Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 09:33:58 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: AUT: Lemisch critique of SDS film


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From: "Jesse Lemisch" <utopia1-AT-attglobal.net>
List Editor: Van Gosse/Eliza Reilly <reillygosse-AT-igc.org>
Editor's Subject: Lemisch critique of SDS film
Author's Subject: Lemisch critique of SDS film
Date Written: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 13:26:08 -0500
Date Posted: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 15:50:09 -0800


From: Jesse Lemisch <utopia1-AT-attglobal.net>
To: <utopia1-AT-attglobal.net>
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 3:49 PM
Subject: Lemisch critique of SDS film


> to: a few who asked, and a few others who might be interested
>  from: Jesse Lemisch
>  about: Lemisch, "Students for a Democratic Society, Heroically Portrayed,
>  Before the Inexplicable Fall: Consensus History in a Left Film"
>
>      My critique of "Rebels with a Cause," a new film about SDS, appears
in
>  Film and History, 31.1 (March 2001), as "Students for a Democratic
Society,
>  Heroically Portrayed, Before the Inexplicable Fall: Consensus History in
a
>  Left Film." A copy appears below. (To see it by attachment,
>  click "Students..." for plain text, or "Setup... for PDF. In order to
read
>  the PDF file you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader present on your
system.
>  For a free copyof Adobe Acrobat Reader, go to:
>  http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html )
>
>      For information about the journal in which the article appears, Film
> and
>  History, see its website, www.filmandhistory.org. But note that the
article
>  itself is not available on that website.
>
>      While "Rebels with a Cause" is often moving and evocative, I also
find
>  it stunningly uncritical, self-congratulatory, first-person heroic,
>  triumphalist -- and thus at odds with much that the SDS I knew stood for.
>  Largely avoiding the question of why SDS collapsed, and presenting little
>  about internal conflicts within SDS, the film won't help younger people
who
>  encounter related conflicts and dangers in the new movements that they
are
>  building.
>
>      Focusing on but moving beyond the film itself, my critique also deals
>  with larger issues of left aesthetics and truth-telling. Why can't we
build
>  conflict into our films? Can't we get beyond old-time Popular Front
>  agitprop? Can't we move beyond this stodgy stuff to edgier left
> film-making?
>  And why can't we tell the truth?
>
>      This critique is in some ways continous with an article that I
> published
>  in The Nation, "Pop Front Culture: I Dreamed I saw MTV Last Night,"
October
>  18, 1986. This created a great deal of controversy, to which I responded
in
>  a second article, "The Politics of Left Culture," The Nation, December
20,
>  1986.
>
>      I welcome comments, criticism, discussion, forwardings, postings,
etc.
>
>      Jesse Lemisch   utopia1-AT-attglobal.net
>
>      [ARTICLE FOLLOWS]
>  ====================================================>
>   Students For a Democratic Society, Heroically Portrayed, Before the
>  Inexplicable Fall: Consensus History in a Left Film
>  Rebels with a Cause.
>
>  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 to join the line outside the US
theatrical
>  premiere of Helen 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  not-so-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 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 saying intelligent things (as are so
many
>  others in the film, engaged in genuinely good works today). Huh? It's not
>  clear whether the film thinks of Weather as continuous with SDS, or at
odds
>  with it. No matter. The film then jumps discreetly over a couple of bad
>  years to 1975: the war is over, the left has triumphed, and SDS, it
seems,
>  is responsible. The film ends with a crescendo of bites from the various
>  talking heads, commending SDS. (Another SDS project, ERAP [Economic
> Research
>  and Action Project], is vaunted, without any attention to its failure.)
