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Image provided by: University at Buffalo
g administrators had been notified n for a high level meeting guarded £ by police. The Spectrum publishes pj an extra edition the next day entitled, “INVASION!” <£ Confusion and anger spread across - campus. The next day, students £ are unable to get an answer to | their question of who called the I police on campus. Police-student « confrontations continue through 0 Thursday at several points on ? campus, although they were 1 confined to some ice-throwing S and continuous chanting of “Off £ the Pigs.’’ The fence surrounding the Themis site as torn down and a truck parked nearby was momentarily set on fire. The student crowd grew to about 1500 during the day and eventually claimed a “victory” in driving police from campus. A solidarity strike is called beginning Thursday the 26th. Vice President for Operations and System Edward Doty later admits to calling police on campus. Regan suspends 20 disruptive students from classes. February 27 — The Spectrum publishes what later will become a famous editorial entitled; “Pigs off Campus” observing that “when you can’t see the police, but you look out the window for as far as you can see in both directions, caravans of patrol cars, TPU cars and K-9 corps cars are cruising through campus - you’re radicalized.” The University grinds to a halt as sporadic disruptions and violence prevent most classes from meeting. The University obtains a court injunction against further disruption. A rumor -control center is set up to keep rumors from inciting further violence. February 28-March 6 — For a solid week, police occupy the campus around the clock to prevent vandalism and harassment. They establish a makeshift headquarters in Clark Hall. Students continue their strike, attempting to stymie those who attempt to enter classes. Administration buildings are frequently blockaded and a few windows are broken. In all portions of the University, the faculty begins to react to the siege of police, with several groups voting “no confidence” in Regan and others pledging to battle Regan’s suspension of the 20 dissident leaders without due process. Robert Ketter, a civil engineering professor at the time, is named to head the Temporary Hearing Commission on Campus Disruption, which will hear the case of the 20 suspended students. March 8 - A Regan-appointed Art and anarchy rT™ “reprogramming” of artists ultimately was not successful. Guns can be captured, but they will kill their makers as well as their makers’ enemies. Artists are not guns however; you cannot aim them. shooting a Vfet Cong prisoner at point-blank range did more to get through to people that this was nur ugly little war. than almost anything else. new America. These movies tried to make the search for a new America by America’s children more immediate by exemplifying the whole by one or two examples. I think it would be fair to say that there were thousands of Easy Riders across this country, but it was easier for us to understand one. Alice’s Resturantwas counter-culture humor, derived from the same vein of humor of artists like Dick Gregory and, earlier, Lenny Bruce. It was a painful catharsis the youth, and the country were undergoing. Midnight Cowboy spended in 1969 along with / Am Curious (Yellow)', the sexual revolution had made it to the screen. That year ended with Z, which although occurring in another country, showed government doing anything to maintain its status-qub including riding roughshod over the alleged rights of its citizens’ or its ‘independent’ press. Cinema’s reflection Point of view Hollywood, having graduated from newsreels, couldn’t compete with the immediacy of television. Besides, we had to relax - even though we earned the war and this country’s internal problems within us like a pregnant woman does the child within her. 1967, more than any other year seemed cricial to the sixties. Bonnie & Clyde hit the screen, showing us kids from another era living the Hell Angels’ motto to the hilt: “Live fast,die young and leave a good looking corpse ” Despite their outlaw status, they were liked, and everyone who made the analogy between The most interesting and intriguing role the arts played in the Sixties concerns the absolute glut of visual images that are part and parcel of the epoch. From a civil rights poster, printed by the then infant poster industry, to the image of sheriff Bull Connor’s dogs ripping into the flesh of King’s marchers and transmitted into our living rooms courtesy of network television, or into our hands via gl6ssy magazines like Life and Look or reinterpreted in the darkness of a movie theatre, the visual image refused*to “ and the letter ‘Z’,” a character in the film says towards the end, while reading a lengthy litany of things the government has declared as contraband, “ . . . which in the Greek alphabet stands for ‘freedom’” Andy Hardly and the sense of history Some films of the sixties also seem to belong to the fifties Petet Seller’s black comedy Dr Strangelove or How I learned to love the bomb continued the experimentation with dark humor as a form of cartharsis. West Side Story was 1961, Psycho, 1960; Doctor Zhivago, 1966. And these are only the films that were quite popular. The resurrection of musicials also occurred then, which on the surface has little to do with the flavor