The Weather Underground (2001) film still, photo from the Chicago Historical Society [Enlarge in New Window]

Sam Green: The Weather Underground

Sam Green has an unguarded vision of the world. "I'm much more interested in moral ambiguity," he admits, "than I am in moral certainty." This philosophical approach to life has shaped the 36-year-old documentary-maker's work in thought-provoking ways. Straddling two genres of documentary film tradition, Green's films are simultaneously densely-layered, experimental collages as well as social activist commentaries. "I try to find the alternative histories embedded within the detritus of American culture and present them in a nondidactic way."

Interestingly, it was through another documentary medium that Green discovered filmmaking: print journalism. In 1991, Green entered the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, with the intention of becoming a correspondent. Once there, he found the program too "stuffy and formal" for his taste and ventured to take a video course taught by documentary video artist Marlon Riggs, who would later become an influential mentor to him. "I had no knowledge of nonfiction filmmaking traditions before I sat in Marlon's class," he confesses. "For the first time, I saw films such as Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and the work of Craig Baldwin. Those films exposed me to the extraordinary possibilities of the documentary form. From then on I knew that this was what I needed to be doing."

After graduating in 1993, Green did a brief stint at a news magazine show for Fox TV in Los Angeles, a "rather sobering experience" as he recalls it, and then returned to San Francisco to start work on his first film, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 (1997), an examination of the rise and fall of self-appointed 1970s pop-media darling Rollen Stewart. "Two impulses inform my approach to potential film subjects: stories that resonate with me emotionally, and my desire to be engaged with the world," says Green, explaining why he chose to chronicle Stewart's admittedly kooky life. (Stewart first gained notoriety by sporting a rainbow wig and jumping in front of TV cameras at major sporting events.) "I identified with [Stewart] in the sense that he wanted to accomplish something. Everybody wants to be significant in some way." The 40-minute documentary, which premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, weaves news clips, home movies, interviews, and archival footage into a richly textured plait that is both a critical essay on the media and a modern fairy tale about a misguided and ultimately tragic hero.

Once again, moral ambiguity is a silent protagonist in Green's second, and latest, project, The Weather Underground. This feature-length documentary, which Green co-directed with Bill Siegel, is a story about the radical political group known first as the Weathermen that actively took part in the protest movement against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1970 the group splintered, its more extreme members becoming fugitives and carrying out a series of bombings against government property.

"It is about young people who had an honest ambition to try to change the world--yet they became monsters, in a way. They are both heroes and villains, and I find that intriguing," notes Green. The spine of the film is the interviews with five former members of the group. Overlaying the interviews is a lush collage of archival imagery, found footage, news reports, photographs, FBI memos, voiceover, and dissonant music. The mélange of aging radicals, defiant but badly frayed, interspersed with familiar images of the 1960s, is strangely evocative, creating in the viewer a sense of longing for a lost innocence.

Green's deconstruction and reassembly of appropriated imagery casts both a critical eye on accepted truths and endows his work with a fresh aesthetic. "I don't want to tell the audience what to think with my films," he maintains, "That kind of hubris makes me nervous. I just want to pose the questions."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | History | Politics | California | 2001