Roger Turner
As someone who has spent most of my life in Madison, I feel sheepish admitting that it took me until last night to watch, from start to finish, the groundbreaking 1979 documentary The War at Home. I’d seen clips, and the film somehow felt like it was a part of me even though I arrived on the UW-Madison campus after the tumult of the Vietnam War years.
The War at Home is engrossing and essential viewing for anyone curious about the role of ordinary people in making change. The 100-minute documentary tracks the rise of the antiwar movement by keeping the focus tight on events in Madison. Directors Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown aren’t making the case that Madison was the epicenter of resistance. Instead, they show how a relatively sleepy Midwestern city awoke to the horrors of war, became radicalized, and built a framework for change. It revisits in shocking detail some of the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. on Vietnamese peasants, and it unearths disturbing footage of Madison police smashing the heads of demonstrators (including a young Paul Soglin) on campus and on familiar downtown streets. We also learn about the history-making Black Student Strike in 1969 and hear from Karleton Armstrong, who served seven years in prison for planning the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center. The directors have a gift for both showing the growing scale of resistance and drawing out individual stories of transformation.
Silber went on to produce several more award-winning documentaries and spent two decades as a network television producer. He is visiting Madison from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and will be here for a special screening of the restored 40th anniversary special edition of The War at Home on Oct. 13 at the Orpheum Theater to benefit The Progressive magazine. Silber will appear on a post-screening panel with local activists.
The War at Home enjoyed a surge of popularity when first released and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1980. Its world premiere was at the Majestic Theatre on Oct. 12, 1979. Five years earlier Silber was in the audience of a Bonnie Raitt concert when she announced the war’s end to a joyous crowd at the old Capitol Theater. That was the moment when the idea for the film crystallized, says Silber.
“I had the idea for a film about the antiwar movement but using Madison as a microcosm,” says Silber, who arrived on campus as a freshman in 1968. He ran it by one of his mentors, documentarian Emil de Antonio, who was encouraging. “He said, ‘My advice to you is to never leave Madison. Go deep into Madison, study what happened here that led to the bombing and other things. Tell that story.’”
After he graduated from the UW, Silber says he became a fixture at the Wisconsin Historical Society. He kept hounding staff for archival material and fretted about whether the history of protest would be lost. When a local TV station donated a massive archive of footage, filthy from being stored in a chicken coop, the Society gave him and Brown access to the treasure trove of material in exchange for help cataloguing it.
“Having been transformed politically and personally by [the anti-war movement], I thought what’s going to happen to all the millions of people who now self-identify as being part of helping to stop the war? Are they just going to go back to their regular lives? Are we going to wait 20 years for someone to tell this as part of another story? I thought, this is our story. I’m not going to wait for someone else to tell it.”
The 4K restoration of The War at Home was a hit at last year’s New York Film Festival, and is making the rounds to independent venues just in time to inform and inspire a new generation of climate change activists.
“With this last climate strike, I started filming the young leaders,” says Silber. “I think all of us, particularly boomers, as much as we thought we were going to bring peace and love and justice, I’d have to say we failed. We have to do everything we can to support them. And maybe showing the film and having an intergenerational dialogue is part of that. I’d like to think it is. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life doing that.”
