Underground
Screening on Film
Directed by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, Haskell Wexler.
US, 1976, 16mm, color, 87 min.
US, 1976, 16mm, color, 87 min.
On May Day, 1975, three filmmakers recorded interviews with Weatherpeople Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Jeff Jones and Cathy Wilkerson at a “safe house” near Los Angeles. The film they completed a year later was much more than long sequences of talking heads, intercutting a well-scavenged collection of footage that was not 'archival' so much as it was a compendium of leftist documentaries from that moment in history. With excerpts from works by Chris Marker, Third World Newsreel, Jane Fonda's Indochina Peace Campaign, and others, Underground now serves as a double-barreled time capsule. We see deep into the interior of the Weather Underground and broadly sample the texture of documentaries of dissent.