Leftist Documentaries
This is an amazingly interesting, if messy, documentary about/by the Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit. It was actually started by a New Left production company that wanted to produce documentaryies about the struggles going on at the time. They made another movie about the Panthers I think. During the filming of the movie, the revolutionaries worked with the production company and were encouraged (or maybe asked/demanded) to be trained in how to make the documentary and had a lot of say in how they wanted to be presented. There were some political divisions within the documentary company and some fully backed the revolutionaries being able to "tell their story" while others really wanted to do more sensationalistic and flashy stuff about the panthers or yippies and whatnot and were against giving so much space to these revolutionaries. A dispute then happened with the company and the revolutionary group (I think because the group found out that the production company had paid the Panthers all this money for a film about them, or maybe there were some other factors involved). At any rate, when the film ran into problems and some of the filmmakers wanted to pull out, the DRUM members took the film reels and equipment as collateral and finished the project themselves (which is why there's a lot of lecturing in the movie).
Anyway, it's a fantastic look at the time period and one that focuses on the anti-racist struggle, but within unions and the workplace.
If anything, you should watch the Appalatian migrant auto-worker scene (who begins speaking about exploitation and all these class issues, but then concludes that it's all the fault of welfare mothers and blacks), as well as the scene with the Automaker representatives (which if it was in a fiction film would seem like totally unbelievable marxist propaganda/melodrama... so it's rather fantastic to see in a documentary).
+ YouTube Video
