Movies about Student protest
‘We had the dust of radicalism sprinkled on us that night’ – an epic documentary of black student protest
The 1968 antiwar uprising at Columbia University is well known. But as Paul Cronin’s new 15-hour film shows, while the white students focused on Vietnam, the black students’ concerns are still urgent today
Fri 25 Sep 2020 03.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 25 Sep 2020 07.10 EDT
‘L ockdown has done wonders for me,” says Paul Cronin with a laugh. An English film-maker who lives in New York, he had been working off and on for 14 years on A Time to Stir, a documentary about the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. Then, after the killing of George Floyd in May, Cronin’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood was transformed. Protesters marched through its streets, statues were defaced, the windows of galleries and banks were smashed, police cars were torched, helicopters roared night and day. It was an extended moment of rebellion and release, terror and possibility.
“I’m watching what’s going on from my window and taking lots of late-night walks through Washington Square with all the wildness and craziness going on there.” Struck by the parallels between the archival footage on his computer screen and present-day convulsions, he went into overdrive, only coming up for air after he had completed the film.
To describe A Time to Stir as an epic work is something of an understatement: it is 15 hours long, made up from more than 700 interviews that run to 2,500 hours. Cronin collected 35,000 photographs, almost none of which had ever been seen before.
Part of what the film chronicles is well-known: campus leftists taking over key university buildings to protest against its role in conducting research that enabled US bombing campaigns in Vietnam. They took an acting dean hostage and occupied the president’s office, where they found cigars with his name engraved in gold. Their insurgency, before it was violently broken up by police, attracted the likes of Abbie Hoffman, the Grateful Dead, Noam Chomsky and poet Robert Lowell, all of whom showed up to signal their support.
But Cronin’s film also shines a spotlight on a crucial, but far less celebrated, part of the story: the resistance of a cadre of pioneering black students who were indignant that Columbia, having purchased lots of nearby real estate, immediately reduced the number of housing units available to low-income residents. Worse, it had taken over a city-owned park where, against the wishes of locals in nearby Harlem, it planned to build a five-storey gymnasium with separate entrances for students and non-students. These decisions were seen as social cleansing, a form of expropriation not unconnected with what the US was doing in south-east Asia.
Many of the black students thought their white peers were showy and tactically naive. “They were just talking politics,” claims Arnim Johnson, one of Cronin’s interviewees. “It’s a rap session, and then they want to do singalongs!” The relatively novel presence of black students at the university might have assured Columbia’s administrators they were in the civil rights vanguard, but many of the students saw it differently: they recall receiving lighter workloads than their white peers, being astonished at the lack of black faculty members or black history classes and feeling upset at getting stopped regularly by security guards. They were at once hyper-visible and invisible. They knew they had more opportunities – for success, for upward mobility – than their friends and family members back home. They also knew about dogs and whippings and beatings: this made them reluctant to be as showily combative as some of their white classmates. According to Manning Marable, who, before his death in 2011, was a professor of African American studies at Columbia: “The white radicals did not deconstruct white privilege in their own lives.”
In the end, those white students were asked to leave Hamilton Hall, the first building to have been collectively occupied. This led to other campus sites, including Low Library where the president had his offices, being targeted by white demonstrators instead. Creating multiple fronts for protesters made it harder to disperse them, but it disappointed those who thought pan-racial unity would be easy to achieve.
“In every beat of this film, one sees how different the world looked to black and to white students – and how they handled themselves in the circumstances,” says Cronin. “The entire thing happened because black students decided to throw white students out. They did not want to be out with them. Black students had thought about these issues for years in a way that white students had not.”
Coalitional politics, the art of “allyship”, the intersection between race and class: these are controversial topics today. How is it, I ask Cronin, that even though there is a mini-industry dedicated to 1968-ist commemoration, the voices – yet alone contributions – of black students are so hard to make out? “It’s funny. I was asked recently: ‘Paul, how did you get the African American students to talk?’ I replied: ‘I just asked them!’ No one had ever asked them before! They were more than happy to talk. And what they remembered was very important. They told the white protesters: you’re not going to smash up Hamilton Hall. You’re going to leave it cleaner than when you arrived. You’re spilling your shit? You’re dropping your dope on the floor? You’re having a good time? You think this is theatre? No – for us black students, this is not theatre.”
