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Berkeley In The Sixties Film Analysis

Decent Essays

The 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties, offers a retrospective of the realization and evolution of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley. Through a mixture of archival footage and “talking head” interviews, the film makes a compelling argument about the importance of Berkeley in the protest movements of the 1960s, but at the same time falls victim to some of the pitfalls common in documentary films that make them unreliable as historical documents. The film offers plenty of firsthand accounting and contemporary footage that give it a sheen of authenticity, however, in its lionization of UC alums it also manages to conflate an entire decade and a complex national gestalt with static instances and the hindsight remembrances of a handful of activists. According to the film, the FSM of the 1960s began incubating in response to the House of Un-American Activities Committee at the start of the decade and came into full bloom with the campus protests of 1964. In the fall of that year, the administration of UC …show more content…

According to testimony in the film, the FSM exposed students the “mechanisms of oppression” and their hard-won right to open discussion allowed for a collective understanding of the omnipresence of those mechanisms throughout US society and foreign policy. Validated by the success of the FSM, student interests turned toward the national civil rights struggle and the deepening conflict in Vietnam. UC Berkeley’s location in the Bay Area also allowed for a hybridization of student activism with the burgeoning counterculture in San Francisco and the radical politics of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. The film ends with a rumination on the People’s Park experiment, an attempt to create a material manifestation of countercultural values in a land rights struggle that joined student organizers with the local

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