Berkeley in the Sixties

Rating:
Summary: Nice
Review: I would like to tell you a little bit about the documentary by Mark Kitchell entitled Berkeley in the Sixties. This film is a great synopsis of the 60s civil rights and counter culture movements based out of UC Berkeley. The film was released in 1990 and contains interviews with everybody from members of the Black Panthers to Country Joe and the Fish. It starts at the beginning of the sixties with the events that would eventually lead to the first protest to the hippies and Peoples Park and so on, interviewing people even into the late 80s. The film kept my attention and was very educational.

Rating:
Summary: Nice
Review: I would like to tell you a little bit about the documentary by Mark Kitchell entitled Berkeley in the Sixties. This film is a great synopsis of the 60s civil rights and counter culture movements based out of UC Berkeley. The film was released in 1990 and contains interviews with everybody from members of the Black Panthers to Country Joe and the Fish. It starts at the beginning of the sixties with the events that would eventually lead to the first protest to the hippies and Peoples Park and so on, interviewing people even into the late 80s. The film kept my attention and was very educational.

Rating:
Summary: The sixties did not fail!!
Review: Is everyone from Texas stupid or just the guy who reviewed
this DVD? Jesus,you're the perfect lamb for George Bush's
America...The sixties and the hippies didn't fail you fool,it
is people like yourself who failed.I know your type well,you
sit on the sidelines too stupid and soaked with fear to think
for yourself and then you attack the very people who are trying
to make life better for everyone...As opposed to better for just
a few.It is very easy to see how Christ was crucified because

we're still doing it to this very day.We destroy the ones who
would enlighten us and then praise those who would destroy us!
Amazing how unconscious and soaked with fear people in this
country are...No,it is mankind who failed not the sixties or the
hippies...We chose fear and ignorance over peace and love...You
tell me who failed....

Rating:
Summary: Nice Summary Of A Wild Time
Review: Okay, I grew up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s and do agree with the one reviewer that the movement of the time has been destructive to many of the values it proposed to cherish (I was a big supporter for years, so I speak from experience) but I still judge the film on it's merit as a film. I may (or may not) agree with the more conservative on politics, but I am reviewing the film and not their politics. It is entertainjing and full of great archival footage. I do not have the DVD yet, but will get it. You do feel you were there and get an insightful look at the mind set of the time. It may be a bit more subjective than I would have liked, but still worth the ticket.

Rating:
Summary: Liberals in the sixties
Review: The sixties are a generation that has destroyed so much of what we loved In America. This was the generation that came as a result of the baby boom after World War II, and look what happened. An ingrate, spoiled and bored generation that started a revoltion that still is happening now, only now there are telling the Generation X what not to do. How sad. The hippies now are crying on Oprah, Jerry, Sally and any t.v. show where the shock is that they're children are uncontrallable and doing drugs. Hypocrites. These same people are making laws to suppress freedom of speech, banning certain music, trying to change our way of thinking, telling us young of this day and age not to have sex, and the ultimate thing they tried to end...money(capitlism), they earn a five figure salary now. All the sixties were about was fighting the "Power". Now there are in power. Look at Hollywood, Wall Street, the Yuppies, Bill Clinton and his sidekick Hillary Clinton, NPR (national public radio), all the broadcast channels on t.v. and Disney. All this and more. They was no color barrier here all the races played into the socialist sixties radical movement of the generation that wanted to change the world only that this sixties radicals hated and still hate the Greatest Country in the world. A good example where the color did not exist onl for whites would be the "Black Panthers", "Azlet", who hate the American Way and want nothing but her destruction. American Veterans of WWII never would have believed that the future generation they would breed would want nothing but the destruction of the U.S.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Documentary
Review: This documentary attests to the fact that persons of All political stripes can cooperate on occasions when authority arrogates power through lies, deceit and pettiness. The Free Speech movement of the early sixties apparently tied together a coalition ranging from Goldwater Republicans to liberal Marxists to thrawt a university administration that didn't merit its authority. Meanwhile, the documentary does proffer considerable support for the premise that a substantial contingent of the anti-war movement of the late sixties did itself arrogate authority through its priviledged status in society to browbeat those whose worldview on the righteousness of that admittedly hideous war markedly differed from their own. Also represented in this documentary are the fledgling black power and women's movement of that era though no mention is made of the movement for gay tolerance and acceptance which saw its first public demonstration outside the White House in the middle sixties by then government workers. I do have the impression still that gay rights activists were met with some of the same derision by the New Left as that spouted on many of those who chose to fight in Vietnam.