To think of Columbia 1968 purely in terms of black and white would be a mistake. One element of its story that Cronin brings to the fore is the importance of Jewish students. They were white, but non-white. Historically, like their black classmates, they had been treated as second-class presences. But by the 1960s, says Carl Gettleman, who helped occupy Low Library, Columbia had begun to resemble a Jewish Ivy League college: “It was in New York, and if a preppy guy went there, he was probably a loser, because if he was a winner he went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton.”
According to Cronin, the incoming Jews knew all about alienation and annihilation. “Many of those that arrived on campus in 1964 and 1965 had watched the Nuremberg trials on TV when they were teenagers. Mike Locker [a student activist who published the power-structure pamphlet Who Rules Columbia?] told me: ‘If you take Nuremberg seriously, then you see that if there’s a crime being committed by your country, it’s your obligation to intervene and object.’ These were the children of Holocaust survivors and they had a hunger for justice. A lot of them were ‘red-diaper babies’; their parents were very left-wing and often lower class. Even if they were secular, they had grown up being told stories about Cossack atrocities by their grandparents.”
Cronin, who grew up in London, but has dual citizenship through his American mother, says he can barely remember a time when he was not drawn to the febrile politics of the US in the late 60s. “I recently found a cassette of a Radio 4 programme about the 20th anniversary of 1968. I was only 15 when I made it!” In the past, he has collaborated on book projects with Werner Herzog and co-translated the poetry of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, but the dominant influence on A Time to Stir is that of British TV documentaries. He says: “I grew up watching a lot of Brook Lapping series [the widely respected production company run by Brian Lapping and Norma Percy]: End of Empire, Watergate, The Death of Yugoslavia. I liked the way they took their time, moved chronologically through epic, complex histories, and showed testimonials from incredible eyewitnesses.”
Perhaps unusually, Cronin does not talk about his film as being partisan or primarily activist. “There’s another Brook Lapping series, The Fifty Years War (1998) – it’s in six parts and about the Middle East, but I’ve been told it has been used in both Israeli and Palestinian schools. With A Time to Stir, I wanted it to be as fair and balanced as possible. There was no point in making it if we couldn’t hear from both the red bandana-wearing Maoists and the cops who beat them that night.” He was also keen to capture stories before it was too late. “I met a guy who told me that after his mother died, he’d thrown away countless rolls of 16mm film he’d shot of the campus protests. These stories are like knives to the heart. I have the historian’s dread of the dumpster.”
The historical value of Cronin’s work became apparent this summer when William Barr, Donald Trump’s widely detested attorney general, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he claimed to have been on the “jock line” in 1968. “This was a bunch of conservative students who took offence at the radicals occupying the buildings. They felt the administration was not being sufficiently gung ho and decided to take matters into our own hands. They physically surrounded Low Library and wouldn’t let food in our out. It was all a bit theatrical.
“Barr said he saw 12 people end up in hospital after a fist fight. I thought: that never happened! I’ve talked to enough people and seen enough footage. No one went to hospital that day. A Washington Post editorial used my film to discuss how a big part of the Barr story is essentially about the manipulation of memory. A few weeks ago, Barr was testifying in front of Jerry Nadler, a Democratic congressman who was also at Columbia in 1968. They were arguing about whether it was right to crack down on protesters in Portland. There’s a sense that we’re still fighting the culture wars of 1968.”
