The Classic Vietnam-Era Documentary “The War at Home” and Its Lessons of Nonviolence
The newly restored documentary film “The War at Home,” from 1979, opens at the Metrograph theatre on Friday. Photograph Courtesy Richard Faverty / Capital Times / Wisconsin Historical Society
TheNewYorker.com
By Peter Canby
October 12, 2018
Four years ago, the filmmaker and television producer Glenn Silber and his wife, Claudia Vianello—also a film producer—moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the previous thirty-five years, Silber and Vianello had been living in, first, Los Angeles, and then in the vicinity of New York. During that time, Silber had produced stories for CBS and ABC news, a number of documentaries for PBS and, earlier, a string of highly regarded independent documentaries, including, with Barry Alexander Brown, “The War at Home,” an Oscar-nominated film, from 1979, about the antiwar movement in Madison, Wisconsin. For Silber, the move to Santa Fe had not been entirely successful. “It’s life in the slow lane,” he told me. “The street which we’re living on doesn’t even have sidewalks or street lights. It’s a dirt road. I’m a newshound. When I hear the bell, I chase a story like a dog chasing a bone. That’s not happening around here.”
But then came the election of Donald Trump and, the following January, the Women’s March. In Santa Fe, the crowd was estimated at more than ten thousand. “The Zeitgeist was powerful,” Silber told me, “and the clouds lifted a little. The women led the charge.” After the march, people in Santa Fe began organizing (“There’s been more organizing than you’d believe,” he told me) and Silber recognized the dynamics from his days in Madison, where he’d been an undergraduate before making his film. He began wondering what he could do to contribute.
Silber went home, rooted around in a box, and found a dusty DVD of “The War at Home.” He went downtown to the Jean Cocteau Cinema, an independent art house that had been purchased not long before by the eccentric science-fiction and fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, whose books form the basis of the “Game of Thrones” TV series. There, Silber introduced himself to Jacques Paisner, who was then the program director. “My goal,” Silber told me, “was to keep the spirit alive.” He wanted simultaneously to preserve the history of an earlier period of resistance and “reach out to the floating base of progressives.” The film opened at the Cocteau theatre in early May and was a huge success. “It was one of the biggest hits I had in the two years I was with the theatre,” Paisner told me. “People see it differently now than they did when it came out,” Silber said. “They cheered like crazy.”
But there were problems with the DVD format. On opening night, within thirty seconds, Silber, who is not a calm person, detected what he refers to as a “jitter” in the film. It’s not clear whether anyone in the audience noticed (and, if someone did, it didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm), but Silber became so agitated that he briefly walked out. It did not help that, when the show was over, Vianello independently asked him what the shaking in the film had been. “It was a computer malfunction,” Paisner explained, “not a permanent problem, but it was during the completely sold-out first show and it was really mortifying to Glenn.” But it’s also true, as Paisner explained, that DVDs in theatres can crash and not play correctly and neither the visuals nor the audio are as clear.
Nowadays, films are distributed in what is referred to as D.C.P., for “digital cinema package,” and, beginning around 2013, most commercial cinemas ceased using any other technology. Silber immediately began thinking of restoring “The War at Home.” But converting a film to D.C.P. is neither easy nor cheap. Fortunately, Silber knew where to turn. Shortly after “The War at Home” was released, he joined with Sandra Schulberg and several other filmmakers to create First Run Features, an organization that worked to get independent films of that era, including “The War at Home,” “Northern Lights” (on which Schulberg was an associate producer), “The Wobblies,” and others, into theatres. Schulberg, who is the granddaughter of B. P. Schulberg, one of the original Hollywood moguls, and the niece of the late novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, now lives in New York and runs an organization called IndieCollect, which restores independent films that are in danger of disappearing. Silber refers to her as “the godmother of American independent film” and, as Jake Perlin, the artistic director of the Metrograph theatre, in lower Manhattan, put it, “If Schulberg says, ‘We’re restoring a film,’ that’s a major thing.”