I was a bit up in the air about what to choose as my second documentary from the 1970s. After scouring such things as the Wikipedia page devoted to the history of Oscar nominations for best documentary, I landed on Scared Straight!, the movie that probably gave us that term -- about prisoners scaring wayward teenagers away from a life of crime. However, despite the film's contribution to our vernacular -- and despite the presence of Peter Falk as the narrator -- I could not find it anywhere.
Instead of continuing through the list of those best doc nominees, almost all of which were unfamiliar to me, and waiting until I randomly landed on one I could find, I decided to take a different approach. Kanopy allows you to filter your search, though you kind of have to stumble onto it to do it the right way. Earlier in this series, I'm sure I was able to filter both documentaries and the 1930s, for example. This time, I could only do documentaries or the decade in question, so I decided to do the decade in question, knowing it would fix me on my choice better than the modern-leaning documentary category would.
And that's how I landed on ... another best documentary nominee.
The War at Home, a 1979 nominee for best documentary (in the Oscars that took place in 1980), details the history of Vietnam protests in and around Madison, Wisconsin, during about a dozen year period from 1963 to the end of the war. When first reading the description, I imagined it would be more specifically about the city of Madison and how its denizens reacted to the war. That's not entirely the case. While ordinary Madison citizens do factor in, this is, probably not surprisingly, focused primarily on the students of the University of Wisconsin. Many of whom would also be Wisconsonians (is that the right word?), but not all.
This is a really thorough document and I found it quite engrossing at first. All sorts of Madison residents -- the mayor, police personnel, campus security personnel, university professors, former students, ordinary citizens -- are interviewed, and there's plenty of archival footage of protests, some of which became violent and some of which resulted in deaths. For more of a casual history buff like myself (can you be a "casual buff?"), I did not think of the University of Wisconsin as being a hotbed of protest. We hear much more about places like Kent State, where four students were killed. But this university was the site of a truck bombing that killed one person, which was undertaken by a guy who shares my last name, Karleton Armstrong. He's interviewed in the film.
As the movie went along, though, I noticed myself checking my phone more, and becoming in other ways distracted. The sheer quantity of footage of students protesting eventually became a bit numbing, even as the film does a good job of taking us through the key turning points of the war, and how those resulted in the intesification of protests. Because there is not a lot of alternative footage, the sameness of it all caused me to lose focus. That left a film that seemed like it was headed for greatness mired in "quite good" territory.
I did think it was interesting to learn details about Vietnam I had not known, which were quite a few. I also thought this made an interesting entrant in this series in that it's the first documentary I've seen that relies heavily on archival footage. That would of course become a staple of documentary filmmaking, but it's not something I have encountered in this series so far. Not that The War at Home was one of the first documentaries to do that, I suppose, but it does it quite well.
Okay, I've got two more months in this series, both of which will feature films from the 1980s. One of them is already picked out, and the other might come from ... scouring lists of best documentary nominees.
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