SOUNDTRACK FOR A REVOLUTION
Written & Directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman
Produced by Joslyn Barnes, Jim Czarnecki, Guttentag, Dylan Nelson & Sturman
USA. 82 min. Not Rated
With Anthony Hamilton and the Blind Boys of Alabama, Angie Stone, Joss Stone, the Carlton Reese Memorial Unity Choir, Mary Mary, Wyclef Jean, Richie Havens, the Roots & John Legend
 

An extremely effective and compelling documentary about the civil rights movement, Soundtrack for a Revolution almost does itself a disservice in the way it sells itself. While it purports to be about the music of the era, the songs are merely an entry point, a doorway into discussing the history of segregation, the absurdity of Jim Crow, and the puerility of violence. This is not to say that the music of the era is incidental to the documentary. As Congressman John Lewis notes early on, the music of the movement created a sense of solidarity. These songs—“The Welcome Table,” “I'm On My Way,” “We Shall Not Be Moved”—wind their way through the film, performed in concert by contemporary artists, forming the connective tissue that holds the discussion together, mirroring the original purpose of the songs: to organize, to get everyone on the same page, to remember past troubles, and to give strength through current ones.

Co-writer and co-director Bill Guttentag said he wanted to create a film like this after talking to his grade-school-aged daughter about what she had learned about the time. She explained to him some basic facts about the era but without any real understanding of what segregation meant. Soundtrack rectifies the dispassionate narrative we’ve all come to know from history class, uncovering the struggles that our public discourse has paved over in an attempt to say, “Everything is fine; we live in post-racial times.” It does this and renders the civil rights movement viscerally real for a new generation, a generation that is well-removed from the era, and makes you feel the cruel illogic of those times.

The absurdity ranges from the bizarre—a happy-go-lucky 1950s educational film about segregation—to the brutal archival footage, and it is in the latter that Soundtrack truly makes one feel the sheer and utter lunacy of the Jim Crow South. We can talk all we want about “just wars” or any other euphemism we want that justifies violence, but in all forms, it is the path of the unimaginative, of the easily frustrated. Watching white cop after white cop viciously beat protesters, you see how out of control they were. One of the most mind-boggling displays of the lack of empathy occurs in the wake of the murder of four civil rights workers in Mississippi. A woman and man interviewed, in voices dry and compassionless, discuss how it was terrible what happened, but that the victims were asking for it. With moments like this, Soundtrack twists your insides and renders that time tangible. Andrew Beckerman
January 22, 2010