Underground Movies
Krieger, Terry
The Unheavenly Movie RAP On 11 December 1970,I attended one of the public screenings of the New England Student Film Festival, which was being held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That...
...Whether anyone wants his personality in whole or part and whether the help he and his associates offer is worth a ten-cent phone call are questions that apparently never have penetrated that mass of confusions which is Mr...
...The film is about a Boston University student organization called-you'll never guess-"RAP...
...These two hackneyed techniques would work only if the audience were to find the film's cultural and political positions so appealing that it was prepared to forgive the film's aesthetic flatness...
...When RAP ended, there were sighs of relief and even hisses and boos from the students in the M.I.T...
...Levitt and Reverend Smith explaining the meaning and extolling the beauty of it all, are scenes taken during the May 1970 student strike...
...Taken by itself, this is fine, but, as the film shows, the RAP members see themselves not simply as people trying to help other people but as part of a cultural avant-garde and as missionaries to the student freak "communities...
...In its color and in its perspective on America, RAP is a black-and-white film...
...Alternating with the scenes of RAP members talking on phones, RAP members talking with each other, and Mr...
...That night, there were at least two or three hundred students in the audience...
...It may have been that, to some of the students, whatever their opinions of President Nixon, his remarks about campus violence made sense...
...His advice consists mainly of amens to the banalities uttered by his flock of concerned and aware students...
...In any case, RAP's flop at the film festival must have disappointed its director, a Boston University student named so help me- James Paradise...
...The film includes a segment on a RAP meeting, during which the participants talk and talk and talk about what they are doing and how they feel about it...
...In another segment of the film Reverend Smith lauds the young and criticizes the failures of older Americans...
...Levitt's mind...
...Recordings of remarks by President Nixon are voiced over many of the strike scenes...
...RAP operates a telephone service for students who are experiencing psychological, drug-related, or other difficulties...
...Its running time is twenty-five minutes...
...In these remarks, President Nixon condemns violence on campus, assigns the blame for it to those who engage in it, and explains that he once used the term "bums" to characterize not all students but only violent students...
...These students can call up and talk with students in RAP, who try to be sympathetic and to give the troubled students advice, including information about professional organizations that might be able to help them...
...Last year, a typical student audience in Cambridge would have been prepared to forgive...
...When he describes how he feels when he is manning the phones, he characterizes himself as someone who is ready to deal with the unanticipated and who dispenses parts of his personality on demand...
...Some of the films shown were excellent, and all of them were interesting-except for one: RAP...
...In the film, the head of RAP-all right, there probably is more than one head in RAP-Howard Levitt, adopting the sort of stupefying sociological jargon that infects the pages of Psychology Today, explains the organization's goal and activities...
...this year, it was not...
...Instead there was silence, what might even be called a respectful silence...
...The alternation of the RAP scenes and the strike scenes is intended to show that, even in the midst of political and social upheaval, a group of concerned, idealistic young people are able and willing to help other young people, and the Nixon voice-over is designed to contrast the meaningless pieties of a heartless President with the noble struggles of compassionate and committed students...
...auditorium...
...which, allowing for the film's good moments, is about twenty-four and a half minutes too long...
...And during the film, when President Nixon's voice was on, there were not, as there most probably would have been last year, hisses and obscene comments...
...This uninteresting discussion is presided over by a Boston University chaplain, Reverend Jack Smith, who is RAP's advisor...
...Terry Krieger...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
