Bill Nichols is professor of cinema studies at San Francisco State University and an expert on Newsreel

In early 1968, two members of New York's recently formed radical media collective, Newsreel, came to San Francisco and established a local affiliate. The intention was to create provocative films covering liberation movements that could be used to raise political awareness primarily among the working classes. San Francisco Newsreel, as it was known, generated a string of potent films, opinionated, forceful, and unvarnished. Following their radical ethos, they adhered to an expressed edict, “destroy self-interest, promote devotion to the public interest,” and worked in collective anonymity. The first of the films to be made was perhaps their best, Off the Pig (1968), a short, stark glimpse of the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966. Principal spokespeople of the Panthers, particularly Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Huey P. Newton (from Alameda County Jail), declare their intention to liberate the black community through their Ten-Point Program of cultural reforms. Leather-jacketed black youth are shown performing military drills in an Oakland park in stirring preparation for some coming altercation. San Francisco State On Strike (1969) covers a heated boycott of SFSU launched in November 1968 inspired by the administration's refusal to support an ethnic studies program. Student rallies, the cynical school president S.I. Hayakawa, and the fifteen nonnegotiable demands all play out against unnerving sequences of police brutality, heightened by the intimacy of the camera. Finally, People's Park (1969) brings it back to Berkeley and the fight for a utopian space wrenched from the University's grip. Appropriating an unused lot, owned by the University, activists landscaped a little bit of Eden in Southside. Newsreel's critique is radical and unflinching-the Regents are agents of the corporate sector and the seizure of property is too great a threat. Berkeley activist Frank Bardacke prefaces People's Park with an overview of the tense situation, then the arrival of three hundred Alameda County sheriffs, soon followed by 2,700 National Guardsmen, results in a demoralizing melee that leaves one activist dead and others injured. Newsreel itself used the term “propaganda” to describe their films, but this was in contrast to the alleged neutrality of the dominant media. They should have been called Real News.