NIGHT CLUB Hippies and yippies feel the long arm of the law in Social Confrontation.

It was Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and the Democratic National Convention’s most heated protests had begun. Mayor Richard J. Daley, watching the footage on television, quickly realized Chicago’s reputation would be tainted. “Mayor Daley was furious at this—‘How dare these people, these protesters [do this]?’ ” says local film journalist Ruth L. Ratny. “You know, ‘What trees do they plant? How dare they be disrespectful,’ ” she says, recalling the events that provided the subject matter and title of the documentary What Trees Do They Plant? Ratny, a lifelong Chicagoan who has been working in film since she was 17, wrote the script for the hour-long doc commissioned by the City of Chicago that aired on WGN just two weeks after the protests.

Three years ago, the Chicago Film Archives began preserving What Trees Do They Plant?, along with the Film Group’s Urban Crisis and the New Militants series of short documentary films on the youth resistance during the ’68 DNC: The Right to Dissent: A Press Conference; Social Confrontation: The Battle of Michigan Avenue; and Law and Order vs. Dissent.

On Friday 16, the Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs will present these newly preserved films as Out of the Vault: Year of Confrontation to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ’68 convention. The event also brings in Ratny—who ran film magazine Screen from 1979 to 2001 and now heads the film-industry web magazine ReelChicago.com—as well as Bill Cottle of the now-defunct Chicago-based production house Film Group that produced the shorts. They paint a disconcerting portrait of the protests by seesawing between shots of violence on the street and press-conference clips of Mayor Daley, Chicago police and city spokesmen.

BLESS THIS MESS Democratic National Convention protesters organize in Grant Park in The Right to Dissent.

It’s the violent footage of police beating protesters and the protesters’ retaliation that is especially shocking, particularly to a younger generation that didn’t live through the turbulent ’60s. Even though Ratny’s charge was essentially to make the city look good during the unrest, footage of “the police beating up on the kids and the kids protesting—we could not escape from those scenes,” she says. “There weren’t scenes of a policeman politely asking someone to get into the squad car—it was just a blur of billy clubs and pushing and dragging and recalcitrant kids just saying, ‘Don’t do this to me! I’m not doing anything.’ ”

The violence that occurred during the protests certainly left a scar on Chicago’s face. But Ratny says viewers can watch and make their own decisions about the events that transpired. And perhaps with the preserved films’ newly polished visuals and cleaned-up sound, people might also more clearly understand the anger and frustration of ’68.

Out of the Vault: Year of Confrontation screens at 7pm on Friday 16 at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater.