Line #21 Film/TheWeatherUnderground


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/6998213b_5633_492d_81ab_c761cbfa5eda.jpeg]]
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3	''The Weather Underground'' is a 2002 documentary feature directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel.
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5	It is an account of the eponymous [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground Weather Underground]], aka Weathermen, a leftist terrorist organization active in the 1960s and 1970s. The Weather Underground is born out of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society Students for a Democratic Society]], a non-violent student activist group formed to work for civil rights and against UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar. As the '60s drag on and the violence in Vietnam continues unabated, the radical faction within the SDS comes to believe that more direct action is necessary.
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7	Matters come to a head at the 1969 convention of the SDS, where the radicals split off from the main SDS movement. As the revolution fails to happen and the Vietnam War fails to end, one faction, calling itself the Weathermen/Weather Underground, resolves to take the violence of Vietnam home to America. Thus begins a campaign of bombing and terrorism. Compare ''Guerrilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst'', a similar film about the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), their kidnapping of the Hearst heiress, and her joining them.
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10	!!Tropes:
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12	* BombThrowingAnarchists: The Weather Underground, bombing the Capitol, bombing the Department of State building, conducting a campaign of domestic terrorism. Actually they were Marxist-Leninist however.
13	* TheFellowshipHasEnded: The Weather Underground breaks up in the late 1970s after the end of the Vietnam War robbed the group of its purpose. One interviewee, Naomi Jaffe, recounts how her involvement ended in the most anticlimactic fashion: she showed up for a scheduled meeting and no one else did, and with no way to contact the others, she was done.
14	* FilmTheHand: The hostility of the SDS and its left-wing elements to the press is demonstrated by a clip from the 1969 convention where a student puts a hand over the camera and says "That's enough."
15	* {{Gorn}}: RealLife Gorn meant to illustrate the violence and disorder of the late 1960s. Photos of the My Lai massacre, uncensored photos of the victims of the Tate-La Bianca murders.
16	* JitterCam: Seen in stock footage, namely a clip from the 1969 "Days of Rage" as a news camera films a couple hundred SDS activists swarming a police barricade in Chicago, starting an epic street brawl.
17	* TheKenBurnsEffect: Used for many still photos, like some zooms out from photos of the chaotic 1969 SDS convention, or a zoom in on a photo of Brian Flanagan being arrested, before Flanagan is interviewed on camera.
18	* {{Narrator}}: Used rather sparingly, as much of the story is told either from the TalkingHeads or from dramatic readings, but Creator/LiliTaylor does pitch in from time to time with narration.
19	* RepeatCut: The film includes a StockFootage clip of an American soldier holding the hair of a Vietnamese girl who is kneeling on the ground. He knees her in the back of the head. This clip is then repeated twice more in a repeat cut, as the narration speaks about the Weather Underground getting more radical.
20	* ShoutOut: The name of the group comes from a lyric in Music/BobDylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
21	* StockFootage: Lots, most of the movie. Vietnam War combat footage, American news coverage of the Weather Underground.
22	* TalkingHeads: Many of the principals of the Weather Underground are interviewed, including leaders like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and David Gilbert, interviewed from prison where he's serving a 75-year sentence for a 1981 bank robbery and murder. Also interviewed are people who had dealings with the Weather Underground such as Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers, as well as Don Strickland, an FBI agent who was part of the task force assigned to investigate the Weather Underground.
23	* {{Undercrank}}: Used for a scene meant to demonstrate the process of planting a bomb in the Ferry Building in San Francisco in 1970.
24	* WesternTerrorists: The Weather Underground, privileged white American college students becoming left-wing terrorists.

Context Film / TheWeatherUnderground