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by Walter Chaw I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world, and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition–Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist!: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and the primal power of public theatre to the possibilities of the film medium to be a vehicle of change and revolution. A document of 50 years of New York's "The Living Theater," a collection of the ideological children of the impossibly tumultuous summer of '68, the picture is a refutation that everything is lost to apathy in a modern age that seeks to sanitize and market atrocity and crusade into patriotism and some perverse version of manifest destiny. Resist! follows this group of idealist performers, engaged in a ministry of outraged pacifism, capturing them and their performances in the cell of film that, in its own way, is as invasive and jarring as any Living Theater guerrilla performance. With this film, Paul Cronin's Amos Vogel documentary, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground, and Errol Morris's The Fog of War, there seems a pointedly renewed interest in issues of sociopolitical unrest, of the arts in crisis, of youth in revolt, and of the importance of civil disobedience as the most patriotic form of expression. It's not for hatred of the country but rather for mistrust of the government, and at its core, Resist! is about the joy of passionate communication and that kernel of sublimity in art that represents the meaning of living.
