pirate radio - Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio
Richard Curtis
Universal Pictures
2009

I doubt that there will ever be a better pirate radio film than Pump Up the Volume although the series People Just Do Nothing is a strong offering. Pirate Radio, also called The Boat that Rocked, is leagues below its predecessor (that's a pun for a boat movie). This kind of movie... well, a lot of effort must go into every movie, but who could care about a movie like this? It's the usual colorful cast of randy characters (if they were american I'd call them zany) who have somewhat amusing things happen in their lives. This is a movie, this is the basic movie concept, now fill the picture out with a time (the sixties) and place (England) - and for an extra dose of novelty, it's set on one of the boats that broadcast rock music at England from its coastal waters.

The film has a lot of people who are in funny shows, Roy from The IT Crowd, Rhys Darby, whose really funny, is here, and so is the rotund guy from all the Simon Pegg films. Philip Hoffman is here too, presumably because he played Lester Bangs in another rock movie. I find sixties nostalgia to be obnoxious most of the time, with everyone dressed goofy and their floppy hair and groovy talking and the pretense that all those rock songs that people my age have mostly heard in TV commercials and movies all our lives were so magical and dangerous to the establishment. Now, in 2016, the sound of the electric guitar is a basic signifier of youthful rebellion in TV commercials.

So the film shows scenes from the boat, interspersed by the gray offices of anti-rock members of parliament who want the boats shut down. Through most of the movie, the "pirates" aren't breaking the law, and it seems likely to me that the term 'pirate' was applied retrospectively. So that's it, they're shut down, they keep going for a bit but that is pretty much the end of the floating broadcasters. What's interesting is that while this is supposedly the end of the era, rock radio became pretty dominant afterwards (in real life) while London is just one location that continues to have a pirate radio scene with complicated signaling systems. Really what these boats broadcast was a commercially viable alternative to the BBC.

The film shows the impact of the station by showing different people's reactions at different places. A girl in her bedroom listening, a group of people at some work place, some old guy dancing. This is where the difference is most significant from Pump up the Volume, where the radio of happy hard harry is also shown to pierce the community, but its also woven into it.

Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.

beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

Hunter S Thompson - 2008 - Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney

Jigsaw Productions

2008

Gonzo is a predictable look at the life of Hunter S. Thompson, the libidinal and anarchistic journalist best known for the hallucinatory travelog, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If anyone already knows anything about Thompson’s work (and really, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, in itself, a summary of pretty much everything he was about) then this documentary brings nothing new to the field. If, for some reason, one decided to skip the ubiquitously available Fear and Loathing... in film or print and decided to watch this documentary instead, then its a decent introduction to the first few years of Thompson’s literary/journalism career, with plenty of interviews with his friends and family in addition to quotations from his works, and images of his literary subjects.  

What interests me about Gonzo is how it operates as another contribution to the maintenance of 1960s America as *the* centre of all countercultural activity. In Gonzo, Thompson’s early life is glossed over and, with some brief references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, so are any mention of literary influences.  His early novels, Prince Jellyfish (never published) and The Rum Diary (finally published in 1998) and the years of literary failure were not mentioned.  Instead, the film moves right into his Hells Angels period and then dwells on the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s for almost the entire film. Once the discussion finally moves on from the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign (which Thomson covered for Rolling Stone magazine) there is a quick discussion of his contributions to the ‘76 Carter campaign and then nothing is said about anything after that until people start lamenting his 2005 suicide. His post-’72 career, 33 years of living and writing, is hardly discussed. It does not seem like its Hunter S Thompson’s biography being produced here but rather HST is used as another means of recreating the 1960s as an especially turbulent and fascinating time.  

Of course, Gonzo, like almost all documentaries about the 1960s includes a standard montage of 1960s imagery. Vietnam napalm victims, US soldiers in various states of mind, anti-war and civil rights marchers, Nixon, hippies dancing, Timothy Leary doing something, John Lennon doing something. Maybe Gonzo merely has a variation on the images I’ve listed above, but some sequence containing most or all of what I just mentioned almost always appears at some moment where the narrator is talking about how the 1960s were “a different time” or some other cliched phrase used to refer to the era.

An endnote: this documentary isn’t that great (it works on a commemorative level), but its director, Alex Gibney, and his production company, Jigsaw Productions, have created many worthwhile documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Other films in Gibney’s filmography such as, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, and Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey and the trips he took on his bus Further) will be mandatory viewing for my ContraTexts project.