Frank Guridy, an associate professor of African American studies at Columbia, teaches a class on the same topic as Cronin’s film. He, too, has been pondering its relevance today. “Columbia fashions itself as an activist Ivy. It at least tolerates student activism. It’s part of the brand in some ways. Many of the people here have very little awareness of what happened here at Columbia in the 60s and 70s. But because of Trumpism, climate catastrophe, the police brutalisation happening every single day and everywhere in this country, my students completely get the political imperatives that were driving the black protesters back then. They are feeling an emperilment that is very similar to what was happening 50 years ago. And with the university buying up parcels of land around Harlem’s West 125th Street, there are still the same questions about Columbia’s imperial relationship to its surrounding community and the social displacements it instigates.”
I tell Cronin that, for me, the most telling sections of his film concern the white students discovering how intentionally violent and conspiratorial the police could be. “It’s so relevant, isn’t it? So many interviewees told me how terrified they were. They never thought it could happen to them. They had heard about police violence, but never witnessed it personally. And then, when they did, in the words of one person I talked to: ‘We had the dust of radicalism sprinkled on us that night.’ Poof! Bam! That was it! In all sorts of vexed but profound ways, the events at Columbia in spring 1968 set them on a path to thinking about the world differently, how best to work with people from different backgrounds, how to make the world a different place.”
A Time to Stir is on Vimeo from 1 October
The Kids Are More Than Alright: Documentaries To Watch on Youth Activism
Youth movements have changed the world and revolutionized the way we organize against systems of oppression. From Freedom Summer to the March For Our Lives, young people have been at the forefront of some of the most radical and important activism of nearly every generation. In honor of students returning back to school and all youth who endured one of the most challenging years, this Docs to Watch features nine documentaries that celebrate young activists who look adults in the eye and say “no more.”
Změna hry (Michael Barnett, 2019)
This year saw one of the most vicious attacks, across the United States, on the rights of transgender people under the age of 18. For the student athletes featured in Změna hry, this was like being told that there is no place for them in the sport that they love. These students may not have pursued activism by choice but their perseverance, strength and commitment to being a part of an activity most kids take for granted, is more than enough reason for a spot on this list. As a bonus, read Dokumentární Magazine’s interview with one of the student athletes from the film for June Doc Star of The Month.
Kde se dívat: Hulu
Léto svobody (Stanley Nelson, 2014)
If there was a single student group that you could point to that revolutionized the way we organize today, it would be the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). One of their most successful campaigns? The Freedom Summer Project of 1964. In Léto svobody, watch a too-often-ignored history of this student-led civil rights campaign that saw more than 700 student volunteers travel to some of the most violent, segregated states in the American South to help local Black communities register to vote.
Kde se dívat: PBS
Domácí pokoj (Peter Nicks, 2021)
2020 was an absolute roller coaster of a year for BIPOC students who juggled zoom classes and college hunts with a pandemic and movement for racial justice. No film captures this experience better than Domácí pokoj which followed students leading a movement to get police out of Oakland Public Schools all while facing the realities of high school and COVID-19. One of the incredible student acivists from the film was also Dokumentární Magazine’s Doc Star of The Month this month.
Kde se dívat: Hulu
Jsem Greta (Nathan Grossman, 2020)
Climate change might be the biggest threat to humanity that older generations may never live to see. It’s the young people who feel the pressure to make people aware of the dire consequences that await the world, and no one knows this more than Greta Thunberg. Jsem Greta follows the teenage activist who rarely minces her words as she grows her movement and becomes an international figurehead for action to combat the climate crisis on our doorstep.
Kde se dívat: Hulu
In The Shade Of Fallen Chinar (Fazil Nc and Shawn Sebastian, 2016)
A short documentary film infused with music video-esque moments, In The Shade of Fallen Chinar features the stories of student artists at the University of Kashmir amidst ongoing unrest that forced the school to shut down. The film shows the resilience of several talented students as they create powerful photography, music and mural work, amidst rampant censorship, all influenced by and in opposition to the conflict in Kashmir.
