Colleagues, Next week the MIT Museum and Radius will be presenting a special screening of “November Actions”,on the 50th anniversary of this famous protest. Ricky Leacock’s unfinished film about this event (actually, the rough cut, work prints, rushes, and negatives) is part of the MIT Museum’s collection. We worked on its restoration for several years beginning in 2010 (it was a featured object in the MIT150 Exhibition) and while it has been shown to groups of alumni and students over the past 3 years, we felt it appropriate to make a full public screening on the anniversary. As my blog post (below) suggests, I think it may be especially relevant today in light of recent campus events.
Hope you can attend but please feel free to forward this announcement to others. (The link to MIT’s events calendar is: https://calendar.mit.edu/event/november_actions_special_screening_on_the_50th_anniversary_of_mits_historical_protests#.Xbv3ar8pBp8) Thanks, Debbie Douglas Fifty years ago, today (November 1), MIT hired Richard Leacock. Leacock had emerged in the 1960s as one of the world’s leading experimental documentary filmmakers and MIT was just starting to offer courses in this area. It was a controversial move because Leacock didn’t have a degree (he had dropped out of Harvard as an undergraduate) but he had been involved with MIT’s famous Physical Sciences Study Committee Project in the late 1950s and was well known to MIT’s provost Jerome Wiesner. The plan was that Leacock would start teaching in the 1970-71 academic year but Leacock needed money (fame for his filmmaking had not translated into financial success), so Wiesner hired him to start right away through a small experimental project Wiesner was running at MIT called the Education Research Center. In his autobiography, A Feeling of Being There, Leacock wrote: “I packed a bag and took a bus to Boston. However, when I got there in 1969, the place was in turmoil over the war in Vietnam…chaos was everywhere. My son Robert joined me and we started filming.” Chaos indeed! Following a major outburst of anti-war activism in the spring of 1969, most especially the famous March 4 protest, there had been a growing movement on MIT’s campus that was expressing not only general opposition to the war in Southeast Asia but more specifically to MIT’s contributions to the military-industrial-complex. MIT’s Instrumentation Lab might have been the darling of world on July 20, 1969 when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon but now people were very aware that the same guidance systems that had made that mission such a success were at the heart of the new ICBM technologies. A growing number of people at MIT and beyond were becoming increasingly critical of the conduct of classified military research on campus. In the summer, a plan for a protest at the MIT I-Labs in November 1969 was launched. Reading articles in The Tech beginning in September really reveals the rapidly escalating tensions at the Institute. Everyone had been shocked by the violence at Harvard when students occupied University Hall in April 1969. The sight of students being arrested, struck with Billy clubs, maced and being dragged out was NOT something Institute officials wanted to see repeated at MIT. Could MIT respond differently? Did there have to be violence? What should MIT do about the issue of classified research? In filming the events of the protest, Leacock discovered that the real action at MIT was behind-the-scenes as a group of administrators, faculty and students met together to address what is recognized now as one of MIT’s most stark inflection points. “November Actions”, Leacock’s unfinished film is possibly the best film ever made about MIT, a rare and raw look at the MIT community grappling with a crisis—economic, political and moral—without judgment. Leacock’s approach was to jump right in (he’s a documentarian after all, not a historian using film to tell a story like Ken Burns does). It’s a swirl of activities, acronyms, Robert’s Rules of Order, shouted accusations, songs! (At MIT!), introspection, frustration, optimism, frustration, and more. It is not a complete history of Vietnam era activism at MIT. It is just one man’s account of a single moment in time. And yet, if current events leave you wondering about MIT, this film is a powerful object lesson and may be even more relevant today than when it was first made 50 years ago. Debbie Douglas Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room N51-209 • 265 Massachusetts Avenue • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 • ddoug...@mit.edu<mailto:ddoug...@mit.edu> • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://mitmuseum.mit.edu • http://museum.mit.edu/150
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