Black Panther Party - comic - 2011 - Portland's Black Panthers

Portland’s Black Panthers
Sarah Mirk
Khris Soden (illustrator)
The Dill Pickle Club
2011
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of a number of Black Panther chapters outside of Oakland. While Comrades features the BPP in a number of mid-sized American cities such as Indianapolis and Winston-Salem, there was no essay on the Black Panthers chapter in Portland Oregon. A small organization devoted to publishing materials about Portland history called The Dill Pickle Club (now called Know Your City) has published a small (quarter-size) comic book titled Portland’s Black Panthers (available on their website and also through Pioneers Press) that gives a brief, illustrated history of that particular, less acknowledged and celebrated, chapter of the party.  

The story of the Portland Panthers follows a similar pattern to the chapters of other cities as discussed in Comrades. Founders Kent Ford, Percy Hampton, and others came together to protect the local black community from police harassment and relentless racism, and struggled to provide a variety of social service (including breakfast programs for children and testing for illnesses) to the poor.  While Portland’s Black Panthers does detail a large degree of conflict with local law enforcement, FBI, and the political establishment of the city, it also more or less portrays the chapter as fairly successful in achieving its goals of improving the conditions of Portland’s black community.

As far as I can tell from their respective websites author Sarah Mirk and illustrator Khris Soden’s interest lies in telling the (forgotten) history of the city of Portland through the comics form. Portland’s Black Panthers is one volume of a set of ten comics about different aspects of Oregon’s history, other topics include the state highways and voting rights for women. Each set is written by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist. Soden’s drawing style for Portland’s Black Panthers is very crisp and linear with little to no use of shading throughout the publication.

new age, Process Church - book - 2009 - Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment

Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment
Timothy Wylie
(ed.) Adam Parfrey
Feral House
2009

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s.  The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone.  They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine.  Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together.

Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville.  Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration.

Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period.  The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.  

Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work.  Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.

black panther party - book - 2007 - Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party
Judson L. Jeffries (ed.)
Indiana University Press
2007
310 pages

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in late 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a means of providing protection to that city’s impoverished black population from police abuse and harassment.  The Oakland Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, quickly became celebrities of the American radical left, and their Aantics formed the image of the BPP that lived in the national imagination.  The Black Panther Party were not strictly local to Oakland, however, and charters in numerous large and midsized cities across the US were founded by black radicals in similar social settings. It’s these other BPP chapters that Judson L. Jeffries’  book Comrades focuses on.  

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of seven essays, each detailing the history of a different, non-Oakland, chapter of the Black Panthers.  Cities include Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem N.C.  These chapters are contributed by a number of different scholars from a variety of institutions, although the editor dominates the book as one chapter is wholly written by Jeffries and he co-wrote three others.  These essays are quite detailed in their discussions although they combine to describe an overall pattern of external harassment that contributed heavily to the fall of each the individual Black Panther Party chapters. That is the pattern of stems from something Jefferies reveals in the introduction, that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panthers the most significant threat to the well being of the United States despite the fact that there were likely less than 400 members nationwide.  Each chapter discusses a specific Black Panthers chapter forming out of a need to organize for the black communities in those cities in the face of unchecked and rampant poverty.  In each city, the Panthers organize breakfast programs for children, testing programs for sickle-cell anemia and other forms of illness, and other community oriented programs.  Then, the local police department and judicial apparatus harasses the chapter out of existence, sometimes in a hail of gunfire (as occured in Los Angeles), sometimes simply through repeated raids and arrests on minor charges, as in Winston-Salem, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.



Comrades shows the Black Panthers, not as the purveyors of armed black power theatre they were often represented as (discussed in detail in Jane Rhodes excellent book Framing the Black Panthers), but as a radical group that showed a genuine concern for their local communities.  The histories of the various local chapters of the Black Panther Party as presented in Comrades display a side to the Party’s story that is, in fact, often washed away by a riptide of stories about police shootouts.  Converse to that, Comrades also investigates how those dramatic episodes at the heart of the BPP were used as justification by local police for the neutralization of the peripheral chapters (which were also prone to their own episodes of violence, albiet often in the face of relentless harassment by law enforcement).  Comrades tells the stories of these other, peripheral, chapters and in so doing, returns the organization’s image as one with the needs of its immediate community back to the centre of how the Panther’s representation.  

