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February 28, 2008

Chicago 10

History Reanimated

By Raph

In 1968, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the Youth International Party (or “Yippies”), attempted to organize peaceful demonstrations to coincide with the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Denied permits for demonstration, they occupied Lincoln Park and marched on the Convention illegally, thus waging a week-long battle against the Chicago Police Department. Brett Morgen’s documentary Chicago 10 focuses on the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial— the defendants are often referred to as the Chicago Seven: Hoffman and Rubin, as well as David Dellinger, head of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), and activists-at-large John Froines and Lee Weiner. The “ten” also refers to Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, who was later dismissed from the proceedings; and defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass.

No cameras were allowed into the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. There is, however, a wealth of juicy footage of the events leading up to the trial— Abbie Hoffman’s wisecracks, Allen Ginsberg chanting “om” into a microphone, and hours’ worth of police brutality against demonstrators. In a traditional documentary, talking heads would stand in for whatever live coverage was missing: our court transcript would be a gray-haired Jerry Rubin in a well-furnished living room, calmly reminiscing about his former self and the exciting times he helped to engineer. In Chicago 10, Morgen, the director of the experimental documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, replaces the talking head convention with reenactments of the trial, taken from court transcripts, animated with motion capture technology and voiced over by actors.

The court scenes, though animated, achieve a surprising level of realism, thanks to a talented vocal cast: Hank Azaria performs Abbie Hoffman’s Massachusetts squawk and Allen Ginsberg’s, well, “om”; Jeffrey Wright mainly repeats Bobby Seale’s cry of “I demand the right to defend myself!”, but does it well; and the late Roy Scheider does his best doddering old man impression as Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie, although that joke gets some mileage in the film). The tone of the trial scenes is so straightforward that the live footage seems fantastastical, like montages to accompany the testimony. A scene in which Bobby Seale, having been denied his right to act as his own lawyer, is bound, gagged and handcuffed to his chair is especially powerful, and transitions into nightmarish footage of the worst police violence in the film.

Like the Yippies’ more radical tactics, the idea behind Chicago 10 is exciting, but overwhelming, and often gets in its own way. The conventions we’ve come to expect from documentaries, when successful, leave us with a better understanding of a phenomenon or event which, at the beginning, may have been too complicated to get a good handle on. The animation element of Chicago 10 may be more entertaining to watch than a traditional forty-years-later interview, but more often than not it only makes the complicated story of the Chicago Conspiracy and its long cast of characters even more difficult to keep track of.

If the film stuck to a regular back-and-forth between footage and animation, we might feel more at ease with its unconventional bumpiness. But Morgen never commits to this rhythm— there are some additional animated scenes, outside of the trial, which are drawn by different artists and use recordings of Hoffman’s actual voice, rather than Azaria’s. The piecemeal format can’t stand up to the tangential nature of a documentary. In another film, a stroll down a side street to mention, say, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the cultlike popularity of the Yippie movement, might provide helpful context for the main subject, but Chicago 10 is too heavily loaded with its own premise to sidestep its focus without losing us.

Perhaps the most confusing disparate element of Chicago 10 is its almost exclusively modern soundtrack, from Rage Against the Machine to the Beastie Boys to Eminem. It’s Morgen’s attempt to draw a parallel between the political climates of 1968 and 2008, or to universalize the struggle of establishment versus anti-establishment. But it doesn’t work, not only because Chicago 10 has no room for more experimentation, but because the film’s very subject makes it all too clear that this story can only be about 1968. This is not just a generalized story of Americans reacting to an unjust war; the Chicago Conspiracy Trial is a litany of specifics, whose unmistakable cast of characters, though their message may still resonate, are nowhere to be found in 2008.

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