>  SDS did grow, and it was a very important part of the 'sixties left. But,
> in
>  this story of growth and ascent, what went wrong with SDS, and how is its
>  decline and collapse explained? Government repression, particularly
>  COINTELPRO, is examined, as is the grim nearly fatal physical attack on
>  University of Chicago sociology professor Dick Flacks in his office in
May
>  of 1969. FOIA documents leave us with no room for doubt of one
> interviewee's
>  statement that our paranoia was actually far less than was justified
there
>  was indeed a coordinated national campaign against us by the FBI and
other
>  organizations. (And, in a marvelous anecdote, Mike Spiegel  today a
lawyer
>  working in police brutality and death penalty cases  tells of phoning his
>  mother, back in Portland, Oregon, from the SDS National Office in Chicago
>  during the uprising after the April 1968 death of Martin Luther King,
>  reassuring her that everything is OK, while, outside the window, a tank's
>  turret rotates and points its barrel towards him.)
>
>          But when external repression is invoked as explanation without
>  attention to mistakes that we ourselves may have made, the result is
>  apologia. When I said to a historian friend seated near me that the film
> was
>  like an upbeat and triumphalist account coming out of the Communist
>  Party/Popular Front, with the internal problems left out, she nodded
>  vigorously and told of numerous disputes with her Communist father: she
>  points out CP mistakes, and he blames the FBI. (I'm a Red Diaper Baby
>  myself, and know this pattern pretty well.) This film, by and about the
New
>  Left, paradoxically imposes on its own history some of the hoary
>  interpretive themes of the Old Left.
>
>          Again: Amidst so much that was right, what went wrong with SDS?
> Talk
>  as we might about hardy souls like myself who have stuck with the cause,
> the
>  truth is that the collapse of SDS was a catastrophe for the left, driving
a
>  significant part of that generation out of politics. It cries out for
>  explanation. Although I disagree with the interpretations, in their own
way
>  sectarian, offered in talking head Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of
> Hope,
>  Days of Rage (1987)  heroic moderate founders, like himself, are cast
aside
>  by zany flamers who lose touch with political reality  his argumentative
>  book has the virtue of presenting conflict about goals and strategies
> within
>  SDS from the earliest times. Indeed, after the film, talking head Cathy
>  Wilkerson (at one time editor of SDS's New Left Notes) spoke movingly of
> the
>  importance of the disputes within SDS: you argued, and you figured things
>  out. But in her response to the criticisms I voiced during the Q and A,
>  Garvy (and others) couldn't see any distinction between sectarian wars on
>  the one hand, and, on the other, the important ongoing disagreements
within
>  the organization, in effect saying that to portray disagreements would
give
>  too much attention to sectarian dispute. The film offers a consensus
>  interpretation, ignoring most of the fruitful disagreements. It leaves us
>  with the notion that SDS was pushed to its death, but  excludes the
>  possibility that it might have, at least in part, jumped to its death.
The
>  process of dying may have begun before the Weather troubles of 1969. Were
>  there no problems or disagreements, in this admittedly tremendously
>  significant organization, before 1969?
>
>          In addition to these large political questions, there are
important
>  questions about internal governance and social relations in an
organization
>
>  supposedly devoted to participatory democracy. Jo Freeman's important
work
>  on "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," written in and about the early
> women'
>  s movement, may well have applied to SDS as well. What about the
"heavies"
>  who were deferred to amidst the pretense of non-hierarchy? How were
> disputes
>  resolved? Was there truly participatory democracy? These are all
questions
>  of direct relevance to today's emerging new New Left (see Jesse Lemisch,
"A
>  Movement Begins: The Washington Protests Against IMF/World Bank," New
>  Politics, Summer 2000, available at www.wpunj.edu/~newpol). Easy talk
about
>  the value of showing young people an upbeat account of the 'sixties
ignores
>  the fact that we leave them poorly equipped for reality if we give them a
>  rosy picture that glosses over the things that went wrong, amidst the
>  incontestably good things, last time.
>
>          And what about women in SDS? Talking head Vivian Leburg Rothstein
>  has written powerfully of sexual exploitation in the communes ("The
> Magnolia
>  Street Commune," Boston Review, 1999: available at
>  www.bostonreview.mit.edu). In its one partial departure from consensus
>  history, the film can't avoid the early and increasing dissatisfaction of
>  some (not all) SDS women with the often grotesque sexism in the
>  organization.  It goes on to portray the women's movement as arising from
>  SDS, and somehow credits SDS for this, which is a little like saying that
>  the Democratic Party should be credited for giving birth to the anti-war
>  movement of the 'sixties, or to the Nader campaign of 2000 (or that
>  Catholicism should be praised for having given birth to Protestantism).
