It was fortunate that peripatetic leftist documentarian Chris Marker, along with several other cameramen, was on hand to give us a valuable time capsule of the huge March to the Pentagon on October 21st, 1967, which had been preceded by a demonstration in Washington at the Justice Department, with the burning of draft cards, the day before.Actions against the US involvement in the war in Viet Nam had been escalating since the first campus teach in of March 1965, and the mobilization committee plans for the fall 1967 event had been affected by the involvement of the hippie movement, which had held its Human Be In earlier that year in San Francisco and had enjoyed its Summer of Love.Marker and crew focus on the looks, faces and clothing of the participants, the profusion of images honoring the recently deceased Che Guevara, and the treatment including some being beaten up by the authorities as protestors attempted to enter the Pentagon building itself.The film does not cover so much the speeches made or the more well known spokespersons who attended.The idea that somehow this symbol of US empire and militarism could somehow be levitated by chanting, silly as it may seem today, is also an aspect covered in this short.It makes a good companion to the book length work, Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, and to the Universal newsreels of the time which survive, and deserves to be more well known.
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