Hi. I believe many who get this will want to watch PBS tonight. In So. Cal., it's kcet @9pm. Ed
----- Original Message ----- From: David Mcreynolds To: Arieh Lebowitz ; Debs ; a - SocialistsUnmoderated Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 11:51 AM Subject: Re: Emma Goldman documentary, Monday March 28, American Experience [PBS] Thanks - should have gotten this out sooner. Damn! People who read their mail on Tuesday will miss it. David ----- Original Message ----- From: Arieh Lebowitz To: A Lebowitz Sent: 3/26/2005 1:10:40 PM Subject: Re: Emma Goldman documentary, Monday March 28, American Experience [PBS] FYI. Just received the news that "Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman" is being broadcast Monday March 28 on American Experience (PBS). FYI, a rather sizable review / announcement appeared in today's press - Note link at end. >> Arieh SOURCE: http://www.lincolnjournalstar.com/articles/2004/04/11/sunday_am/10048008.txt An 'exceedingly dangerous woman': Emma Goldman's story byline: KENT WOLGAMOTT Emma Goldman is far from a household name today. But 90 years ago, chances are good that if you paid attention to newspapers and public events, you knew of Goldman - and if she came to your town, you'd likely have gone to hear her speak. "Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and of personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers are such to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman." - U.S. Attorney Francis Caffey, 1917 An oft-jailed anarchist firebrand, Russian immigrant Goldman was one of the great American orators of the first two decades of the 20th century, crisscrossing the country to deliver speeches on topics from the labor movement and anarchism to birth control and women's emancipation, drawing more than 40,000 people to 120 lectures in a six-month period. "Her name was enough in those days to produce a shudder. She was considered a monster, an exponent of free love and bombs." - Margaret Anderson, publisher of The Little Review, 1913 Police officers were usually in the crowd when she spoke, ready to haul Goldman off to jail for something she might say. A New York speech during the 1893 financial panic landed her in prison. In 1919,Goldman's refusal to stop speaking out against World War I resulted in her deportation. "There's nothing wrong with Emma Goldman, except that she's eight thousand years ahead of her time" - William Marion Reedy, publisher of the St. Louis Mirror, 1908 A feminist long before the feminist movement, a free speech crusader and a political radical who plotted to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick, Goldman was reclaimed by the leftist movements of the '60s and '70s and made a brief return to popular culture in Warren Beatty's 1981 film "Reds," in which Maureen Stapleton won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing her. In the last two decades, however, Goldman has largely become a forgotten figure in American culture. Monday, her story will again be told in "Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman," a documentary on the PBS series "American Experience" written, produced and directed by Mel Bucklin of Nebraska Educational Telecommunications. "She opened your mind and made you think about things you never thought about before. That was her outstanding characteristic. She made people think!" -Freda Diamond Bucklin became interested in Goldman while working on another "American Experience" documentary about pioneer female journalist Nellie Bly, who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.But she says that "Reds" is one of the things that motivated her to make her documentary. She wasn't the only filmmaker who wanted to do a movie about Goldman. During one of her early research trips to New York City, where Goldman lived and did much of her work, Bucklin learned that Hollywood heavyweight Harold Ramis, who starred in the "Ghostbuster" movies and has written and directed hits like "Caddyshack,""Groundhog Day" and "Analyze This," had been trying to do a Goldman picture, too. "He had pitched Goldman relentlessly to all the movie studios as the subject for a movie,"Bucklin said."He'd been very predictably turned down flat by everyone. His best pitch - he says it was the best pitch of his life - was to Disney, with Bette Midler as Emma Goldman." Ramis wasn't able to get his Goldman movie made. But he was able to help Bucklin with hers, introducing her to his New York location manager who had worked with Martin Scorsese on "The Age of Innocence" and helped Bucklin to find appropriate filming spots on New York's Lower East Side. Bucklin's meeting with Ramis came in 1999, when she was working under a PBSresearch grant.Two years later, Bucklin had put together financing, anchored by a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, to make her documentary. Then came Sept. 11. "It seemed at that time that it might change everything - the horror of that event, the terror that came in its wake," Bucklin said. "The totally cognizant decision made by the government to suppress free speech and civil liberties in general made even some of my NEHadvisors worry that NEH would be forced to take their money back. I brushed that off - we weren't thinking rationally at all. But what that event did was make this a much edgier film." That edge came from the reaction to Sept. 11, when the desire for security threatened to overwhelm civil liberties, bringing a new focus for the Goldman experts she had arranged to interview. "Bad history repeats itself,"Bucklin said. "The Patriot Act, the detention of the Middle Eastern men at Guantanamo Bay, the unvarnished aggressive comments directed at the liberal cross-section of the country influenced my interview subjects. That, I have to say, made this a much better film." "In person, Emma Goldman confronted Americans with an archetypical rebel who challenged their social, intellectual and political convictions."