>  Women's rebellion within SDS did indeed play an important role, along
with
>  others, in the early women's movement. But to place this movement for
>  fundamental change in the ledger book of SDS's accomplishments is
>  preposterous. (For the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement, see,
>  among others, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist
>  Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation, 1996; Ruth Rosen, The
World
>  Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, 2000; Susan
>  Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, 1999). Strangely,
talking
>  head Marilyn Salzman Webb thought that the film had underestimated the
>  importance of SDS in producing the women's liberation movement. (Happily,
>  the film makes no similar claims for SDS as the fountainhead of gay
>  liberation).
>  And where is truth in all this? The stakes are high here: can the left be
> believed when it tells its own story? In the most telling comment from the
>  talking heads after the film, Steve Max (a long-time political organizer)
>  alluded to Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of the inaccuracy
of
>  his writing about the British Empire: if it wasn't that way, Max
> approvingly
>  recalls Churchill saying, it should have been. Some of the audience
>  applauded. I gasped, both at Max and at his applauding audience.
>
>          So, putting aside post-structuralist doubts about reality, truth
> and
>  causality (which essentially conservative doubts are in increasing
> disrepute
>  as a movement reborn brings us back to reality), what becomes of truth if
>  the-way-it-should-have-been is just as good as the way it really was? In
>  response to this criticism,  Garvy said she had only two hours (two
> hours!),
>  and had to decide what audience to address. This is an ominous remark.
Can
>  we, who lived this movie, face up to the truths of our experience? Should
>  young people today, birthing a new movement,  be sat down and presented
> with
>  a history that misrepresents an earlier movement, albeit an important
one?
>  Is there one truth for one audience, and a different truth for another?
>  Shall we keep our errors to ourselves?  (To me, this is reminiscent of
the
>  remark by one Cold War president of the American Historical Association
> that
>  "not everything which takes place in the laboratory is appropriate for
>  broadcasting at street corners" [Lemisch, On Active Service in War and
>  Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession
(1975),
>  p. 73]). Shall we present those who come after with a fictitious
paradise,
>  leaving them to be surprised and even to feel betrayed when reality
bites?
>  Is this the CP, all over again?
>
>          I find nothing objectionable, and much that is true, in what most
>  individual talking heads in this film say. The question is how the film
as
> a
>  whole is put together: what's in it, and what isn't. Even with her two
>  hours, Garvy says you can't build conflict into a documentary. (I have
> heard
>  this argument offered for years in connection with left films shorter
than
>  this one, and am beginning to wonder just how much time would be enough
to
>  invalidate this excuse. Would four hours be long enough to include some
>  dissent?) This is silly: of course you can recount conflict, and in ways
>  that are not only informative but that are also cinematically exciting.
You
>  can, among other things, film people arguing, and you can even do so
> without
>  taking up any more time. Hey, what happened to the famous "dialectic"?
>  "Arguing the World"(1997)," which doesn't show Irving Kristol, Irving
Howe,
>  Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer in direct argument, nonetheless reproduces
>  some of the disagreements among that particular set of leftists/former
>  leftists. My plea for building conflict into film is not a mere
> academicism:
>  from the classic "Rashomon"(1950), to "Land and Freedom"(1994), even to
>  "True Crime"(1999)  all shorter than Garvy's film  we have ample evidence
>  that conflicting interpretations of reality can be cinematically
thrilling.
>  (What an irony that Clint Eastwood does this better in "True Crime" than
>  does this left film!) We need more than the old-time agitprop, now in
>  glorious color, but nonetheless still just talking heads and Ken
> Burns-style
>  klutzily untouched by a flourishing film avant garde, with such
brilliantly
>  imaginative films as David Gordon Green's "George Washington" and Richard
>  Fung's "Sea in the Blood"(2000) on display in New York at the same time.
