ONE CITY RESISTS TRAGIC WAR FAR AWAY
‘THE WAR AT HOME’
Originally reviewed Nov. 7, 1979
This documentary will be screened in a new 4K digital restoration starting Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Co-director Glenn Silber is expected for audience discussion at Friday and Saturday screenings. Roger Ebert reviewed the film as part of a Chicago International Film Festival report.
Last year during a party in somebody’s house on the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Democratic Convention, a friend got up with a big smile on his face and a beer bottle in his hand and loudly began to lead a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Looking around the room, I realized some of the younger people at the party were lip-synching to words they weren’t very familiar with.
At first I was dismayed that the Younger Generation wasn’t getting with it on the Peace ’n’ Revolution front. Then I realized young people learn the words to “We Shall Overcome” in cycles, as the song is needed.
Note: When we hear them singing it the next time, we know we’re in trouble again.
“The War at Home” is an extraordinary documentary about the last time we really needed to overcome. It is a record of the full course of the Vietnam antiwar movement as it began and flowered in Madison, Wisconsin, on and around the campus of the University of Wisconsin — and, to a degree, how Madison spilled over into what we were doing here in Chicago.
It is not a protest film. Somehow, you just can’t make a movie supporting a cause that’s been won, and expect anyone to care. This is a film about how we were back then, when a Volkswagen Bug with one of those dumb McCarthy flower stickers on it was, all by itself, a passive act of protest.
The movie is the result of six years of work by Glenn Silber, Barry Alexander Brown and other filmmakers and researchers in Madison, who sifted through almost all of the videotape TV news film shot in Madison about war protests and protestors — and then found many of the same people 10 years later and interviewed them. They never did have that 10th anniversary Woodstock concert, but maybe the feeling would have been something like the one in this film: of a veterans’ reunion for the people who fought on the other side of the domestic war cause.
The first footage here is from way back on Oct. 18, 1963, when some strange-looking people with haircuts from another planet are protesting American involvement in a place nobody else had yet heard of. John F. Kennedy had more than a month to live. The movie follows the March of events in Madison, as Kennedy skilled, as Johnson abdicates, as Nixon escalates, as the 1968 Democratic Convention has its stunning effect on history — not in the streets, but at home on TV. The whole world was watching. Remember?
At first we wonder … why Madison? Then we realize, why not? The national antiwar movement was so huge as to be incomprehensible, like the war it opposed. It was made up of microcosms like Madi- son, and sooner or later everyone passed through town: Here is Sen. Teddy Kennedy, gamely being defeated by protestors. Here is old Wayne Morse — remember him? He’s campaigning for president. Somebody had to. He died on he trail. Here, in his footsteps, comes Clean Gene McCarthy, elegant and enigmatic and, for a moment, a knight on horseback.
And then comes frail old Ernest Gruening, the octogenarian senator from Alaska, speaking during the sober days and weeks following the explosion at the [Army Mathematics Research Center] — the blast that killed a late-staying graduate student.
Karl Armstrong was one of the protestors arrested and charged with murder after that. He speaks: “I feel a sense of shame for taking someone’s life.” He hadn’t meant to. Small comfort? Old Ernest Gruening has been around since the Spanish-American War and comes back to Madison to say: “This protest was his civic duty.” And then the footage of the veterans now back from Vietnam (the war is growing older now, very old) and throwing their medals on a bonfire.