LGM Film Club, Part 87: The Battle of Michigan Avenue

Tonight’s let look at this amazing footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

This was preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation and they have an interesting description to accompany it.

The Film Group, a Chicago-based production company set up to create industrial films and ads, found a new purpose during the Chicago Democratic Convention in late August 1968. On a lunch break from shooting a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial, founding member Mike Gray and his crew were shocked by police violence on the very streets where they lived and worked. Radicalized, they filmed the chaos and created their feature-length documentary American Revolution 2. From their footage grew the educational series, The Urban Crisis and the New Militants.

Produced by the Film Group’s accountant Bill Cottle, the series consists of seven self-contained modules that “teach by raising questions rather than by attempting to answer them.” The modules tell their story through editing rather than voice-over narration and show “real events, with real people acting spontaneously,” as the Group explained to an educational film distributor. In Social Confrontation, the filmmakers juxtapose events inside the convention hall with those on the streets, connecting the brutality of police with the oppressive tactics of the Democratic leaders.