Alan Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (2020), a film known as "a chance to sprint to the Oscars," is based on real historical events in the United States, the 1986 anti-Vietnam War protests. President Lincoln, who was beloved by the people, was assassinated, Lyndon took over to implement the "great plan", the United States continued to intervene in the Vietnam War, and anti-war sentiment intensified.
Eight civilian fighters, represented by Abby Hoffman, Tom Hayden and others, were tried by the new Republican government for leading the public to hold public protests, and the film was released at the time of the US election, which can be described as profound.
The Vietnam War caused the American youth group to lose self-confidence in the country at that time, and a counter-mainstream craze of radical young "Yippies" began to take shape.
How do you transform historical events into film materials?
When examining history, we should take the vision of global history, and only by paying attention to a historical event without regional color can we more macroscopically feel its driving force for the entire process of human history.
Set in the 1960s, The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago was the Vietnam War and an intellectually radical movement for change that combined radicalism with a "hippie" culture.
Alan Sorkin is adept at capturing and describing historical events, and the previous films "Steve Jobs" and "Jasmine's Hand" are examples of his personal prominence, and adapting history into a lively visual art is not an easy task.
There are three group organizations in The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago: the Black Panther Party, the Xphirie, and the Student Democracy Organization, collectively known as the "radical leftists." Tom Hayden, a member of the student democracy organization, announced the birth of the "New Left" in the United States, Abby Hoffman advocated the use of heterogeneous counterculture to carry out ideological movements, and Bobby Sear was good at using speeches to convey progressive ideas. The three factions gathered in Chicago during the US election, and through the trial of the three factions, many practical problems of American society were exposed.
Are the three factions and the U.S. government opposed to each other?
I don't think so, they blend with each other, they nurture each other.
The system is the judiciary, the federal government, the police, and the ideology is intellectuals, heterogeneous people, and minorities. The former provides fertile ground for thought for the latter, and the latter lays the soul of construction for the former.
This is exactly as the film Episcopals said: "If the world is absurd, fight it with absurdity." ”
The whole world is watching the whole world
In the Chicago Seven Gentlemen trial, the medium plays an important connecting role.
From the very beginning, Hoffman was asked in an interview and asked: "If the revolution is canceled, how much will you ask?" Hoffman used the propaganda effect of the media to answer a fairly standard answer – the price is my life. On the one hand, it highlights the spiritual core of the organization's pursuit of independence and freedom, and on the other hand, it also lays a social exemplary blueprint for the construction of its own image.
Television, newspapers, telephones, journalists and news media, etc., continue to appear in this film. Even at trial, some of the communication between the judge and the defense attorney took into account the reaction of the audience on television today.
Media symbols sometimes amplify the event itself. For example, there is a scene in the play where one of the seven gentlemen stands up at the end of the court because of his reverence for the system, but the others do not get up because the trial judge on that day showed obvious black discrimination. The details of this move were amplified by the television screen, so that his subsequent social life was markedly "hostile" to the black nanny.
Another plot is the tape incident. Lenny Davis, furious that the police beat the child, uttered the following remarks: "If it is destined to bleed, let the blood flow all over the city!" ”
This sentence was used by the authorities because of the lack of a subject as a source of incitement to riots. Lenny Davis's intention was not to cause violent disputes, but to be willing to "sacrifice" the revolutionaries' own interests, not to provoke the authorities and police to "sacrifice their lives" for it.
The conflicting nature of the trial received full attention from the outset by the media, who were silent recorders of the incident. If the judge's judgment has an element of favoritism and fraud, then the media lens is more about restoring the truth of the facts, but there is also no lack of "artificial destruction" created by shoddy in the later stage.
What does this "riot" want the world to see?
See blatant discrimination? Manipulation of power laws? The agitation of new ideas?
The discourse constructed by the media seems to be more ambiguous, adopted in order to gain attention and to preserve its own institutions.
American optimism is always so inspiring, and historical events need to return to the public eye in a timely manner, constantly getting references for issues that seem to be newly staged, but are actually reincarnated.
Freedom is the prerequisite for the establishment of institutions, and systems are weapons that guarantee freedom.