The Cinema of History
a documentary and participants recall columbia '68
“I’m not a filmmaker,” Paul Cronin tells me. “I’m not an expert on film, I don’t know much about film.” So says the creator of four documentaries, which have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He’s published four books on cinema, some of which are taught in the film school here at Columbia. “I’m not that interested in film,” he says earnestly.
An excerpt from his latest documentary effort, A Time to Stir, recently debuted at the Columbia-sponsored event “Columbia 1968 and the World: A 40th Anniversary Event,” meant to remember and analyze the student uprisings of 1968.The two-hour excerpt represents the fruits of 18 months of hard research: 130 interviews, 250 hours of footage, 11,000 photographs. “It’s an extract from a work-in-progress,” the director states as he introduces the film to an eager audience, “which basically means I ran out of time and money.” The movie thrust me into a cinematic cabinet of disorganized files, whirling about in a storm of murky historical context and audio files that abruptly cut off at the critical moment. Subtitles introduce a string of characters, and I struggle to keep up.
This audience, although experiencing the film for the first time, has no difficulty following the train of events. A Time to Stir tells the story of the 1968 protests at Columbia University, a week-long interval when students took over five buildings on campus and brought university life to a halt. The crowd sitting in the screening room had lived through these events. “Tell me when it’s you,” one woman says to the man beside her, pointing her finger towards the screen. The members of the crowd responded to the documentary with gusto—an interview with then-University President Grayson Kirk flashes onto the screen, and before one can digest the placard, a wave of laughter automatically sweeps forth from the audience.
They wear their name tags, each with a class year and a building: Hamilton, Low, Fayerweather, Avery, or Mathematics. As the movie finishes screening, a Q&A began, but the audience spends most of the time reminiscing. Many of these memories aren’t pleasant. “Killers,” says an audience member, referring to the police that eventually broke up the riots. “We don’t train people to kill people,” says Sanford Garelick, the man who had led the NYPD force. A man makes an angry announcement about the gymnasium plans (Columbia’s infamous expansion plan into the Harlem neighborhood that originally sparked the protest), and then abruptly turns his back and walks out of the screening room. Two women, standing across the room from each other, argue through microphones about how events really went down in Fayerweather.
The certainty of the audience echoes the certainty of the impassioned speeches that fill the documentary. But neither Paul Cronin nor his film has anything to do with such certainty. The director explains his thoughts on the documentary form: “If you come to a conclusion about something, you haven’t truly weighed up the small details. There’s new information coming in all the time—there’s no way at this early stage of the game—and I might be saying this for five years, and I might be saying it for the rest of my life. There’s no way I’m going to come to any conclusions ... when I finish the film, if I finish the film, it’s going to be even more confusing.”
Throughout the screening of A Time to Stir and during the discussion afterward, I have the impression of history slipping through my fingers. In one scene of the movie, an elderly lady drops food into a basket for hungry students, blows a kiss, and walks away. Who was this woman? Did she have radical beliefs? Who knows where she’s gone? After the screening, I briefly talk with one gentleman, Howard Lipan, GS ’66, a photographer who worked throughout the tumultuous week. The leaders in Mathematics, he recalls, wanted his photographs to be sent to North Vietnam, as an effort of solidarity to bolster flagging souls in Hanoi. Howard Lipan refused, horrified. Did a link between North Vietnam and the students in Mathematics actually exist? Could this history be reconstructed, or are the lines of communication forever dead?
“It had to be done now,” Cronin says of his documentary. “If I’d done it 10 years ago, it would’ve been even more extraordinary. But you do it now, you do what you can.”
While introducing the film, Michael Ryan—director of Columbia’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library, housed in Butler—refers to A Time To Stir as “history, and the making and remaking of history.” We see this process in living motion throughout the film, both as characters recall their lives 40 years ago, and later—after the initial emotions of revisiting footage of themselves as fresh-faced youth have somewhat faded—as they reevaluate their experiences.
Michael Jacoby Brown, CC ’69, reflects on his changing perception of those weeks: “Seeing the movie, for me it was really eye-opening to see the actual footage of the police and how they felt, which I didn’t have any clue about. I didn’t know those guys, they were just coming in to beat me up. To see their feelings, that was, I think, very interesting. I think the value of something like this, to see ... a cop from the Bronx who grew up on the street ... that’s his point of view, and that’s real.”
Mark Rudd—a student who was expelled after the events of 1968—shares similar feelings. “He uncovers some misunderstandings and miscommunications between the blacks and the whites, namely that the black students felt we were not disciplined enough. That was clear in the film, and I learned that,” Rudd says of Cronin’s documentary. But during 1968, Columbia made headlines in the New York Times repeatedly (as we see in the documentary, which includes a photograph of the front page, with the legend LIES scrawled across it). “Paul’s is different,” Rudd says firmly, “Paul’s a historian.”
Indeed, the documentarian does not plan to study film forever. “I don’t need film to express myself. I’d rather write books, and that’s why I’m coming to get my Ph.D.” In the coming years, Cronin plans to earn a doctorate in communications from Columbia, and he’ll be studying 1968 (A Time To Stir is his third film on the subject). “Columbia’s an extraordinary microcosm,” Cronin says. “Everything is here: the politics, the racism, the imperialism, the corporate structure, and the generation gap. It’s all here at Columbia, in that one week. It’s an amazing kind of Aristotelian unity of time, unity of place. The fact that it was in New York means that there was, you know, so much media, so many images. Columbia: smart people around, people articulate themselves, even if they’re totally deluded.” \\\