THE FALL 1969
U.K. documentary. Youth quake, turbulence and chaos. The film's subtitle is, "Film as a Series of Historical Moments Seeking a Synthesis." The Fall provides a lens on the turbulent late 1960s protest movement. Filmed in New York, Newark and Washington DC between autumn 1967 and spring 1968 The Fall is part avant-garde video montage and part surrealistic midnight movie with a psychedelic music soundtrack that includes the Nice, the Doors, the Animals and others.

The Fall includes what is probably the most eye-opening film footage of the city of Newark on fire as a result of the rioting that occurred after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. Also filmed are the great Pentagon protest march and the student occupation of Columbia University that ended in violence as police quashed the demonstrations with tear gas and stormed Hamilton Hall and the Low Library.

The University sit-ins and protests went on for weeks, initially led by a far-left group, Students for a Democratic Society (known as SDS). While the standard media coverage of these events was all done from the outside, The Fall is the only record of what took place from the inside. Never has a revolutionary movement been so intimately portrayed, with all its main personalities vividly shown as real people.

The Fall features Robert Kennedy, The Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Auster, Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller, Gloria Steinem, Robert Lowell, Robert Rauschenberg, Penelope Tree and disturbing footage of "The Destructivists" bludgeoned a chicken to death by beating it against a piano. Maybe the 60s weren't that much fun after all.

THE FALL 1969 documentary on DVD

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