Soundtrack To A Revolution

reviewed by Marc Glassman

Soundtrack for a Revolution
Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman, directors; Danny Glover, executive producer of this full-length doc
Featuring: John Legend, Joss Stone, Wyclef Jean, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Congressman John Lewis, Julian Bond
Doc Soup Screenings: Wednesday, Feb. 17 @ The Bloor Cinema
6:30 and 9:15 pm. www.hotdocs.ca
Guttentag will be in attendance

Flmmakers Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman have come up with a startlingly apt metaphor for the 1960s—music. The civil rights and anti-war movements were in the forefront for most of the decade and so was folk singing. Anthems like “We Shall Overcome” and “The Times They are a’Changing” were sung on picket lines all across North America as middle class White kids joined with the terrifyingly oppressed African-American minority to change the social and political landscape of the United States.

Huge victories were won during that time. The American South, a repository of the worst kind of racism and ethnic violence, was challenged by a pacifist movement led by Martin Luther King, following in the footsteps of Gandhi’s brilliant campaign against the British Empire in India. White supremacists like George Wallace and Bull Connor were challenged by a disciplined group of African-Americans and principled white liberals to show how violent they could be—or give up and allow democracy to prevail.

Over a dramatic period beginning in the late ‘50s and continuing through the ‘60s, America’s blacks were given back the right to vote that had, in practice, been denied them in the South for a century. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The world changed.

Through the judicious use of archival footage, contemporary interviews with such veteran civil rights leaders as Julian Bond, John Lewis and Jesse Jackson and songs—both old and new---the entire period is brilliantly evoked by Guttentag and Sturman. Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Peter, Paul & Mary and many others stood up against racism (and latterly the Vietnam War.) Their songs and presence helped to change the tide in America.

Great singers of today including Haiti’s Wyclef Jean, John Legend and Joss Stone bring the tradition of folk music to the present in Soundtrack to a Revolution. So do the words of King and his followers. Inevitably, this is a film about Dr. Martin Luther King. Ultimately, this film’s soundtrack resonates to the pure rhythm and hypnotic power of the great preacher’s rhetoric.

Soundtrack to a Revolution is an Oscar nominee—deservedly so. I urge people to check it out next Wednesday at Doc Soup. You won’t regret the time spent watching this film and you might go away inspired.