Movie: The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann, 1970)
The students occupying their university (it has displaced a playground and community centre for black people, aside from funding the Vietnam War) apprehensively await the speech of their dean. It's expected that he will send in the National Guard if they don't cease their occupation. Outside, the faculty grounds are filled with press, cops, and curious crowds of all political colors. When the dean takes the microphone, he indeed gives the students five minutes to clear out voluntarily. Instead, they break out in song, chanting the chorus of John Lennon's Give Peace A Chance. For the next five minutes (the movie almost gives the impression that it's happening in real time) tension mounts, as the music envelops everything and Hagmann cuts between the uneasy atmosphere outside and the students inside, solely concentrated on their performance. When their time is over, the National Guard charges in, and we are dropped in the middle of the action, seeing from up close how the cops wreck havoc inside the building and inflict violence and tear gas on the students, while on the soundtrack we keep hearing the ever fainter (now non-diegetic) sounds of Give Peace A Chance.
The scenes described above form the climax of The Strawberry Statement, are some of the most memorable I've seen in American counterculture cinema, and come as a complete surprise. The clarity, intelligence and sharpness of the filmmaking here is at complete odds with the rest of the movie, which is both unfocused and overdetermined. That becomes obvious from the opening scene, in Simon's (Bruce Davison) dorm. Just after we see a poster of JFK on the wall, we hear a radio report on the Sharon Tate murder trial, followed by Simon comparing the ants in his room to the Viet Cong. Craming the entire 1960's in one scene to signal what your movie has on its mind seems unnecessary, but not once you realise that Hagmann has quite a lot of trouble communicating his ideas narratively or visually. At one point, a montage set to a rock song from the counterculture movement is directly followed by a montage set to a similar song without either montage containing anything of note. Ordinary dialogue scenes between two characters are sometimes shot with the camera quickly moving in a circle around them, showing things that are completely irrelevant to the scene. During protest scenes the camera mirrors fists being thrown in the air, making quick jitttery moves forwards and backwards. The movie has many similar moments that mostly emphasise that Hagmann is making big, original directorial choices, without seemingly having thought about what these choices actually add to the movie. Most of the time they are counterproductive.
The aforementioned Simon is a 20-year old dude, part of the rowing team, and loving it, despite not entirely fitting in its conservative macho culture. Identifying as a liberal, without really thinking about the actual ideological implications of that, he joins the protest movement on a lark and mostly to meet women. He doesn't quite fit among the occupiers either, but he senses that their concerns are valid, without really feeling emboldened to take radical action beyond that. He spends most of the film confused about how he wants to define his relationship to the protests, the rowing team, the university itself and Linda (Kim Darby), the student radical he has a thing for (and vice versa). I quite liked this characterisation of Simon - it's one of the more realitic portrayals I've seen of how students negotiate their political awakening with their desire to comfortably enjoy, and adapt into, the adult world. Simon eventually does find his voice, choosing to fully stand with the protesters, in a monologue that sets up the film's climax. What this means, and what adds some additional interest to the movie, is that the sharpness of the filmmaking corresponds with Simon's clarity of thought.
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