1971

Having marched for peace in the late 60's and early 70's I was thrilled by this film!

Smart, committed people penetrated the impenetrable fortress!

I hope they inspire others to uphold true American ideals and non violently oppose abuses of power.

These people are heroic American patriots and their story is a vital part of our history.

This film moved me in a deep way. I'll never forget it.

I'm grateful to the film makers and especially to the brave people who skillfully undertook this action and generously came forward to tell their tale all these years later!

It's interesting how mass media works on a very-short-term memory. Things that happened today are always said to never have happened before. And then once in a while, they just unearth old information in the form of documentaries. This is a documentary about the 1971 breaking in the FBI office in Media, a suburb of philadelphia to expose infiltration practices of the amerikan political police, which will lead to the exposition of cointelpro. This documentary isn't all about old news though, as the time has passed long enough for the activist to become public about it without any fear of repression. Over forty years later, they get to tell their own stories and the security culture involved in remaining free and unsuspected in the four decades since. It was being streamed on PBS for free during the time of anniversary of the burglary.

Having lived through this period, and remembering a lot of it well, the film was something of a nostalgia trip for me, and a terrific companion piece to Betty Medsger's excellent book. (Wish we'd seen more of her.)

But why oh WHY do documentary filmmakers feel it necessary to use reconstructions with actors, as here? They are not only distracting (and perhaps confusing - ?), they suggest that the director does not trust her witnesses, who are FAR more interesting to watch and listen to than the dully animated wallpaper of the reconstructions.

For a purist like me, such tricks make me distrust the veracity of the material, but then I'm an old school documentarian, and growing more curmudgeonly with the passing of the years.

p.

1971 is a little uneven as a documentary, but well worth watching for its telling of the Media story as well as for its exploration of the world of white middle-class professionals active against the Vietnam war. The film blends archival footage with reenactment seamlessly, and delivers the blow-by-blow story of the break-in very well, although as an IMDb goof notes the dramatic device of the apartment manager watching television is anachronistic. While film goers will already be aware of the raid's success, 1971 successfully delivers tension around its explanation of the planning, execution, and aftermath, with the audience made to feel participants' concern about discovery, especially via the actions of the ninth member of the group.

I was especially taken with the movie's examination of John and Bonnie's concern for their children, and Bonnie's statement that the couple refused to use their status as parents to absolve themselves of responsibility for crimes being conducted in their name. The post-Reagan era popular culture narrative of Vietnam resistance tends towards depiction of the anti-war movement as comprised of tie-dye wearers listening to The Doors, but a generation now in our 50s remembers our parents hiring dependable babysitters and then heading off down the Schuylkill to I-95 and a demonstration at the Pentagon. Philly had SANE, Women Strike for Peace, WILPF, AFSC, the Unitarian Peace Fellowship, and other organizations filled with responsible middle-class Americans sickened by the war.

The War. We talk today about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, as CGI backgrounds for drone video games fought by air-conditioned kids in Nevada trailers. Whether the 1991 or 2003 invasion Iraq was never The War. In 1971 when you said The War everyone knew what you were talking about - the coffee table had Life Magazine's spread on My Lai ditches filled with women and children's corpses as a year later it would have Nick Ut's photo of nine-year-old screaming Kim Phúc. If you were an educated responsible parent in 1971 you knelt down and looked your ten-year-old son in the eyes and told him you would do what you could to keep him, and Vietnamese children his age, from being butchered for your government's lies, Dow's profits.

Vietnam is a character largely missing from 1971. We hear Bob and Keith talk about the necessity for action, see footage of Jackson State bullet holes and Mary Ann Vecchio, but the film fails to evoke that feeling of the war having ground on for so long now despite all one's actions to stop it. By 1971 Tonkin had been six years past, we'd lived through years of Johnson's and now Nixon's lies, nightly body-counts of dead Vietnamese, uncertainty whether the neighbor's boy was going to be drafted. While 1971 delivers the story of how Media, I think it fails to fully communicate why.

1971 is a bit choppy in the aftermath of the break-in. McGovern's rejection of and then capitalization on the Media documents was nicely referenced, reminding us of his and other liberal politicians' actions that year in connection with Ellsberg and Russo's cache. Camden seems kind of tacked on and without context. There was no mention of Harrisburg that I recall. In explaining Bob, Keith, and the Raines' sense of exhaustion it might have been useful to communicate something of the burden of the various conspiracy trials and the work that went into their defense. I liked the explanation of Carl Stern's exposure of Cointelpro. Reminiscences by the Raines' kids and Bob's musing on unintended consequences were interesting, but also telegraphed to me that at this point the film had lost focus. The Church Committee treatment seemed to me very incomplete. We were told of Media participants acting in the wake of MLK and RFK's assassinations, but there was no mention of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, other Panthers, Allende and other CIA targets. It's true the viewer could easily become lost in a sea of references, but Media's impact and legacy is intertwined with other revelations which were on the minds of contemporary political actors, and the film might have spent a few more minutes fleshing this out.

The story told in "1971" is a very important one for every American and I do recommend you see it. However, despite this I have to be honest...I had a very hard time staying awake during the film. Normally I don't have this trouble but think it wasn't just me...the film, despite about some important events, comes off as very slow. See it...just try to have some caffeine with you.

The story in this film is super-important. At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, an unknown group of dissidents broke into a local FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole the documents in the office. This was important for two reasons: the documents held important evidence of illegal FBI activities and copies of the documents were sent to the press! Now, for the first time, concrete evidence was known to exist that talks about FBI harassment of innocent Americans the agency saw as subversives! So, breaking up marriages and manipulating innocent people was fair game for the agency--mostly because there was practically no oversight of the FBI.

So why is this important today? Well, with increasing surveillance by not only the FBI but Homeland Security, we once again have the POTENTIAL for abuses of civil liberties. Additionally, with the WIKILEAKS and Edward Snowden stories in the news, the events of 1971 seem very familiar once again. Overall, an interesting story told in a rather dry and low energy fashion that every American, on the right, left or in the middle, should see.