Notes from Underground

On Feb. 29, director Sam Green sat in Hollywood’s Kodak Theater for the 76th Academy Awards, where his 2003 film The Weather Underground was nominated for Best Documentary Feature. This Tuesday he was in New York, where the film was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibition.

But standing before an audience at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) on Sunday, Green seems much less interested in these measures of institutional favor than he is with the reactions he’s getting from the students who have just seen his first feature film. On Monday, he stopped by Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) 51a, “Fundamentals of Video,” to show his film and speak with a handful of film students about the Sundance-premiered film on militant radicals in the 1960s and 1970s.

“It’s great to be in theaters and it’s great to be on PBS, but the audience that I feel most strongly I’d like to see it is young people,” Green says on a cell phone call from his Boston-New York train. “I didn’t have any interest in making a piece that was going to be a walk down memory lane for baby boomers.”

This is perhaps not the most natural strategy for a film that painstakingly documents the mindset that drove formerly-peaceful activists to adopt a philosophy of violence as the Vietnam War spiraled out of control. The students who made up the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground, chose to express their objections to what they saw as an unjust, needlessly-murderous war with a series of domestic bombings throughout the 1970s on targets including the U.S. Capitol and Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

Though their bombs never killed anyone but three of their own members in an accidental explosion, the members of the Weather Underground had inverted the very principles of pacifism that had motivated so many to oppose the Vietnam War in the first place. Green’s film is a 90-minute attempt to understand that contradiction—but ultimately, he says, the questions surrounding the Weather Underground cannot be answered for those who lived through the events.

“It’s their story in a way,” he says, but when he shows his film to boomers, he says, “the discussion afterwards digresses into who was right then.”

Instead, the 37-year-old Green says he wants to make a new generation aware of this profound moral dilemma and its renewed relevance. While some directors were doing publicity junkets with the national press or mounting aggressive Oscar campaigns, Green and co-director Bill Siegel embarked on an irregular tour of college campuses this fall. They continue to take time every few weeks to travel across the country, screening their film for students and interacting with them afterward. The day of his Harvard screening, Green conducted another showing at Brandeis University, and in the days before that he had stopped by Hampshire College and Williams College, starting dialogues with the students who saw his film.

This kind of direct contact hasn’t come without a price, according to Elisabeth Subrin, the VES visiting lecturer and filmmaker whom Green credits with helping bring him to Cambridge this weekend.

“Sam could have handed this film to a much more mainstream distributor and had no relationship with the audience,” Subrin says. “It’s kind of fun, but it’s back-breaking work when you go to college campuses. It’s certainly not a financial move.”

Green’s only complaint about his visit to Harvard, though, is that there were too many middle-aged people and not enough students in the audience at the archive. The decades-old wounds explored by The Weather Underground are still far from healing—a fact made clear by the scattered hisses that greeted figures from Richard Nixon to Todd Gitlin, a more moderate figure from the anti-war movement of the 1960s, as they appeared on screen at the HFA.

Green says the film has met with a wide variety of responses—but never a lack of emotion—at the screenings he has attended.

“Occasionally someone will stand up and say, ‘Why are you supporting terrorism?’” he says. “At the same time, there are people on the left who feel that it’s too critical. I think that if you’re getting an equal amount of flak from both sides, you’ve found a good center.”

Storm on the Horizon

Green—from the middle generation, born between the boomers he knows are still racked by the debates of the 1960s and the youth he now hopes to bring into them—says his interest in the Weather Underground long predates his career as a filmmaker.

“I remember reading something about the group when I was a teenager,” Green says. “It was very romantic in a way.”

And the fundamental, unanswered question of the film—whether a radical ideology can be made to fit the confines of mainstream society—is one that Green says he often wondered about.

“I grew up in the eighties and had idealistic impulses, but I looked around and it was a pretty bleak time,” he says. “I always wondered how the sixties became the eighties.”

The decade of Green’s youth, kicked off by the surrender of the Weather Underground’s remaining leaders to authorities in 1980, is represented in the film by starkly ironic images: clips from an aerobics video and footage of Ronald Reagan are juxtaposed with the rise of AIDS and crack cocaine.

Green says The Weather Underground began in earnest in 1998 out of “curiosity” springing from a series of conversations with a former activist living near him in San Francisco.

“I thought, ‘God, somebody should make a movie out of this,’” Green recalls.But as a director who had made only two previously-released films, the longest running 45 minutes, Green said he did not think himself up to the task at first.

“I tried to get a friend of mine who’s an established director, Mary Harron, to do it and I would help her,” Green says. “I really hadn’t done anything this ambitious.”

