In 1969, a Chicago court spent six months hearing the case of the men who became known as the Chicago Seven, who had been protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and were arrested and charged with conspiracy to riot. Directed by Kerry Feltham, this 1971 film started out as a play conceived by a Toronto theatre group based on the trial transcripts. The result is surreal, absurd and over-the-top, emphasizing not so much the course of the trial as the despotic actions of an authoritarian state power in its dealings with dissident citizens. The stage is both courtroom and circus; and the trial is both tragic reality and a grotesque scenario with elements of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". The film makes state repression visible and is simultaneously an act of alienation only grows in intensity.
Chicago 70
This bizarre amalgam of "Alice in Wonderland" and the transcripts of the Chicago 7 Trial makes for an interesting commentary on the American judicial system.
