s radicals, and that the remaining Weathermen live with a palpable ambivalence over what they did. The filmmakers also end with two ironic clips–“Hanoi Jane” Fonda turned in a workout video guru, and the fact that one of the Weathermen went on Jeopardy and won $32,000. Not too shabby.