Kde se dívat: Youtube
Naše mládež na Tchaj-wanu (Yue Fu, 2018)
What began as a documentary following two charismatic young activists, transformed into a film that captured one of the largest student-led protest movements in Taiwan, The Sunflower Movement. Naše mládež na Tchaj-wanu, which won a Golden Horse for Best Documentary in 2018, follows activist Chen Wei-ting leading a student-driven, 23-day occupation of Taiwan’s parliament in protest of a proposed trade pact between the country and China. At the same time, the film follows Boyi Cai, a Chinese student fighting for Taiwan in a different way in mainland China.
Silence Sam (2019)
With confederate statues being razed across the United States, Silence Sam takes an intimate look at what the fight to remove racist monuments looks like on a college campus. The short film, which follows the advocacy to remove “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina, is not only a documentary about a student-led movement but is also a student-led documentary. An important film in its own right, the film’s creators also ignited another conversation about ethics in the documentary filmmaking by calling out the film Commons, which told these students’ stories without their permission and discounted their activism.
A particular quote from their open letter stood out and felt important to share on this blog: “Student films are films. Student movements are movements. This student-led movement deserved a student-led film.”
Kde se dívat: Youtube
The Legend Of The Underground (Nneka Onuorah and Giselle Bailey, 2021)
The Legend of The Underground tells a powerful story of a group of Nigerian youth that defy the harsh gender norms, homophobia and transphobia in their country. These bold, and incredibly fashionable, activists challenge Nigeria’s law against same sex public affection and LGBTQ+ gatherings. The stakes are high as they risk up to 14 years in prison for daring to just be themselves.
Kde se dívat: HBO Max
nás děti (Kim A. Snyder, 2020)
No list on youth movements would be complete without the inclusion of the immeasurable dedication of the victims of the Parkland shooting. While there are a few docs about the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting itself, nás děti, which is an IDA fiscally sponsored film, chooses to put the main focus on Parkland students who wouldn’t let the world look away from the horrific realities of gun violence in America. The film follows these students as they travel the country speaking truth to power and igniting the March For Our Lives movement.
Kde se dívat: Apple TV, Amazon
Hansen Bursic is the Digital Communications Coordinator at IDA. He is also a filmmaker and freelance writer with bylines in CinéSPEAK a QBurgh.
Tagy
- Docs to Watch
- Docs about Youth
- Social Issue Docs
‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ Review: Payal Kapadia’s Dreamlike Protest Documentary Is Personal and Political
NYFF: This abstract documentary about the purpose of modern Indian university is in many ways one of the best student films ever made.
Siddhant Adlakha
More stories by Siddhant
Října 4, 2021 1: 15 pm
Zobrazit další možnosti sdílení
A dreamlike documentary that magnifies the personal until it reveals a lucid political collage, Payal Kapadia’s feature debut “A Night of Knowing Nothing” is composed of archival footage, student chronicles of contemporary protests, and letters whispered aloud to an absent lover. Co-written by Kapadia and Himanshu Prajapati, its fictitious framing device — a box discovered in a room at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), containing lost film reels and a diary written by a student known only as “L” — creates several floating layers of dramatic reality, which gently fall atop each other to create a vivid portrait of revolt and oppression, love and pain, and philosophical thought threatened by nationalist agenda.
The central thesis of this New York Film Festival Currents selection can be boiled down to a single question: What is the purpose of a university in modern India? However, its approach to this seemingly simple idea is boldly multifaceted, from its ghostly depiction of young love that blossoms in the absence of parents (and curdles when they re-enter the picture), to its exploration of the modern Indian film school — using decades-old student reels to create an artistic continuum — to the vital role of the student protest within India’s political milieu, and its self-reflexive goal of using socialized education to level the playing field.
Kapadia’s vivid tapestry begins with the magnificently charged image of young adults dancing in silence — like the technical experiments of novice film students, much of the digital footage, edited to closely resemble 8mm and 16mm black-and-white film stock, arrives sound-less and in 4:3 — as widescreen cinematic classics are projected against a far wall and across their moving bodies. The film’s only score in this moment is L’s secret journal (read in a shaky voice by Bhumisuta Das), which speaks of a fellow student with whom she fell in love, a boy named “K.” This combination of lively image and mournful narration imbues the camera’s fly-on-the-wall perspective with a sense of melancholy. As life unfolds with verve and passion, the spectral narrator, L, exists at a remove, as if she were both present amidst the frolic, and distant from it, her heartbreak leaving her unable to get involved.
