Underground

(Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler, 1976, 87 min., 16mm)

Here and Elsewhere. On May Day, 1975, celebrated documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and film editor Mary Lampson recorded interviews with Weatherpeople Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Jeff Jones, and Cathy Wilkerson at a safe house in Los Angeles. Designed to promote the Weather Underground’s anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist ideology of international revolution, the film could not show its subjects’ faces due to their fugitive status, so the filmmakers staged their interviews through screens and with mirrors. The resulting film is far more than long sequences of displaced talking heads, but is intercut with leftist documentaries of the moment, including work by Chris Marker, Cinda Firestone, Third World Newsreel, Jane Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign, and others. Underground not only depicts the shadowy interior of a clandestine revolutionary cell, but also demonstrates the internationalist zeal animating them.