The news media is notorious for presenting images of mass confrontation and violence, but causes and precipitating factors and struggles, let alone any aftermath of consciousness raising and movements as social change are inevitably nowhere in sight. The Howard Alk/Mike Gray documentary American Revolution 2 is a righteous corrective to media distortion, and omission of history as a popular work-in-progress.

The timely DVD release of this historic vintage 1969 classic begins with Gray's doc short, Riots To Revolution: Chicago In 1968. That seminal anti-war student uprising at the Democratic National Convention that year has been effectively compartmentalized by the establishment media as an aberration. American Revolution 2 reconnects that event to the political movements that grew around it, out of the oppressed surrounding Chicago neighborhoods.

The filmmakers have gleaned potent raw footage of the spontaneous parallel struggles that flowered out of two vanguard movements: The Panthers on the South Side, and the poor white workingclass North Side youth forming The Young Patriots. Both movements discover through heated group dialogue and interaction, that they have much in common when it comes to poverty and police brutality. The notorious Chicago PD in particular is cited for its long history of violence against the local population, that the demonstrating students are ironically observed to be discovering only now. Also central to their grievances are the lack of education, housing and jobs.

In an era long before cell phones, laptops and i-Pods, there is a striking memory of a time when undistracted human beings actually listened to one another intently, and engaged in pure forms of mutual enlightenment, education and the illumination of political consciousness. All of which confirms American Revolution 2 as an enduring and essential cinematic blueprint for movement building and social change.

American Revolution 2 is available from Facets Video, at www.facets.org.

Prairie Miller
WBAI Arts Magazine
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