Underground

With a somewhat greater reputation as a 'cause' than as a film (FBI subpoenas on de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson to surrender all footage brought an outcry from left-liberal Hollywood, before being withdrawn), this clandestinely-shot interview with five leading members of the Weather Underground marks both de Antonio's weakness and his strength as a radical film-maker. Soft-pedalling the analysis of the Weather-people's position on revolutionary armed struggle in the States (the questioning suggests reverence for 'the outlaw' rather than rigorous enquiry), and accordingly obtaining a number of rather woolly theoretical self-justifications, he none the less firmly situates the group in a recent US political history constructed largely from his own previous films and those of his followers, constantly relating his almost anonymous (obliquely shot) fugitive subjects to the events and conditions that radicalised them and sent them underground.