A post-punk gonzo doco from the 1980s restored for the digital realm. Vancouver in the 1980s.
The Squamish Five. Now in a time of ever increasing environmental suicidal somnambulism & social, political dementia. #documentary #film #anarchism #CDNpolitics #Canada #BC #Vancouver #environmental #deterence
The Reagan era (1981 – 1989) in the USA marked a time of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the
deployment of cruise missiles, whose guidance systems was being made in Canada at Litton Systems, Toronto.
Public opinion polls of the time indicated that a majority of Canadians were against the manufacturing and the presence of these missiles on Canadian soil.
In the early 80s, a Vancouver area group of five young people bombed a Litton Systems cruise missile guidance plant, a hydroelectric installation and three violent pornography Red Hot Video stores. Known as The Squamish Five, the group became central in a debate amongst left and anarchist circles regarding the legitimacy of violent direct action.
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“The film’s inability to settle on a fixed mode or modes forrepresenting the world evidences an inner nihilism beneath its fundamental, and authentic, commitments.
The shifts begin to open, in the viewer’s mind, a kind of vacuum in which nothing is possible, in which nothing can live –the vacuum, perhaps, of the world after the holocaust toward which Hockenhull believes we are headed.
In the words of one of the film’s texts, “At the end of the world . . .figure becomes lost in ground,” and fine art is rendered irrelevant.
Chicago Reader, Fred Camper, “must see”