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| HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN |
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| Featuring: Howard Zinn, Matt Damon, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan, Alice Walker, Daniel Ellsberg |
| Directors: Deb Ellis, Denis Mueller |
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Studio: First Run Features |
| DVD release: 21 September 2010 |
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Runtime: 78 min. (1 disc) |
| Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC |
| DVD Features: Aspect ratio 1.33:1, Audio tracks (English - Mono), Human Nature and Aggression, A Speech at the Veterans for Peace convention, filmmaker bios, trailers, Boston Common speech, Howard Zinn's recommended reading list, Daniel Ellsberg's "A Memory of Howard Zinn" |
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 One day - I think it was a Tuesday - about 25 years ago, someone handed me a copy of a book and said, "You'll love this." The book was Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States . At the time, I was in college and had heavy stats and logic (if P then not Q and such nonsense) homework. I made the mistake of dipping into Zinn's book over lunch and couldn't stop reading for three days straight.
I was too young to have taken part in the radical '60s and then in the '70s - well, let's forget the '70s existed. In any case, I'd never heard of Zinn until I read A People's History. But I quickly discovered that he was a member of a loosely affiliated cluster of radical activist philosopher-historians, a group that includes Noam Chomsky and many others. These activists were fighting the good fight against that relentless tide of greed called capitalism: they educated and advocated for civil and women's rights, unions and labor rights, and against wars big and small, hot and cold.
They also - and Zinn was a leader in this regard - led a movement of revisionism in the historiography of the Western world, especially the U.S. Americans have mythologized their history, like any people, I suppose, but the result has been a milquetoast telling of lily-white tales that, it turns out, bear little relation to reality. Today, we take for granted that women, Indians, Africans and Asians and working-class folks helped build this country, but not so long ago, if it didn't come over on the Mayflower, it didn't have a place in the history books used in K-12 classrooms.
With You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, you get a rich scoop of Howard Zinn and his life and times. Fresh out of college, Zinn was hired by Spellman College, a school for African-Americans in the South when it was still under apartheid. Zinn rapidly emerged as a civil rights leader and spent his life as an activist and educator. By dint of sheer persistence, he was finally recognized as the hero and national treasure he truly was, but it took decades before that finally happened.
Originally released in 2004, Ellis and Mueller's wonderful documentary on Zinn is also a people's history of an era of resistance to corporate and government-sponsored violence and greed. It was re-released in a commemorative edition following Zinn's death in 2010. The new edition is chock full of extras (about an hour's worth) and is just as inspiring and relevant as it was when first released. My fear is that the film will remain relevant: the need to fight for our rights, to fight for justice, and to inspire activism through education will be needed far into the future. At least we have tools like this film to get the important conversations started.
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