Reviews of an Anthropological Nature:

Chicago 10
I helped to promote a screening of Chicago 10 at the Jewish Cultural center in DC, and upon arriving discovered that I was the youngest attendee in the room. Chicago 10 had its East Coast Premiere at SILVERDOCS in 2007.

This film intrigued me in its use of animated scenes and archival footage from the Chicago protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The animated storytelling makes the story more accessible for youth while using the mechanism to work around casting and believability difficulties in reenactment scenes. Furthermore, an illustrated representation reflects how the public gains access to most closed court trials, pushing this aesthetic and making it all the more potent in the filmmaker’s use of the trial transcripts.

The most striking scene in the whole film was the revelations of the judge’s character and his demeaning attitude towards the defendants. In the personifications put forth of the judge one is given the antagonist of the film; however, at times the personalities of the activists are not fully heroic characters. All the characters in the film have their own flaws and heroisms presented. While a revealing film of the 1968 activist and alternative cultures, it fails to fulfill in a final climax, relying in some ways too much on the outcome of the trial rather than looking at the story more holistically.

For a young audience, Chicago 10 stimulates a renewed interest in the history of their elders, making it cool and appealing. The lack of female roles in the film, while understandable in that the characters involved in the Chicago 10 were all male, further highlighted that the audience for this film are male, and the leaders of the movement were male.