This sets the stage for the way “A Night of Knowing Nothing” hyper-focuses on the intimate, until it cracks it open from within and lures forth desires that clash, inevitably and unavoidably, with broader political forces that seep into the fabric of young Indian life. L’s romantic abandonment is slowly revealed to have ugly, caste-centric dimensions, which the film carefully peels back as it begins to inject its visual fabric — of everyday student life captured on what appears to be celluloid — with news footage of real events, like FTII’s student strike after the appointment of a new Hindu nationalist chairman. Using this event as a platform, the film pulls back even further, to reveal the wider world of Indian student protests against the Modi government, its discrimination against Muslims, the treatment of “lower” Dalit and Bahujan castes, and cruel hikes in university fees, which seek to re-fashion higher education as a realm of the already wealthy.
The film often uses sound to implore the imagination and to make the viewer project themselves into the students’ spaces and experiences, whether by contrasting images of police violence and youth in revolt with devastating silence or by filling the airwaves with lively chatter when the frame features only the emptiness of mess halls and university corridors. It also oscillates between the propulsive sounds of protests songs and an unsettling musical score, which, in tandem with its haunting narration, creates an atmosphere of soulful echoes similar to other recent pieces of innovative docu-fiction that have found their way to NYFF, like Minh Quý Truong’s “The Tree House,” about Indigenous Vietnamese tribes filmed by a fictitious Martian filmmaker, and Suneil Sanzgiri’s “Letter From Your Far-Off Country,” which also uses letters to explore Indian protests and the modern lineage of anti-caste social reformer B.R. Ambedkar. The students’ Ambedkarite and Leninist politics form a winding aural and narrative landscape, and when the film broadens in scope to capture their revolts, it becomes incredibly riveting.
However, behind the curtain of these political ideologies, it finds a unique vulnerability whenever it slows down to capture individual stories, whether of real students (many of them Muslim or Dalit) under the thumb of a fascist Hindutva government or of L, whose soft voice betrays a defeatist exhaustion. Rousing moments abound whenever students bellow from makeshift pulpits, but the film never shies away from the ceaseless, devastating personal impact of India’s political climate. Its collection of student footage helps establish what’s at stake in subtle and surprising fashion, between sunlight illuminating a dormitory on a mundane morning — an unremarkable normalcy that soon feels threatened — and the gentle nudity of a girl lying in wait for someone unseen. This level of artistry directly evokes L’s story, and indirectly comments on the value of the film itself, and of FTII films in general. Even such a tasteful and thoughtful image would be considered too provocative for the censorious Modi regime.
Kapadia graduated from FTII several years ago, but “A Night of Knowing Nothing” is, in many ways, one of the best student films ever assembled. While shot digitally, it’s indistinguishable from film. The raw and unpolished nature of the footage — its amateur-ness, so to speak, born ironically of expert impersonation — imbues the film with a sense of history unfolding in the moment, as if untouched celluloid were being beamed to us directly from a 16mm camera in the mid-2010s, removing a layer of artifice in order to circumvent time itself. During close-ups of various protesters, a tactile gate weave (the mechanical wobble of film stock being pulled through a camera) makes events feel more volatile and unpredictable. The enormously high contrast of some of the images turns people into stark silhouettes — into shapes and ideas as they move rhythmically through the unfurling of history and a painful love story.
Známka A-
“A Night of Knowing Nothing” screened at the 2021 New York Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
We collect Movies about Student protest rating based on ratings and reviews on popular services. To collect Movies about Student protest we analyze rendition, popular services, comments, people reviews, forum comments and make our own rating. If you think there is a movie missing in the selection, you can leave a comment with the name of the movie that should be included in the selection. Let’s make a rating Movies about Student protest together!