by Niall Anderson
For a brief period in the late 60s and early 70s, it looked as though the revolution would be televised, and not only that, it would be produced, directed and paid for by Hollywood. These were the years of Zabriskie Point (featuring Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver), Medium Cool (which wove into its story ground-level footage of the 1968 Chicago riots) and The Strawberry Statement (which featured author James Kunen as himself, re-enacting the Columbia University protests he’d experienced as a student). Adopting the verité styles of the French New Wave and a blithe moral seriousness all their own, the countercultural success these films enjoyed was buttressed by the much larger successes of The Graduate, Easy Rider and Bonnie & Clyde. For a short moment in cinema history it looked as though revolution had made its home on Sunset Boulevard.
Since then we’ve seen a lot of films like The Graduate, Easy Rider and Bonnie & Clyde, but we haven’t seen too many like Zabriskie Point – or at least not from the mainstream. The cinemagoer who likes transgressive politics along with their popcorn has been obliged to find it in the genres, or in films by auteurs whose expressed politics (Godard’s Marxism, for instance) lead to their films being pre-ghettoised. And the sad fact for cinematic revolutionaries is that you can’t have a real revolution without popularity.
MostlyFilm 