'The War at Home' review: When UW-Madison lit the fires of revolution
Spanning 1963-1973, the Oscar-nominated 1979 documentary "The War at Home" chronicles anti-war activism and institutional response at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Gene Siskel Flim Center)
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO TRIBUNE | NOV 29, 2018 AT 10:00 AM
Back in a 4k digital restoration, “The War at Home” returns this week to the Gene Siskel Film Center. The legitimate question: What can a nearly 40-year-old documentary, covering a decade (1963-73) of anti-war turbulence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, offer anyone contending with the societal casualties of 2018?
A lot. Seeing the documentary again, after all these years, is virtually guaranteed to stir up emotions, memories, feelings in every direction. The movie remains a nuanced, evocative call to action.
Directors Glenn Silber (scheduled to introduce the Friday and Saturday screenings) and Barry Alexander Brown first released “The War at Home” in 1979, when the Vietnam war’s shadow couldn’t be escaped. By then the movie screens were full of the war. “The Deer Hunter” (1978) may have been a gut-wrencher, but it had little to do with what actually went on; that same year “Coming Home,” equal parts moving and soapy, told a different fable of the home front. (There was no home front in “Apocalypse Now,” a 1979 release, only a mad vision of hell.)
Compare whatever you see in your mind’s eye when you those words, apocalypse now, to the opening minutes of “The War at Home.” They come from different planets. The documentary opens with excerpts of a Madison civic propaganda spiel shot in 1963. It’s “Leave It to Beaver” time. The campus is peaceful and blindingly white. “The all-American town!” says the voiceover narrator.