The Forest for the Trees (2005)

Judi Bari

 

Judi Bari with Darryl Cherney

April 1990 death threat photo

Bari with attorney Dennis Cunningham

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES           A-                                                                            USA  (53 mi)  2005  d: Bernadine Mellis                     The Judi Bari Website 

Or – a portrait of a hard core social activist in America, and how they have been targeted by bigoted zealots from the other side throughout history, requiring specialized legal teams who are among the few who fight the unpopular fight exposing the unlawful conduct of the American criminal justice system that harasses, fabricates evidence, and ultimately frames these activists when their views are seen as a threat.  While this filmmaker, expanding on an earlier short film submitted as her Master's thesis from Temple University in 2004, narrates her own film about her legendary civil rights attorney father, Dennis Cunningham, he in turn paints a poignant, at times chilling portrait of Earth First! environmental activist Judi Bari, paying her his ultimate respect by defending Ms. Bari in the face of FBI charges that she was a terrorist, instead calling her one of the strongest moral leaders he’s ever met.  Cunningham built his career defending the Black Panthers, bringing a civil suit on behalf of Fred Hampton, a Panther leader who was shot to death by Chicago police, The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), ultimately winning a $1.85 million dollar award for Hampton’s family, as well as representing the Weathermen and the Attica prison inmates.  A well-balanced piece showing both the side of the activists as well as the logging industry, Bari was actually mending fences with irate loggers who advocated revenge against her radical demonstration tactics, calling to their attention that the fight wasn’t against workers, but the owners of giant timber conglomerates who had already cut down 97% of the old growth redwoods in northern California, who were now targeting the remaining 3% for extinction.  Nonetheless, she received death threats and her car was rammed by a logging truck.  But on May 24, 1990, a car bomb exploded under the driver’s seat of a car Bari was driving, suffering crippling injuries which damaged her legs and pelvic bones, but she and fellow activist Darryl Cherney survived the blast, which led the Oakland police and the FBI to charge her with the crime, labeling her a terrorist, claiming she was responsible for carrying the bomb.

Incredulously, the FBI charges were brought by Richard Held, who led the secret FBI COINTELPRO (COINTELPRO [Counterintelligence Program] (1956-1976) •) tactics to undermine the Black Panthers, smearing the organization, planting false stories in the press, abusing the legal system to harass as many members as they could, conducting break-ins, assaults, and even assassinations, conduct that might be termed a form of official terrorism against its enemies.  But who guards the nation when the nation’s justice system itself is conducting its own illicit campaign to wipe out its enemies?  COINTELPRO remained secret until a burglary into an FBI office in 1971 exposed top secret files targeting such notable lawful activists as Martin Luther King, boxer Muhammad Ali, and actress Jean Seberg.  Twenty years later, despite documented death threats against her life, the police charged Bari for a crime that was ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence, which led her to bring a civil suit for false arrest, charging the Oakland police and the FBI with conspiracy, claiming it was a ploy to discredit her and the Earth First! organization.  A month before the bombing, Bari learned that the FBI’s lead bomb expert had conducted a “bomb school” for police officers on the property of Louisiana-Pacific Lumber Company.  The police never looked for any other bomber, despite evidence to the contrary.  Based on stalling tactics, the case never came to trial for twelve years, 5 years after Bari herself succumbed to breast cancer, but not before she provided a video taped deposition for Cunningham, which was played in court.  A chillingly intense film, one of the better observed studies of the aftereffects of the repressive social climate from the 60’s, where freedom was literally under siege from law enforcement officials, the body charged with protecting the lives of the citizens.  In 2002, a jury found that the Oakland police department and the FBI blatantly lied about the case and awarded $4.4 million in damages, successfully clearing their names.