hippies - film - 1979 - Hair

Hair

Milos Forman
CIP Filmproduktion GmbH
1979
121 minutes

Milos Forman, a director of films about the recent past (minus Amadeus), created this 1979 film based on a 1967 musical of the same name , written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni.  The film focuses on the friendship of two archetypes of the American 1960s: the free-spirited flower-child and the conservative army recruit.  Clean-cut country-boy Claude Bukowski, on his way to army army training, stops in Central Park in New York City (for some reason), where he meets John Burger and his group of hippie friends who end up becoming his surrogate family while he stays in the city.  Shortly after Bukowsky befriends Burger and company, they meet Shelia, a debutante from an upper-crust family who becomes another unlikely associate to the hippie gang.


This is what Bukowski sees when he arrives at Central Park:

The film explores a number of hippie tropes, mostly through the songs that now echo through various appropriations in other forms of popular culture, for example this: 

And this:  

These songs cover topics such as new age spirituality, destruction of racial boundaries, hallucinogenics, free love, war, sunshine, and non-conformity - which is symbolized by hair: 

John Burger is a tough NY hippie, recalling Abbie Hoffman in his attitude and appearance and fast-talking demeanor. Here's Burger singing "I Got Life" as he ruins dinner:

 He might also be a prefiguration of Ferris Bueller, whose antics bring his his friends to unlikely places where they are unwelcome (such as a posh garden party hosted by Sheila’s family) and, following Bukowski’s enlistment, into the army base.  Ultimately, Bukowski and Burger essentially switch places, as Burger is inadvertently sent to Vietnam while posing as Bukowski on the army base so that Claude can visit his hippie friends off-base.  The final turn of the film shows Burger’s headstone as Let the Sun Shine blasts.  This final scene includes the most visually striking (and haunting) shot of the film (seen from 2:32 in the video clip below), a show which shows the perspective of the soldiers walking in pairs into the absolutely dark interior of the cargo-plane that carries Burger into oblivion.  The shot provides the viewer with the perspective of being just above the soldiers of shoulders, giving the viewer the point of view of a protective spirit about to abandon its ward.

Apparently the film adaptation was disappointing to Rando and Ragni for its great reduction of the anti-war stance of the stage musical, rather placing the bulk of its emphasis on the free-spirited lifestyle of the whole hippie thing (“...man”).  Who knows why this happened?  Government-Hollywood conspiracy?  A loss of the sense of urgency as the film production followed the end of the war by a few years?  That there was a deemphasizing of the anti-war aspect of the ‘60s in Forman’s Hair, is surprising, because in the more recent Taking Woodstock, the anti-war attitude of the era is absent, even though the more recent film includes a character that is a Vietnam-vet turned long-haired hippie.  Compared to Taking Woodstock, the final scenes of Hair appear forcefully radical.

Some of the songs have been heavily sampled for music of the 1990s rave culture - here’s one example: 

 

lgbt liberation - book - 1971 - The Gay Militants

The Gay Militants
Donn Teal
Stein and Day
1971
355 pages

I purchased The Gay Militants for two dollars from the man who sells books on the street at the corner of Bloor St. West and Brunswick Ave. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.  The small number of street-bound booksellers who set up within a one kilometer radius of the University of Toronto St. George campus have some good books.  In addition to The Gay Militants, I have also found books by Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre from either the man in the Annex or the man who sells books just outside of St. George subway station.  Don’t ignore these guys!

The Gay Militants is a comprehensive (300+ pages) history of a then new radical homosexual activism, starting in June 1969 with the Stonewall Riots, and ending with discussions of the event of Christopher Street Liberation Day (essentially the first NYC pride parade), on July 27, 1970.  Barely over a year of action is chronicled, in great depth, by Teal - and this book can be read almost as a survey of the underground (and overground) press coverage of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, as each chapter contains dozens of article excerpts.

Teal, who died in 2009, was an insider to the gay liberation movement, and he wrote his text in the voice of someone who was present at many of the events he described.  He was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance, an organization that is also one of the primary subjects of his text, and therefore was at the heart of these matters as an active participant, and not just their historian.  The book is an incredibly dense look at all of the events from that first year, from battles with police, to the management of dances, to the establishment of an underground press (as well as commentary on items in both the activist and popular press that showed difficulty in accepting that there was any such need for gay liberation).  The Gay Militants also, towards its end, quotes statements of support for  from members of The Black Panther Party as well as critique of other (macho-man) radicals who ignored their cause or didn’t see it as valid.  

acadian nationalism - film - 1971 - Acadia Acadia?!?