Rating:
Summary: great to watch after reading social construction of reality
Review: this film is a nice piece of art. it is comical that a reviewer claims watching this film and then has the arrogance to cry "Hypocrites", saying these people later became part of what they were fighting against. if one has an attention span sufficient to view the whole film, one sees the inevitable "where they are now" part at the end of a documentary. by the type of work they have chosen, the participants are just as honorable now as they were then. they just learned a little about what they were up against. for the rest who never try, they learn nothing.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: This has to be the best documentary on Berkeley that I have seen

Rating:
Summary: Fabric of 60s Counterculture Politics: Weaving the Threads
Review: This is a superb, valuable documentary.

Berkeley was at the epicenter as the counterculture politics of the '60s emerged. And revisiting the political ferment of '60s Berkeley can offer an unusually helpful overview of these interwoven political currents. This film does that very, very well. It rises far,far above films which simply recount the intense experimentation with sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll that eventually charcacterized the counterculture. This film focuses on the often-less-understood, and fascinating, politics of the time.

The fascinating footage (including early glimpses at Reagan as a
relatively new "pol"), the deft editing, the years-later retrospective reflections of "now-grown-up" participants in the Berkeley "FSM" (Free Speech Movement) -- these are all very engaging, and beautifully assembled. But what makes the film great for me is its clarity in reflecting the interplay of counterculture themes: the movements for free speech and for civil rights, the movement against the Vietnam War, and assertion of the new feminism. Along with the energetic pursuit of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," these elements - blended into one 'tsunami' of a movement -- were experienced by us all coming of age during that time, throughout the US and throughout much of the world. But as a young person during that era, who became very swept up in the self-proclaimed "dawning of the Age of Aquarius," I recall also feeling unclear on how these ideological components -- which otherwise seemed to me distinct and substantively unrelated - became intertwined in the social politics of that era.

Whether the film is slanted, and whether "The Movement" was positive or negative, seem to me besides the point. The Movement was; like it or not, that reality is indisputable. From varying perspectives, our entire culture experienced it, and was affected by it. Most of the many millions of us on college campuses during that time were forever changed -- for good, for ill, or both. This film presents the most coherent depiction I've seen of how this happened, what it's "logic" was - and manages to do so engagingly, without becoming pedantic. That's a whole lot for one film to do, even for someone who respects and loves film as our culture's greatest current art form.


Rating:
Summary: Blast From The Past
Review: This is a very good documentary on the history of American civil rights from it's birth in 1960 to the flower power counterculture/ Vietnam era of the late 1960's.

Some memorable speeches from the likes of Martin Luther King and
the Black Panthers leaders, student demonstrations at Berkeley, Hells Angel boss Sonny Bargers altercation with student demonstrators and much more. All of which makes for a very informative, educational and passionate film.

What really hit home though, was how oppressive US domestic politics was back then.

Reagans refusal to listen to the students "howling", military
tactics on Berkeley campus and the destruction of Peoples Park
showed Reagan in a true light. He was a misinformed single minded bully, of that there is no question.

It would be all too easy to draw parallels with Bush, but I am
not into all this fashionable Anti-Americanism.

The point I am making is that the US is a great nation, but it's population need to be more careful on who it choses to lead them, and this film is a reminder of that fact.