Paul Wolf, principal author of the report COINTELPRO The Untold American Story, COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story, said of the Bari case:

Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation’s premier crime-fighting agency, the FBI has always functioned primarily as America’s political police.  This role has included not only the collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups, but also counterintelligence operations to thwart those activities.... There is no better example than the Judi Bari case to show that the FBI kept on well into the 1990’s using covert action tactics against political movements and activists which they perceived as threats to the established order.... In spite of knowing full well from their own expert’s testimony that Bari and Cherney were innocent victims, the FBI and Oakland police continued to lie to the media ... saying they had plenty of evidence they were the bombers.

What is most compelling in this film is the ragtag group of lawyers who would sit around in a circle and discuss arguments and legal tactics, none of which is shrouded in dense analytic legalese, but which is downright folksy which anyone could understand, where Cunningham comes off as a latter day Jimmy Stewart, politely dissuading certain arguments for lack of legal grounds, but never raising his temper, always allowing everyone a voice at the table, including J. Tony Serra from the old Panther defense team, Bob Bloom who scoured the FBI documents on the case, paralegal Alicia Littletree, and Judi Bari’s daughter, who wanted to rectify her mother’s legacy from a terrorist who killed herself with her own bomb to a socially conscious activist who took the moral high ground and was instead targeted for assassination.  Cunningham comes off as a quiet, self-effacing guy who doesn’t believe he’s suited for the job, who’d rather tinker in his back yard with junk metal building odd-shaped art sculptures than spend his time in the pressure cooker of this courtroom, usually grumpy and downright morose with his daughter who films him after the day’s proceedings in the car.  While cameras were not allowed in the courtroom, there is an eloquent use of a tape recorder capturing some of Cunningham’s final argument, which is a wonderment to behold, as it discredits the authorities by summarily praising the goodness and moral character of the person charged, who he then describes as not just part of the moral fabric of being an American, but one of the special few among us who has the courage to stand up for something, an act which by itself is likely to ruffle a few feathers, but doesn’t deserve the smearing of her name, the overt fabrication of evidence, or her murder to shut her up.  Amusingly, the police objected to the jury’s request for copies of the 1st and 4th Amendments to the Constitution, claiming they might be construed the wrong way.  Cunningham’s exasperated reflections about how we have the best legal system in the world, guided by a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, but also a worrisome government that at times refuses to follow them, are priceless. 

The Hurt Locker

THE HURT LOCKER             A-                 

USA  (131 mi)  2008  d:  Kathryn Bigelow

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

—Chris Hedges, war correspondent

As the former wife of James Cameron (THE TERMINATOR, ALIENS, TITANIC), we’ll try not to hold that against her, but it’s hard not to be influenced by the maker of such monumentally huge Hollywood blockbusters, probably all were the most expensive movies ever made in their time.  As the director of POINT BREAK (1991), however, one is reminded that its notoriety in film history is not as the best surfer-heist movie (Is there another one?), but for what has been voted as the all time dumbest scene in the history of cinema, ranked #1 here:  Amazing Planet: 49 dumbest movie moments .  However, it’s clear that whoever wrote this movie (Mark Boal) has an intimate knowledge of the subject at hand, as he’s a freelance writer who spent time in Iraq embedded with a real bomb squad that with each and every assignment was given the most dangerous, life-threatening missions.  It’s a meticulously detailed portrait of a 3-member special Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit in Iraq in 2004 that attempts to de-activate explosives.  One man is the Intelligence Officer, Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), another covers the perimeter with his weapon, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), while the third, Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), attempts to dismantle the explosive device while communicating with the Intelligence officer, almost always under a hostile environment, as anyone nearby, we soon discover, could be responsible for the explosive and may have a remote to detonate it at any moment.  In the tense opening scene, as Thompson can be heard breathing heavy under his miserably suffocating special suit in a country where the temperature routinely soars above 120 degrees, a man with a cell phone is identified out of the corner of his eye at the last minute, too late for Thompson, the leader of the unit who runs for his life but ends up making the ultimate sacrifice.  Enter his replacement, Staff Sgt. William James (the uncommonly good Jeremy Renner), fresh from a tour in Afghanistan, one of the most unlikely of men, as he wins no popularity contests, an older, independent guy who sets aside all the guidelines which are designed to protect him and works in his own aloof way, usually at odds with his team who invariably lose contact with him, yet he’s driven to do the job right, which means staying alive.  