In 2000, Green says, he decided to go it alone, but he says the film faced financial challenges from the start.

“Getting grants to do a documentary about a group that tried to violently overthrow the U.S. government is not an easy thing,” he says.

And Green says the strong feelings still held by many on the film’s subject made it difficult to research—a process that meant not only hours combing through network news archives but also extensive in-person interviews with prominent figures from the would-be revolution.

“It’s obviously not the kind of story where you can go to the library, check out two books and know everything there is to know about it,” he says.

In one striking clip from The Weather Underground, activists bar journalists—“vultures,” in their words—from a leftist convention. The main characters of Green’s film spent ten years hiding from the world. And in a time when even the Weather Underground’s deathless bombings strike any number of deeply-felt chords, Green says he found that many of his subjects retained the same distrust of publicity.

“Initially everybody thought it was a bad idea,” he says. “Everyone we talked to said, ‘Don’t make this movie.’ Almost all the accounts of what happened had been very negative.”

Green says it was only after many months of off-record conversations that he and Siegel built up the trust of their subjects.

“His patience and diplomacy in dealing with these people was remarkable,” Subrin says. “It was a kind of Herculean task.”

Even after getting former Weathermen to speak with him on camera, Green says the interviews were far from easy.

“They were always a little bit tense,” Green says. “It’s not a relaxed, easy story. There was always a point in every interview where the person would draw a line and say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’...All the interviews were a negotiation.”

Green says the activists often refused to talk about the details of their militant campaigns and their participants.

Once he had secured funding and coaxed the former Weathermen into opening up to the camera, Green still faced the challenge of putting their actions in context.

“Obviously they were inspired by the horror of Vietnam,” he says. “It took me a long time of doing research and talking to people before I actually appreciated how horrific the war was.”

In the film, present-day interviews and old news broadcasts are juxtaposed with several punishing sequences depicting brutal violence in Vietnam. Green says he struggled to save these passages from leaving audiences numb.

“It’s very hard these days, because we’ve seen so much death and so much killing on TV...for that kind of imagery to have any power,” Green says.

“Sam handled it really carefully,” Subrin says. “It would have been really easy for him to be gratuitous with the images he used.”

In one particularly disturbing scene, the camera shows a Vietnamese man being shot in the head at point-blank range in a street. The moving image, familiar to many as a still photo, is rendered all the more powerful in slow motion.

“When I saw it for the first time it just assaulted me,” Green says. “It was as if someone hit me in the face... That is what war is.”

Robb Moss, the Arnheim lecturer on filmmaking and the teacher of VES 51a, where Green spoke, says he finds this sequence’s retrieval of an iconic still image to be an apt metaphor for Green’s technique in The Weather Underground.

“That’s kind of an image of what Sam’s movie does,” Moss says. “My recollection of events was the photograph, but his movie gives me the before and after.”

Aftermath

After finishing the lengthy process of culling archival footage and filming new interviews, Green faced a task in some ways even more daunting: editing the many hours he had collected into a coherent narrative.

In the middle of editing, Green says, an event of huge international significance threatened to end his own documentary project. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, he says, his uncompleted film’s attempt to understand a group of people who had bombed public and private buildings to bring down the government acquired an unsettling resonance.

“Before Sept. 11, it was kind of a forgotten piece of history,” Green says. “The context changed so much.”

For a time, Green says he considered abandoning the project outright.

“Initially after Sept. 11 happened, I sort of felt like it wouldn’t be possible to finish,” he says. “In the couple weeks after it I thought, ‘I’ve done all this work and it’s for naught.’”

Though he says he tried not to let the aftermath of the terrorist attacks affect the film as he resumed editing, Green admits that he felt the need to change its tone subtly.

“After Sept. 11, there was no room to be light about it,” he says.

But ultimately Green says he felt that the events of September 2001 made it more important to bring out the issues raised by the Weather Underground’s actions, no matter how uncomfortable that sometimes was.

“After a few weeks, when it became clear what the response to Sept. 11 would be, and hearing [President] Bush flattening out these complex issues, I began to feel like it was more important and relevant than ever,” Green says.

“Why is an act of violence in one situation considered a country’s duty and in another situation considered a terrorist act?” Subrin asks. “What could be more salient than that question today? Is there a more important question in 2004?”

This is not a question that The Weather Underground ultimately answers with any clarity, Subrin adds.

“A viewer leaves the film not knowing why [the events it narrates] happened,” Subrin says.

In such a context, though, Green says it was important not to force pat answers.

“Those kind of things, I think, should be looked at in all their complexity,” Green says. “Hopefully it might muddy those waters.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.