>  Garvy has been making films for twenty years, but seems out of touch with
>  newer developments. If the left is indeed still alive, it should be
working
>  towards edgier film-making, not this stodgy stuff. And we need to be able
> to
>  say to people that we were and remain honest about our failings as well
as
>  our strengths. There is no reason for the American people to listen to
the
>  left unless we can be trusted to tell the truth.
>
>          I was active in University of Chicago SDS 1963 (64?)-68, at which
>  point I was fired from my job as assistant professor in the History
>  Department and the College. U of C SDS leaders like Steve Kindred and
>  Christopher Z. Hobson were enormously self-critical, anguishing over the
>  chapter's relation to students: were we with them, too far ahead of them,
>  what were we doing wrong? Why did the latest sit-in fail? It is this
>  self-critical spirit in SDS (now confirmed by such emerging scholarship
as
>  John McMillian's "'Love Letters to the Future': REP, Radical America, and
>  New Left History," Radical History Review, spring 2000) that rescues it
> from
>  the liberal/conservative imposition of cartoon stereotypes of our alleged
>  anti-intellectualism. But none of this extraordinarily self-critical
spirit
>  appears in this film.
>  In 1986 I wrote of left film and documentary ("Pop Front Culture: I
Dreamed
>  I Saw MTV Last Night," The Nation, 10/18/86), "The dominant esthetic of
> this
>  genre, which we might call first-person heroic, became the documentary
> style
>  of the New Left, but has its origin in the aesthetic of the left of the
> 1930
>  's... The style strongly expressed the idea that the testimony of those
who
>  participated in great events is the truth, needing no comment or
analysis."
>  I criticized such left documentaries descended from that aesthetic as
>  "Seeing Red,"  "Union Maids," and "The Good Fight": "History is
> complicated;
>  people disagree... [In these films] there is little sense of the
complexity
>  of the past and little confrontation between conflicting views." This
> caused
>  such a ruckus that it led to a second Nation article, "The Politics of
Left
>  Culture," 12/30/86, in which I said , "If we on the left expect the
> American
>  people to trust us, we have to tell the truth... We have a duty to go
> beyond
>  one-sided celebration." I'm sure there are examples of such attempts in
the
>  years since, but "Rebels with a Cause" isn't one of them.
>
>  copyright Jesse Lemisch 2001
>
>
>  Jesse Lemisch (utopia1-AT-attglobal.net), professor of history at John Jay
>  College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, is a
>  life-long left activist and was a member of SDS throughout the 'sixties
and
>  a founding member of the American Historical Association Radical
Historians
>  Caucus (1968). He is the author of: Jack Tar vs John Bull (1997); On
Active
>  Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American
Historical
>  Profession (1975), as well as such articles, historical and otherwise,
as:
>  "The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up" (1968); "Jack Tar in
the
>  Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America" (1968,
>  1993); "Radicals, Marxists and Gentlemen" (1989); "A Movement Begins: The
>  Washington Protests against IMF/World Bank" (2000); "Black Agency in the
>  Amistad Revolt" (1999, 2001); "Anti-Impeachment Historians and the
Politics
>  of History" (1998); "Angry White Men on the Left" (1997); "Social
>  Conservatism on the Left" (1989); "The Politics of Left Culture" (1986);
>  "Bicentennial Schlock" (1976); "Who Will Write a Left History of Art
While
>  we are all Putting Our Balls on the Line?" (1968, 1989); "Towards a
>  Democratic History" (1967); and numerous other articles and reviews, in
> such
>  publications as the William & Mary Quarterly, American Historical Review,
>  Journal of American History, Radical History Review, Harvard Law Review,
>  Souls, The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Book Review, The
>  Nation, New Politics, SDS Radical Education Project.
>
>   Acknowledgements. The author thanks Naomi Weisstein for her comments and
>  criticism. Others who helped include Christopher Z. Hobson, Joanne Landy,
>  and a few others who prefer to remain anonymous.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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