FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVNG TRAIN
Howard Zinn, an impressive figure of the left, is best known for A People’s History of the
United States. American history told from the point of view of the disenfranchised, it has
sold a million copies worldwide since its publication in
1980. In Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the filmmakers Deb
Ellis and Denis Mueller trace the historian’s life from his birth through his response to current
political events. Zinn was born into a poor family in a New York City slum.
During the 1930s, he worked in the shipyards where he organized laborers in the fight for better
conditions. He recalls - in one of his many interviews - the first beating he took at the
hands of police, which prompted his understanding that police aren’t neutral in concerns of state.
In the 1940s, he met his wife, enlisted in the Air Force, and was sent to Europe as a World War II
bombardier. He was ordered, late in the war, to drop the U.S.’s first batch of napalm on a French
village where the German occupiers had all but surrendered. This led to Zinn’s unwavering
pacifism. After studying history at Columbia, Zinn began his teaching career with the notion
that official history didn’t welcome all voices equally. He taught at Spelman, a college for black
women in Atlanta, and took a leading role in the early civil rights movement. He protested the
Vietnam War and organized the first prisoner exchanges with the North Vietnamese.
Predominantly a series of interviews with friends and former colleagues, the film is an engaging
though uncritical survey of Zinn’s life. Alice Walker, one of his Spelman students, rounds out
the long list of testimonials, as do Noam Chomsky, MIT linguist and leftist luminary,
and Dan Berrigan, the activist poet and priest who worked with Zinn on the prisoner exchange.
In a highlight, Zinn tells a group of high school students, “If you
study history, what you learn is that wars are always accompanied by lies. Wars are always
accompanied by deceptions. Wars are always accompanied by a guy going, ‘We’re going to fight
for democracy. We’re going to war to fight for freedom.’” As the film moves toward closure,
however, its energy begins to lag. We realize that none of Zinn's opponents have rounded out the
list of testimonials. Even harsh or mild criticism would have made the praise more objective,
grounding us in the notion that this gadfly has indeed had an effect other than just as friend and
inspiration. Joel Whitney, screenwriter/poet, teaches at Fordham University
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