
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 23, 1991                   TAG: 9102230357
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`BERKELEY' IS SKILLFUL PROTRAIT OF '60S

The 1960s have been getting a lot of attention these days with retrospectives like the recent public television series titled "Making Sense of the Sixties."

More is no doubt on the way with Oliver Stone's "The Doors," the dramatization of Jim Morrison's shock-rock band due out in the coming weeks.

But few efforts are as likely to catch the mood of the times as successfully as Mark Kitchell's documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties."

If any single geographic region could be called the counter-culture capital of the '60s, it was San Francisco's Bay area. Here was the home turf of the Hells' Angels, the Black Panther Party, Haight-Ashbury hippies, the Grateful Dead and a host of other groups and individuals that gave the period its look and sound.

Here also was the University of California's campus at Berkeley, the so-called gem of California's education system. All through the 1960s, Berkeley was on the cutting edge of the protest movement - whether it dealt with free speech, the Civil Rights movement or the campaign against the war in Vietnam.

Kitchell meticulously chronicles, with vintage film footage and contemporary interviews, the birth of the protest movement at Berkeley and how it evolved from a burst of First-Amendment fervor into a fragmented and unfocused surge that served a variety of agendas.

The documentary, nominated for an Academy Award this year, begins with campus protests against hearings by the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee. From that point on, Berkeley was the seedbed of radical student politics.

When the college, under the leadership of Clark Kerr, banned leaflet tables from the campus, the Free Speech Movement was born. Clumsy administration reaction only fueled the students' outrage. Sit-ins, marches and confrontations resulted and the leitmotif of campus life on many major universities was established.

Kitchell brings an impassioned appreciation for the era and its long-reaching effects. But he also brings balance. Many of the 15 people interviewed address not only the valuable influences that emerged from the volatility of the '60s but of the conceits, naivete and destructiveness of the movement as well. As philosophy professor John Searle points out, emotions were intense and issues immediate but there was no cohesive vision to bring off what was thought of as a revolution at the time.

That so much footage and so many interviews result in as tight a documentary speaks well for Kitchell's diligence.

The idealism, and violence and outrage and overwhelming sense of community that drove the era are all here. It's a skillful portrait of a fascinating place and time. `Berkeley in the Sixties': A Kitchell FIlm at the Grandin Theatre (345-6177). Unrated; 117 min.

by CNB