Forty years after the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protesters are looking to repeat history in Denver this week. In fact there’s even a group calling itself “Recreate ‘68″, and if you’re a true internerd, you’ve already seen the popular YouTube clip of the crowd chanting “Fuck Fox News” at a Fox News correspondent (check out the other side here).
After so many attempts at making parallels between ‘68 and ‘08, I’m a little bored of the nostalgia, and I think the retro attitude is past the point of showing its ineffectiveness. Earlier this year, I groaned at the use of a modern (though really, mostly decade-old) soundtrack in the ‘68 DNC-set animated documentary Chicago 10. Yet two years prior to that film’s 2007 premiere at Sundance, I had already seen a failed attempt to callback ‘68 with the Medium Coolhomage This Revolution, the trailer for which is today’s clip of the day.
Chicago 10 is meant to build the mythology real people and events using non-fiction elements: Archival footage and–in dramatizing the trial of the protesters–animation. Director Brett Morgen uses a technique called Motion Capture, so that he himself could act out many of the courtroom characters. His physical movements were translated to drawn caricatures and then the voices were added from various actors (Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman is particularly surprising). By blending the animation with archival footage and a present day soundtrack (Beastie Boys “Sabotage” plays under archival footage of the hippies storming a monument in Grant Park), Morgen intends to ram the spirit of 60’s era protest into current events. However, I’ll be telling people to go see Chicago 10 for the pieces that are more documentary than call-to-arms.
The Yippies (led by Abbie Hoffman) and MOBE (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, led by Rennie Davis) are organized protesters going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention to renounce the nomination of LBJ, and thereby a government running an unjust war. They converge on a city already in a bad year (the police in Chicago’s 1968 riots came off as the barbarian horde) and Mayor Daley publicly promised any disorderly conduct at the Convention would be squashed. Conversely, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were promising the start of the New Revolution. Hence, tensions were high around the Convention before the bunting was even hung. …Read more
There are a lot of eyebrow-raising moments in this interview with Chicago 10 director Brett Morgan, in which he announces that his next project will be a Courtney Love-approved documentary about Kurt Cobain. Some of it is cringe-worthy, some of it is intriguing, most of it is somewhat WTF? On the good side, it sounds like the film will incorporate some material we haven’t seen before:
…we’ll have the music of course but [also] his home movies. He did stop action animation, which I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen but I saw it and it’s fucking great. I mean it was crude and I’m gonna probably refine it, you know…
…but on the bad side…
I mean one of the things I think with all my movies, if I won the lottery last night you know, one day I’d love to open up a theme park like Disneyland with rides based on all my movies because I think that like when I did The Kid Stays in The Picture, to me it was like the Disneyland ride about Bob Evans. If Disneyland had a ride called Bob Evans The Kid Says in the Picture it’s that? When I did Chicago 10, I kept thinking this is a Chicago experience. This is like Space Mountain with like police coming out at you and whatnot. The same thing with Kurt Cobain, it’s what the Seattle music experience should be in a way. It’s going to be like this 3 dimensional visceral sort of sublime you know movie…ultimately I think the goal for that film is to make sort of a Catcher on the Rye for the next decade?
I love it that that last part is phrased as a question. Anyway, as wary as I am of the notion of a documentary modeled after a theme park ride seeking to usurp the greatest novel ever about teen alienation, I think I’m a little bit more troubled about a few statements Morgen makes which sound vaguely familiar. More after the jump.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Chicago 10 is meant to build the mythology real people and events using non-fiction elements: Archival footage and–in dramatizing the trial of the protesters–animation. Director Brett Morgen uses a technique called Motion Capture, so that he himself could act out many of the courtroom characters. His physical movements were translated to drawn caricatures and then the voices were added from various actors (Roy Scheider as Judge Julius Hoffman is particularly surprising). By blending the animation with archival footage and a present day soundtrack (Beastie Boys “Sabotage” plays under archival footage of the hippies storming a monument in Grant Park), Morgen intends to ram the spirit of 60’s era protest into current events. However, I’ll be telling people to go see Chicago 10 for the pieces that are more documentary than call-to-arms.
