LAFF 2009: CONVENTION

It is the real thing at A.J. Schnack's Convention.

An unconventional look at democracy

By Ed Rampell

The best thing about A.J. Schnack’s entertaining, engaging new documentary about the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention is how the director skillfully counterpoints several diverse groups with different issues converging on a single place: Denver’s Pepsi Center.

Depicted in Convention are, first and foremost, the protesters, including aging ex-SDS-ers, members of “Recreate 68” (R68), assorted young anarchists, and anti-war Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.

Then there are Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and city officials, including security forces, who must not only host the Democrats’ shindig, but somehow keep the peace as they accommodate and, at the same time, contain demonstrators. They, of course, have the power to disrupt the proceedings, like what famously happened during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago (aka “Czech-ago”).

Finally, there is the press corps covering the coronation of Barack Obama, mostly embodied by Denver Post staffers.

It is the genius of this clever documentary to focus on these three disparate groups, instead of on the Democratic honchos (whom we’ve certainly gotten a belly full of already), although Senator Hillary Clinton, Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden and Obama are, of course, glimpsed from time to time and occasionally take center stage.

Various characters in this nonfiction film helmed by Schnack -- who previously directed 2006’s Kurt Cobain About A Son -- enter stage left. Barbara and Mark Cohen are longtime activists who met at the University of Denver where, in the sizzling sixties, organized against the Vietnam War with Students for a Democratic Society. Now these two 68-year-old co-founders of Recreate 68 are back, continuing the good fight against America’s endless wars du jour.

The Denver Post journalists include Allsion Sherry, a sort of cub reporter who is thrust from the education beat into the paper’s political team in order to help the overstretched daily cover the unfolding spectacle. We follow the sometimes hotheaded young redhead as she dishes on the Dems online and in the Post’s print edition.

Hickenlooper’s loopy team includes the mayor himself, a bureaucrat who learns how to ride a scooter in order to beat the convention traffic, and other various planners and assistants, such as Denver’s Permit and Protest Liaison. Kevin Scott sports D’Artagnan-like hair beneath his lower lip, as he tries to run interference between the protest marchers, police, officials and conventioneers. While the City administration tries to present a kinder and gentler face -- look closely as Big Brother follows from afar the demonstrators step by step -- street by street, on the command center’s Orwellian big screens, as they surveill the mostly law abiding, peaceable protesters.

At times the demonstrators appear to be buffoonish -- at one point a Denver Post newsie derides them as the worst protesters he’s ever seen. At times, while confronting the heat in the heat of the moment, there’s dissent among the dissenters as they argue amongst themselves. After a tense standoff, the crafty Obama appears to co-opt and outwit them so pro-peace Iraq/Afghanistan veterans won’t steal his thunder. But as they avoid the so-called “free speech cages” set-up to ensnare them far from the convention center -- out of sight of Democratic delegates and the media limelight -- just as the city administrators continue the electoral process and Denver Post reporters perpetuate the 1st Amendment, the activists continue America’s grand progressive tradition. It began with the Boston Tea Party and Lexington and Concord, continuing with John Brown, Fredrick Douglass and the abolitionists, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Susan B. Anthony and later the Suffragettes and feminists, the founding of May Day at Chicago after the Haymarket Square riot as workers fought for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, with the CIO and other unions, the Wobblies, Socialists and Communists, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and other Civil Rights and Black power advocates, the Chicago 7 (or was it 8?) and other anti-war dissidents, and on to those brave, impetuous militants in Denver’s streets, heirs and heiresses to America’s revolutionary heritage.

I have one bone to pick with Convention. Sometimes the soundtrack was quite irritating. Marching bands are to music what the Bush regime was to presidencies. Nevertheless, Convention reminded me of Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler’s radical 1969 classic set and partially shot in the thick of 1968’s Chicago convention, mingling fiction with newsreel footage as teargas and the police riot unfolded. In retrospect, all Daley and the Dems had to do was to give the students permits to sleep in the park, and all of that infamous billysticking bloodshed and brutality could have easily been avoided. It was a repeat of this traumatizing scene that Hickenlooper’s interlopers and the Democratic spinners wished to repeat.

In Convention we get to follow and see City administrators, student agitators, newspaper reporters and national politicians interact and vie with one another. That’s something called “democracy,” and this film critic from the great state of mind casts his ballot in favor of A.J. Schnack’s Convention.