The Weather Underground (2002)

Directors:

Sam Green
Bill Siegel

Release Date:

13 November 2003 (Australia)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

The remarkable story of The Weather Underground, radical activists of the 1970s, and of radical politics at its best and most disastrous.

Plot Keywords:

Underground | Government | 1970s | Interview | Black Panthers

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 4 wins & 3 nominations

Cast

Billy Ayers	...	Himself (also archive footage) (as Bill Ayers)
Kathleen Cleaver	...	Herself (also archive footage)
Bernadine Dohrn	...	Herself (also archive footage) (as Bernardine Dohrn)
Brian Flanagan	...	Himself (also archive footage)
David Gilbert	...	Himself (also archive footage)
Todd Gitlin	...	Himself
Fred Hampton	...	Himself (archive footage)
Abbie Hoffman	...	Himself (archive footage)
Naomi Jaffe	...	Herself (also archive footage)
Martin Luther King	...	Himself (archive footage)
Jim Lange	...	Additional voice-over (voice)
Timothy Leary	...	Himself (archive footage)
Charles Manson	...	Himself (archive footage)
Walter Mondale	...	Himself (archive footage)
James Robison	...	Himself (archive footage)
Mark Rudd	...	Himself (also archive footage)
Don Strickland	...	Himself
Lili Taylor	...	Narrator (voice)
Evan White	...	Additional voice-over (voice)
Laura Whitehorn	...	Herself (also archive footage)
Pamela Z	...	Narrator (voice)

Runtime:

92 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Colour

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:M | New Zealand:R13 | Singapore:PG | USA:Unrated

Filming Locations:

Berkeley, California, USA

Company:

The Free History Project

Movie Connections:

Features Dont Look Back (1967)

Soundtrack:

God Bless America

Sad, but Important Film

The people in the film made many astute points. Rudd points out toward the end that violence is seen by the public as mental illness or some other chaos unless perpetrated by the government--in that case, violence is normal. I'm glad the Weathermen existed. How flat and hopeless the history of activism would be today without them. It seems that nowadays there is a stereotype of the college leftist activist as being a weak member of a highly privileged class who simply feels guilty about the privilege but is ultimately all talk--wants to keep his wealth in the end. The Weathermen defy this stereotype, putting themselves in full danger of losing everything and accomplishing incredible strategic feats against the government like freeing Timothy Leary and bombing government buildings. I suspect that such a defiance of stereotype is why I, who am college educated and a leftist activist type, never knew the names of the Weathermen, while I knew the names of the most prominent Black Panthers, like Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. It is a movement almost entirely ignored, even by leftist academics. As the film wraps up, one thing that is telling is that none of the featured Weathermen sold out and became capitalists like so many members of SDS. They're all currently doing things for the good of society even if they're no longer bombing buildings. Also, we learn from the film that people didn't simply lose interest in the left and anti-war/anti-capitalist activism, preferring to embrace the glorious consumerism of Reagan's America. The government beat it out of people. Particularly, the government killed the Weathermen's effectiveness when they forced them underground. Maybe the reason we don't have mass uprisings in the U.S. as in other countries is because our government is the most effectively repressive, it being the most powerful in the world.