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Mark Kitchell's Berkeley in the Sixties is a documentary which sustains exceptional balance throughout its two hour running time. This balance does not come from any single interview, but over the course of multiple interviews. Furthermore, while the events are taken up in first person narratives, each retelling reveals how years of reflection can yield different meanings, coupled with altogether new sympathies.
The documentary begins with the free speech movement, then moves to protesting the Vietnam War, the influx of hippies to the Bay area, the rise of the Black Panthers, and finally the feminist movement in Berkeley. In addressing different movements, and looking at how different perspectives are forged over the span of an entire decade, there is no easy consensus on what happened. It is, of course, a matter of perspective.
Nonetheless, perspective is a way of correcting conclusions all too easily taken for granted. John Gage and John Searle, for example, find the free speech movement to be a model scenario of protest. Indeed, it is the most clearly victorious battle for protest shown in the documentary. But both come across as conservative in light of further examples.
The free speech movement, for example, becomes a protest of the Vietnam War in one of the more memorable moments. As Mario Savio congratulates the students on their victory, the students begin walking away only to stop dead in their tracks when Savio says they are not done because there is a war going on.
Other disparate perspectives include Allen Ginsberg answering questions with a chant, Bobby Seale debunking popular myths of why the Panthers sold Mao's red book, and Jackie Goldberg explaining how the Left was unable to take women seriously. As the range of perspectives increases, solidarity fizzles proportionally.
On the whole, the film juggles a wide variety of perspectives, and sympathies do not go unchecked. Still, the documentary does appear to have more sympathy for radicals. Whether the sympathy is a matter of who gets interviewed, or a catchy tune played during a protest, something more elegant highlights its radical flare. The film allows participants in these movements to account for why they changed their minds at any given point. To allow for someone to explain a change in their political methods and objectives is a far cry from today's penchant for immediately dismissing change, as if morality itself could only be a static category. This allowance is balanced precisely because it also serves as a corrective to the conservative limitation of fairness to merely affirming the status quo.
IMDb rates this film 7.4 stars out of 10
