Rebels With a Cause
by Helen Garvy
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Juan Gonzalez, Todd Gitlin, Tom HaydenDirector: Helen Garvy
Brand: Zeitgeist Films
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Unknown; English (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 109 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-04-15
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
Movie Reviews of Rebels With a Cause
Movie Review: SDS, then and now
Summary: 5 Stars
I wish I could have gotten my hands on a copy of "Rebels With a Cause" three years ago when I wrote a short historiographical piece on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Alas, I didn't own a DVD player then. Too, my professor probably wouldn't have let me cite it as a source. But watching Helen Garvy's account of the rise and fall of the largest New Left organization in the 1960s doubtless would have made my journey through the written sources less painful. I waded through Kirkpatrick Sale's massive 700 plus page tome, Todd Gitlin's equally weighty book on the 1960s, an intellectual history of SDS, and a couple of other heavy reads that left my mind reeling with information. Yep, Garvy's documentary would have cut through all the minutiae found in those books and given me a few touchstones to wrap my analyses around. At the same time "Rebels With a Cause," due to its running time, necessarily moves through dense information quite quickly. A viewer wishing to know a lot more about SDS will need to consult other sources of information. Too, Garvy has a tendency to whitewash some of the group's unsuccessful activities.
I'm quite impressed with the documentary. I've seen a few of these counterculture/New Left video presentations over the last couple of years, and Garvy succeeds in bringing us faces we've heard about in other places but haven't seen on camera. Folks like Bernardine Dohrn, Billy Ayers, Tom Hayden, and Todd Gitlin appear to offer insights, of course, but we also hear from Carl Oglesby, Sue Klonsky, Al Haber, Carl Davidson, Jeff Shero, Mike Spiegel, Bob Ross, and Casey Hayden. Wow! Most programs on SDS focus on the early, idealistic days when the group was just another left-leaning group on the University of Michigan campus, but "Rebels With a Cause" brings us leaders and personalities from the darker, later eras of the group when membership soared to over 100,000 as a result of the draft and the communist cadres started ripping the organization to shreds. I'm amazed Garvy located Alan Haber for an interview; I haven't seen him on other SDS/Weather Underground documentaries, which is curious since he essentially founded the organization in 1959. In short, it's great to see so many people I had only read about before.
As for the flow of the documentary itself, we get an enormous amount of material. We start with the beginnings of SDS when a small group of disenfranchised college kids took part in the civil rights movement in the South. "Rebels With a Cause" discusses Tom Hayden's "Port Huron Statement" and its theme of participatory democracy in some detail before moving on to the various rallies culminating in the first anti-war demonstration in 1965, a demonstration that placed SDS firmly in the minds of young people across the country. The period stretching from the Olympian heights of this anti-war protest to the embarrassing rise of the Marxist-Leninist sects that destroyed the group in 1969 also receives serious attention. Here the documentary pulls no punches as the former leaders look back on the turn to violent revolution with what amounts to a slap on the forehead. They almost to a man (and woman) acknowledge the stupidity of embracing violence and wish things could have been different. I could go on and on describing what "Rebels With a Cause" covers: the role of women in the New Left, the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) that led to the group's first real schism, the early association with SNCC, and much more.
I mentioned earlier that Garvy's flaw is the tendency to whitewash certain aspects of the group's history. I'm not talking about the Weather Underground foolishness since the documentary does a good job critiquing that ridiculous series of events. What I'm talking about is some of the subtler, less well known incidents that caused the group problems. Let's take ERAP, for instance. The whole idea behind this project was for members to get out into the community--the poverty stricken communities, by the way--in order to make a difference in people's lives. It was an attempt to actualize participatory democracy instead of standing around talking about it, and it failed spectacularly. Poor people, it turns out, are quite conservative on many issues and don't take kindly to a bunch of scruffy college kids with a lot of talk telling them how to live. Even worse, the ERAP communities often lived in a single residence, men and women both, and residents of the neighborhood expressed horror that unmarried kids would live under a single roof. "Rebels With a Cause" provides little information on the ultimate failure of this SDS initiative, which is surprising because ERAP is the first instance of the problem that would ultimately bring down the organization: the tension between those who wanted to take action versus the armchair theoreticians content to sit at the typewriter churning out pamphlets and treatises.
When you're done checking out the documentary with all of its interesting footage and interviews, make sure and flip through the extras. Garvy throws in excerpts from Hayden's "Port Huron Statement," Paul Potter's speech at the 1965 anti-war demonstration, a few text pages on SDS history, and information about her own role in the group. Despite a few niggling problems with the presentation, "Rebels With a Cause" covers an enormous amount of ground and will doubtless inspire many viewers to find out more about this little slice of 1960s radicalism. I recommend following up Garvy's film with "The Weather Underground," a 2003 documentary focusing on what came after the breakup of SDS.
Summary of Rebels With a Cause
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