- Richard Drinnon, historian Goldman's story as told by Bucklin and her interviewees has great resonance, working on the surface as the history of a slice of the American radical movement and a biography of a truly unique individual. But it is really a picture about free speech, free expression, the limits of dissent in a free society and what it means to be an American. Bucklin cited those four elements in her early proposals for the documentary, and those issues, along with a striking feminist perspective, pervade the film. Its effectiveness is particularly impressive considering that Bucklin had only a few seconds of usable film of Goldman. The clip shows her walking as she is about to be deported. The other film available of Goldman was taken in 1934 when she was permitted to return to the U.S. for a lecture tour. Goldman talks to the camera in that film, then answers reporters' questions about Hitler, Mussolini and events of the time. "She was muzzled," Bucklin said. "She was given a chance to come back to this country, but she was prohibited from talking about politics.She was ready to bite someone's head off - you can see that on the film. I didn't think it would be fair or accurate to use that." So Bucklin was left to tell her story with historical photos, stock footage from the era, interviews and some dramatic re-creations, which do not show the actors' faces. "I thought it was really a very interesting, compelling film to watch,"said Danny Lee Ladely, director of the Ross Media Arts Center, which debuted "Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman" last month. "It's one of the best NETVproductions I've ever seen." A student activist in the '60s,Ladely was aware of Goldman and some of the things that she had done before he saw the documentary. "But what the film really came across with is the tragedy of her life - how she was exiled and how that devastated her," Ladely said. "She died disappointed and she had some real tragedies in her life. It wasn't just 'let's look at some history.' It made the film more human, and it made her more human." ...... "As long as I live I must be a crusader.What I think, what I feel, I must speak. Not for a hundred, not for five hundred years will the principles of anarchy triumph. But what has that to do with it? - Emma Goldman. "Anarchism is the most misunderstood of any of the 'isms',"Bucklin said. "The idea is absolute, unrestricted, untrammeled freedom, removal of tyranny, equality for all regardless of wealth or class or sex, with the underpinning that government is at the root of violence and that violence begets violence." Goldman very likely wasn't a fully formed anarchist when she arrived in the United States at the age of 16, escaping from a horrible childhood in Russia where she had witnessed the formative stages of the Russian Revolution, including the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II by a group of nihilists. "I think her mind probably drifted between her sympathy with the nihilist movement, who were trying to bring a revolution, and her hopes for the promise of this country,"Bucklin said. "What she found was the thrilling possibility of an egalitarian society, but also crushing disappointment. "That's a key to Goldman. It's always personal and political or political and personal, to borrow a phrase from the '60s. I think that idea informed her life. That's what made her so frightening, terrifying in her own time, to authorities and even to her own comrades. Talking about sex, that kind of thing, didn't go over very well with her anarchist comrades.But that's what makes her a hovering, lasting presence today." In 1886, the movement captured headlines when five anarchists were falsely accused of a bombing in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Four of them were put to death, the fifth killed himself. Goldman said that event made her an anarchist, and her dedication to the martyrs was confirmed when she was buried in the same cemetery with them. In 1889, four years after she arrived in the U.S., Goldman left a loveless marriage and found herself in Sach's Cafe, a bustling New York City eatery full of anarchists and other political radicals.There she encountered Alexander "Sasha"Berkman, the man who was to be what she called the "stillpoint" in her life. Soon she met German anarchist Johann Most, who became her mentor, and her path was set. By 1893, the 24-year-old Goldman was a recognized radical leader and known as a riveting speaker. The financial panic of that year had the country on the verge of economic collapse, with more than 3 million unemployed. It was then that Goldman urged the unemployed: "Go forth into the streets where the rich dwell, before the palaces of your dominators and make them tremble. Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread." "Of course people were freaked out about that. Who wouldn't be?" Bucklin said. "As a cop, how would you control 10,000 people walking into the kitchens of the wealthy?" The New York police controlled the matter by arresting Goldman and jailing her on incitement to riot charges. "I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood." - Emma Goldman During her year in prison, Goldman learned rudimentary nursing skills, which she practiced on her release. On a trip to Europe, she learned midwifery and attended a conference on birth control. When Margaret Sanger's husband William was imprisoned for helping his wife in her struggle for birth control, Goldman threw herself into the birth control movement. "Historians have said that birth control for Goldman was not an issue, which is why she came to it late," Bucklin said. "She'd had health problems that prevented her from having children, and this was a woman who had many lovers. Again, it's the personal and the political." Birth control became one of the many subjects on which Goldman lectured in the first two decades of the 20th century. Other topics included the forthcoming Russian revolution, the unemployed, anarchism and the labor movement. With the assistance of her lover/business manager Ben Reitman, Goldman became a draw on the lecture circuit. "It was the only game in town,"Bucklin said. "There was no TV, no radio.It was cheap. It was the center of civic life. She wasn't the only one.There were scads of people out speaking." But the passionate, irascible Goldman was particularly popular, even if those in attendance risked ostracism or even jail if they expressed too much agreement with what she said. Goldman was particularly adept at parrying with those in the audience who asked questions after her lectures. "I think that's where she was on fire,"Bucklin said. "She was often funny and kind of biting and left the audience in stitches. People loved it. She really was a sideshow." "I detested Emma Goldman. She was so repulsive and extremely domineering, extremely self-centered. - She was completely egotistical. Of course, she had great capacity, but not on a personal level. - Emma Gilbert "Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman"doesn't paint its subject entirely as a flawless figure who was unjustly treated by the establishment she opposed. Rather, one of the dramatizations shows her collaboration with Berkman in an attempt to build a bomb to kill Frick.The bomb failed to detonate, so Berkman attacked Frick with a gun and knife. He served 14 years in prison for the assault. It also delineates her support for those who tried to or succeeded in assassinating government leaders, including Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley after hearing one of Goldman's speeches. "I've always thought she was a person who was far more lovable than likable," Bucklin said. "From her confusing position on using violence to bring about social change, to her devotion to the middle class where she stored her hope to bring about social change, to her kvetching, she was a probably a difficult person to be around." "Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults. - But that must not make us blind to the social faults of America. That cannot make us deaf to the discords in America. That cannot compel us to be inarticulate to the terrible wrong committed in the name of patriotism in the name of the country. -" - Emma Goldman, 1919 Goldman's opposition to the World War I draft resulted in 22 months in federal prison for conspiracy to violate the Draft Act. When she was released in 1919, she and Berkman were immediately deported to the Soviet Union, a revolutionary society in which she had put her full faith. Appalled at the conditions of daily life they saw in their former homeland and treated like adolescents by V.I. Lenin, Berkman and Goldman left the Soviet Union in 1921 and committed themselves to speaking out against the Bolsheviks. "It's a study of how idealism can cloud peoples' view of reality, so they make some very foolish mistakes," Ladely said. "The Soviet Union, when she got there, wasn't the idealized place she thought it would be. It was a far worse place than America. I think that's a good lesson. Anybody who thinks seriously about the woes of this country should know that it's still a great country. And when we try to correct the mistakes, it doesn't make us unpatriotic. We're trying to make it a better place to live." Goldman was unable to return to the U.S., her true country, and spent the last years of her life in a cottage in St. Tropez,France, before that village became a resort. Trapped there, in large part, because she spoke out in America. "Unlike so many figures in history, her accomplishments were so incremental," Bucklin said. "But without her pushing, we wouldn't have the civil liberties we have today.She pushed it right to the limit. We Americans are always looking for heroes.Ithink that's a problem because we miss so many people. She is a very unlikely hero. She's not on anybody's radar screen." After Monday night, at least some part of the national radar screen will be picking up Goldman again. Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@;journalstar.com Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman Airs: 8 p.m. Monday, Nebraska ETV, Channel 12 Repeats: 10 p.m. Tuesday, 8:30 p.m. Wednesday; on NETV 2 (Time Warner Cable Channel 17), midnight, 3 a.m., 10 a.m., 3 p.m. Tuesday, 9 p.m. Friday Nebraska locations in the film: Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer,Grand Island Yia-Yia's Pizza, LincolnParrish Building,Lincoln Gage County Historical Society, Beatrice Fairbury Fremont and Elkhorn ValleyRailroad For more information: Go to the NET Website at www.mynptv.org or to the PBS "American Experience" Website at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Give the gift of life to a sick child. 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