UPTOWN UP IN ARMS AFTER 1968 CONVENTION
‘AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2’ ★★★★
Originally reviewed May 25, 1969
Chicago Film Archives screens a new 35mm print of this classic Chicago documentary, produced by The Film Group, at 7:45 p.m. Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Tickets: siskelfilmcenter.org.
The heads got beat last August during the Democratic National Convention. The events of that week seemed, at the time, to be a watershed. Nothing could ever be the same afterwards. The police themselves, as the Walker Report put it, had been the rioters. And people had seen it all on TV.
Now summer is upon us again, and the question is: Has anything really changed? The events of convention week, which will figure so sharply in history, already recede in our minds. One battle does not make a revolution. Or does it?
“American Revolution Two” isn’t really about the convention disturbances. It’s about what happened afterwards, surprisingly, in the Uptown neighborhood of poor Southern whites. While Lincoln Park liberals wrung their hands and signed petitions, an unusual alliance was formed a few miles north. It was between the Black Panthers and the Young Patriots. A most unusual alliance: On the side of their berets, the Young Patriots wear the Confederate flag.
The film isn’t much concerned with the alliance itself, however; it’s taken for granted that poor blacks and poor whites should work together. The film is about how a neighborhood had its idea of Chicago permanently altered by the events of convention week. My guess is that The Film Group stumbled onto this theme and had the perception to keep after it.
The film itself began as a collection of footage from those two memorable nights, Wednesday and Thursday, of convention week. It was then expanded to cover several months. The Film Group (a smoothly professional Chicago company that usually makes commercials and sponsored films) made it as a collective effort, and there aren’t any credits.
The result is a film every Chicagoan should see. But that’s a cliché. What I want to say is: If you were disturbed by what happened last August and if you wondered, however vaguely, how such a cataclysmic week should apparently have no aftermath, then you should see this film and see what has happened.
The film is an “unnarrated documentary,” something both The Film Group and Chicago filmmakers Gerald Temaner and Gordon Quinn have been experimenting with. There’s no deep, authoritative voice telling us what is happening. Instead, we see and hear only the people the film is about; they speak for themselves.
One of the film’s subtitles is “A Few Honkies Get Their Heads Beat,” and that describes as well as anything the first third of the film. We see again the scenes we remember so well: the demonstrators, the police, the guardsmen, the tear gas, and the march to Dick Gregory’s home.
And then we go into the ghetto: into pool halls, bars, restaurants, to hear black people talking, sometimes angry, sometimes wry, about the honkies who needed to get their heads beat to find out what the ghetto knew all along. In one stunning shot, we begin with a close-up of a black girl who speaks of her experiences and beliefs. Then the camera pulls back to a medium shot revealing her as an armed militant: “I’ll have my rifle on one arm and my baby on the other, and I’ll fight for what’s mine.”
The editing builds up a rhythm of angry and amused black faces, and the rhythm of the film is the rhythm of the words they’re saying. This momentum begins to be broken by another kind of face: a white face with a Southern accent, saying earnest things. But saying the same things.
We go to a party at which this man and many of his neighbors drink Pepsi and argue passionately about their neighborhood, about being poor, about what needs to be done, about the “pigs” who, they say, harass them for the crimes of being poor and living in Uptown. The party includes members of the Young Patriots, a white Uptown street gang — or community organization, depending on your point of view.
The film shifts to events in Uptown. A Black Panther organizer, Bobby Lee, comes into the neighborhood to offer assistance to the Young Patriots.
In an astonishing scene, Lee confronts and wins over a room filled with suspicious, even hostile Uptown whites. God knows what these people thought of Black Panthers before they met one! Bobby Lee cajoles, reasons, argues, asks questions: “We been through a lot together. You poor? You ever been in jail?” The man nods, holds up two fingers. “Tell us what you been through,” Bobby Lee says.
First one person, then another gets up to speak. Bobby Lee coaches a shy young mother to her feet; she holds her baby. When she finds courage to talk, the words come in a rush: “The cops had my brother up against the squad car. He was out in front of the house. The cops had a knife, they were pricking him with it. I said, what’s he done? They wouldn’t answer.”
And others: “The cops said, what’s your height?” a boy says. “Then they took me over to the wall where there was a measuring stick, and then banged my head up against the wall. If you’re poor, they don’t care. That’s it, man. If you got the bread, the pigs are scared of you.”
“Right on!” Bobby Lee intones, “Right on!”
People have been saying for a long time, why don’t they make a movie about Chicago? Now one has been made. Not a Hollywood movie, with imported stars and directors, using Chicago merely as a backdrop. But a movie in and of Chicago.
“American Revolution Two” shows this much clearly: that in the aftermath of the Democratic convention, a group of formerly voiceless, even opinionless Uptown whites became galvanized into a community that was fed up. That these people were able to understand that their enemy was not the black man (or another stand-in target) but an establishment that dismissed them as poor hillbillies and, therefore, less than equal. That these people formed an alliance with the Black Panthers, borrowing their methods of organization and protest. And that this alliance has created, in the midst of a city largely without a voice (unless you’re white, unless you’re educated, unless you’re affluent, unless you have clout), a community which found its voice and used it.