Acadia Acadia?!?
Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault
National Film Board of Canada
1971
75 Minutes

This is the first film that I've watched from the National Film Board of Canada website which has recently made hundreds of its documentaries and animations available for streaming or download.  I intend to gradually go through the NFB website's content and write about any films that I deem appropriate for this blog.  As I'm moving through the NFB content alphabetically, Acadia Acadia?!? is the first such film, although there's a couple more in the A’s about the Oka standoff and the October Crisis of 1970 Quebec.

Acadia Acadia?!? is a black and white documentary that captures the short life of the Ralliement de la Jeunesse Acadienne, the student movement that called for the recognition of Acadian identity by the English political establishment in New Brunswick.  This documentary was mostly shot at the University of Moncton, the first and only French language university in New Brunswich.  The film's directors, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, have worked in collaboration on a number of projects for the NFB and many of them focused on aspects of Francophone culture in Canada.  With this film, Brault and Perrault focus on a small student activist movement centered on the campus of a small university in a small Canadian city, but their film opens up a discussion about the status of French Canadians outside of Quebec during the 1960s.

Acadia was once a French Colony that once existed east of New France (modern Quebec) where New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec currently is.  The Acadians were expelled from the region in the mid-18th century, settling in places like Louisiana following the French defeat to the English in their Colonial war for Canada.  Many of the Acadians returned to eastern Canada, following their expulsion, and they established French speaking communities throughout their former colony.  At the time of the events Brault and Perrault captured in their film, the city of Moncton was over 30% Francophone.  This %30 was hardly represented in the political and educational institutions of New Brunswick however, and therefore this student movement emerged to fight for language rights by, in part, asserting their Acadian heritage.

The film captured many of the significant events of this movement.  The successful call for a student strike at the Univertity of Moncton opened the documentary, which then segued into scenes of a large march for French language rights at Moncton city hall.  The scenes of the students speaking with city hall council were quintessential of the 1960s zeitgeist, as they featured a condescending group of aging white (and in this context, Anglophone) blowhards, proud of their ignorance, talking down to a group of educated and angry young outsiders.  The activists call for French to be recognized at city hall was rejected, showing how English, as the only recognized language of the political establishment of a city that's over a third Francophone, was a means of providing a barrier to access political power and services in that city.  The activists did not take their rejection well and they left a pig's head on the lawn of the mayor's home.

Brault and Perrault mix scenes of activist action with talking head interviews with the Young Acadians, wherin the student agitators express their opinions on the English power structure of the province, the meaning of Acadia, the state of the University of Moncton, their views on direct action activism and violence, and their wish to express themselves without giving up their identity.  The activists are clearly armed with recent sociological and postcolonial theories that contribute to many of the views they express in these interviews.  There are also some scenes shot at an Acadian village where the activists discuss language and cultural politics with some of the villagers - this scene is the converse of a scene where the activists sat at the meeting of a loyalist organization, where during the recital of the oath to the Queen and when the members of this organization sang 'God Save the Queen', the students held up the clenched fist of activist solidarity.  

The activists occupied the University of Moncton's science building for nine days in the winter of 1969.  The students were raising questions about why their school received zero funding from the provincial government while the University of New Brunswick was heavily subsidized (thus making tuition lower for students, and enabling the institution to provide nicer facilities and better services.)  The occupation ended with students submitting to police requests to move, despite earlier calls for passive non-violent resistance to the authorities, which pretty well caused the movement to dissipate.  Shortly thereafter students returned to classes, and thirty students were expelled, including Michel Blanchard, one of the activist leaders who speaks throughout the documentary.  Furthermore, the university closed its sociology department, the chief source of the social theories the activists operated on.

The English film is 75 minutes long, an abridged translation of the original French version that runs closer to two hours in length.  One feature of the translation is that there is only one female translator voice, which is fine, it works, but I never noticed how other such films make the choice to translate the words of male speakers into a male voice.  Overall, this film is probably one of the few sources of information on this particular movement, as a subaltern, Acadian, nationalism in Canada has mostly been a subject with regards to the First Nations or Quebec contexts.

Beginning in 2009, Michel Blanchard was permitted back onto the University of Moncton campus for the first time since 1970. 

PS:  Here is the link to watch the English version of the film on the National Film Board website.