The death of activism?: popular memories of 1960s protest

Between 1988 and 2002, the films Mississippi Burning (1988), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Malcolm X (1992), Panther (1995), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), and The Weather Underground (2002) recalled 1960s protest movements. This dissertation examines these six films and journalistic coverage of them to explore the relationship between popular culture and historical understanding. More specifically, this dissertation develops answers to the following questions: How do particular texts in popular culture ascribe meaning to the past? How do particular texts establish themselves as important sources of historical knowledge? How do counter-memories of activism become part of broader cultural discourses? I apply methods of rhetorical criticism to films and journalism reviews to explain how popular culture has attributed meaning to 1960s activism. Patterns across films about 1960s protests symbolically declared the death of activism, but they did not establish the popular meaning of activism entirely. The films’ narrative genres, stylistic devices, and journalism reviews appeared in different and often contradictory ways to construct a range of messages about the role of activism. Each of these films’ rhetorical stances regarding historical reality contributed to their roles as a source of popular memory. Mainstream journalism reviews also contributed to the meaning of 1960s activism by conferring, or denying, legitimacy to particular films as sources for remembering the past. While these films’ status as truth contributed to their roles as sources of historical information, this status did not guarantee the films’ positions as part of popular memory. Documentary films that did not adopt conventions of entertainment film had limited popular appeal. Alternatively, films that were hybrids of documentary and entertainment films functioned as sources of popular memory by adopting both generic narratives that appealed to mainstream audiences and stylistic devices that establish films as sources of historical information. I conclude that films that produce contradictions between the generic conventions of film and the cinematic depictions of the past open spaces for secondary sources to deliberate about the past. Thus, the counter-hegemonic potential of films might not actually rest in the films themselves, but in the controversies that they provoke elsewhere in popular culture.