Also as a bonus? My skepticism was unwarranted. I had a TON of fun having this conversation. What is the purpose of an academic institution? Who should pay for all of this? Why does student life matter in the context of more macro-level politics? And we talk about the making of the film as well β how do you even make a documentary?!
Find him on Twitter lukeigel. J: How did you get started, and why did you decide to make a full-length documentary? I watched it back in November of , COVID was peaking, and this movie just completely blew my mind: this vast expanse of archival footage, spanning the history of America, Britain, various other countries from the s onwards, overlaid with this strange, atmospheric and hypnotic industrial music.
So we write a broad overview. But then β ok, what if we were to add narration? What if we go over footage of the 50s and 60s and 70s that we can download from YouTube? And quickly the scripts turn from 10 to 15, to 50 to pages. And there were just these gorgeous shots of students hanging around on campus. We were like, if we can capture this vibe, but across all 80 years, this is something we have to work on.
I think the core topics that we cover: the military's role at MIT, the vast series of protests throughout campus, whether it's because of America's war in Vietnam, because of MIT's treatment of the homeless and people of low income housing in Cambridge in the s, all these different things were so incredibly compelling that we wanted to build a script around them. We knew that this was crucial and we knew that we had to build this story up over the course of many hours [i. Something that's really striking about the earlier decades, especially, around the Vietnam War, is how militant and genuinely radical student activism was.
The protests you can see onscreen, they're super intense, to the extent that riot police were called in, there was some violent enforcement action, students were imprisoned. And all of this feels very radical to me now. But it also feels like a lot of the student body was on board with it, the UA, the β I don't know what that stands for β it's like the presidency of the student body. Yes, like the person who won that election ran on a very radical platform.