It's a confoundingly different, but no less accurate, portrait of war that focuses on the unthinkable violence as seen through the minds of the men that are expected to carry out the most dangerous missions.  Without any pop songs to amp up the mood, or other heavy handed Hollywood trappings designed to manipulate the audience, one becomes entranced with the narrow focus of the film, which follows this unit on a series of assignments, much of it near wordless or with long quiet pauses, as we soon discover James is extraordinarily good at what he does.  He works with extreme calmness under duress, but the zone of his concentration is so narrow at times that he may put others at risk simply by ignoring them, which he does frequently, but he’s helpful as a soldier in ways one needs to be, offering guidance and support to those less experienced or on the verge of freaking out from all the stress.  At one point, we see Eldridge intensely concentrating at a war video game, where lurking behind various structures is the enemy, where the object is to immediately recognize friend or foe, placing the brain on instant alert, a similar state of mind when in the field.  He visits a doctor regularly to help him sort out these “issues,” as sometimes it’s hard to tell life from death.  This film is as much about psychological interiors, as this unit constantly sweeps unknown areas that have been determined too dangerous for regular foot soldiers, so the camera becomes the visceral eye of the unit, never knowing what lies behind each door or wall or window.  The audience is mesmerized by the immediacy of the action, which is continually perceived here as the unseen danger, filmed entirely in expectation mode, wondering who and where the enemy (or hidden explosive devise) may be and what will happen next.  One of the more intense scenes in the movie is filmed in near stillness, where the unit gets caught under intense sniper fire and after an initial state of panic has to recompose themselves and figure a way out with military precision and skill.  Another is filmed in near blackness, as they attempt a night search mission in a nearby neighborhood after a suicide bomber blast attacks the base, where after a round of shots, two men can be seen carrying Eldridge down some back alleys.  In rescuing him, James shoots at all three, killing both kidnappers but also shooting Eldridge in the leg, which pisses him off to no end, reminding James that sometimes he pushes too far, calling him an adrenaline junkie, as they’re a bomb unit, so why were they doing a door to door search, which is the job of a foot soldier?  

There’s two other interesting scenes of note, one where a commander recognizes James’s bomb expertise, calling him a wild man, and commends him in front of all the men, forcing him to admit that to date, he has successfully de-activated 873 bombs.  This hardly fits the idea of noble and selfless combat, sometimes embraced as “the myth of war,” where we enshrine war in words of glory instead of the mindnumbing reality of death, and instead veers awfully close to a profession that embraces death first hand, as that’s an astronomical number of times for one man to tempt death.  He becomes so comfortable with that feeling, with death as his constant companion, that everyone else in his life becomes meaningless, as they are completely outside his mindset during that moment of truth.  Another, of course, is when his tour of duty is over and he returns home, and despite constant stories of death and bloodshed, it’s only a matter of time before he’s back over there again, as someone of this expertise is like a prisoner who’s more comfortable locked up, in a world that he’s used to, where being on the outside makes him feel uncomfortable, which is how James feels about being home.  It’s like the Myth of Sisyphus, where he constantly has to push that rock up the mountainside, only to do it again and again, always having to tempt death in order to feel alive.  War is hell, and here it becomes synonymous with the intensity that comes with the meticulous precision of his profession, which may be the only thing in his life that he’s that good at, but he’s playing russian roulette.  Interesting that in a movie theater, this same death wish becomes part of the viewer’s fascination, as we can’t take our eyes off this lurid war game, much like the Knight in Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), a man who lives in the shadow of death that follows him around relentlessly, where one is both attracted and repulsed by a force that taunts and toys with him to eventually succumb, eventually deciding that resistance is futile, as they are forever joined in a terrible dance of death, playing musical chairs, until eventually a chair won’t be there waiting for him.