of the time. Were movies basically serving two audiences, one which turned to Hollywood for movies that would entertain (as it had always been Hollywood’s raison d’etre ) and one which demanded social accountability from this monolith of American, and to a degree, international, culture? One of the first films I saw when I came to UB in the Fall of 1976 was a locally produced feature by Marty Sadoff documenting the interaction of the community and UB in 1969. Andy Hardly goes to College sent this freshman reeling with the thought that what transpires in the film happened right outside the doors of the theatre. I emild only guess as to what really happened here during the aprocryal term of Spring 1969. Since then, 1 hhave never noticed the film screened again. I don’t know why this is so but I do know that its absence and the absence of Sixties art in general has left a gaping hole in the continuity of life on this campus. While we needn’t take over a building as a homage to the spirit of the campus unrest, we should know at least the history of this place. Students without a sense of history about their country, their parents’ culture, and themselves as students are at a distinct disadvantage. Because, believe me, the administrators and community at large remember. But it is supposedly the nature of the times that students don’t see themselves as related to a past student body if only by the attitude of an administration and community reaction from a knowledge of that old student body. Whatever soporific drug there is doping up students, removing even the normal curiosity people have about those who predeccessed them, it works pretty quickly. Joe Fernbacher, an editor on The Spectrum, said of the film a term after the siege of Spring ’69, . . with original music in the background the events of last year’s campus eruptions unfold before an audience already anethesized by schoolwork and general apathy . . . People only seem to want to see if they are in it. They seem to care little about why the film even exists . . . What I want to know is why isn’t it (seen by everyone whether student, administrator, or housewife) and why do peopje seem not to care about its fate.” Questions still unanswered Nine years later most of us are asking “what film?” and “what fate?” The art of Sixties and for any period exists for two-fold reasons: it simultaneously attempts to delineate an area of the artist’s life which he has decided to comment on and to exist as an artifact for people looking back, looking to re-experience the spirit of the time or Weltanschauung, rather than getting bogged down in the symbols of a time. And that’s why I’ve talked in some length about the art of this time. OK. The radicals of the Sixties are seen nowadays, with * a 'chuckle, as the dilettantes of revolution.' They were engaged in “a revolution with no faith, with no real organization” as Michael Pierce put. That may be so but to raise again the question posed by Jimi Hendrix, “Are you (or rather we) experienced?” We should be, at least more so than our sixties counterparts. But in many ways, we seem to have given up anything other than a pap claim to the legacies of the sixties. Art supposedly imitates life and a lot of the legacy lies there. Fembacher asks the quiescent returnees to this university, a“aftcr all, we (the returning students) starred in the film and certainly we all weren’t actors on a stage, now were we?” be anything less than a'visceral account of the times. When the duo ancTthe day’s youth felt themselves to be pretty the Crimean War became the first war ever to be hip. The Graduate said a mouthful about alienation and documented by photographs, it made the war a lot less the mindless pursuit of middle-class ideals and in under removed from the people of England — it may have even two hours too. In Cold Blood ran through the nation’s helped end the war. v veins and everyone loathed the ugly underside of the When the Vietnam War commenced every evening at South. TwoPoitier films, Guess who coming to Dinner and six o’clock on 21 inch screens in our living rooms, it In the Heat of the flight, continued to look darkly at the became debatable whether it mobilized us into the massive South, but more importantly they also broached the anti-war movement or bludgeoned us into a glazed subject as to what might happens if the civil rights passivity as the minicam’s eye showed us crippled movement really overcame all barriers. (We would have to Vietnamese and American soldiers, and yes, even our own wait for Putney Swope however, to see this unexplored dead. After all, wasn’t Fred and Ethel on the Screen five territory charted for us in cinematic terms). minutes ago? Despite the confusion and the Schizophrenia which television carried to the nth degree, the visual image remained awesomely potent. Eddie Adams’ photo of a Vietnamese girl running naked and screaming from her nap aimed village and the photo of a Saigon general 1968 brought hope to some people, but a confused awe to most as Moonchild looked upon us from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (One person called Zoo, a “Moby Dick” set in space. ) Easy Rider, “a drug version of Keroauc’s book On the Road,\ rambled across America In search, of a Nine years later, all of us, both children and infants of the sixties* are still scratching our heads over that question.
