A Time to Stir (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Scott MacDonald

Produced, directed, filmed, and edited by Paul Cronin. A Time to Stir is available in two versions, both in ten chapters, including a 2018 version with a total running time of seven-and-a-half hours, and a 2020 version with a total running time of fifteen hours. Distributed by Sticking Place Films, available for free viewing on Vimeo.

Paul Cronin is more likely to identify himself as a historian than as a filmmaker—though he has produced a considerable body of film. I became aware of Cronin through his interest in Amos Vogel, author of the classic survey of rebellious filmmaking, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), whose Cinema 16 film society (1947–1963) helped to transform the American film viewing and filmmaking scene. In 2003 Cronin finished a documentary about Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (2003). In 2005, he saw to the publication of a facsimile edition of Film as a Subversive Art, then edited Be Sand, Not Oil: The Life and Work of Amos Vogel (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2014), a collection of writings by and about Vogel.  

Cronin has also edited books on several major directors, including a collection of writings by director Alexander Mackendrick, On Film–Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), and, for the University Press of Mississippi series, three collections of interviews by various critics and scholars with George Stevens (2004), Roman Polanski (2005), and Arthur Penn (2008). Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Conversations with Paul Cronin (revised version, Faber & Faber, 2014) is an epic, 542-page career interview with Werner Herzog; and Lessons with Kiarostami (New York: Sticking Place Books, 2015) is a distillation of the thoughts of Abbas Kiarostami, collected over ten years during Kiarostami’s film production workshops in several countries.

As filmmaker, Cronin has documented filmmaker/artist/novelist Peter Whitehead in a trilogy of features: In the Beginning Was the Image (2006, 200 minutes); Once out of nature… (2007, 197 minutes), and Fool that I am… (2015, 71 minutes). Fascinated with Haskell Wexler’s braiding of enacted narrative melodrama and documentation of ongoing political events in Medium Cool (1969), Cronin interviewed Wexler and many of those who worked with him on the film. The results were the fifty-five-minute film, “Look Out Haskell, It’s Real!” (2001, included on the Criterion disc of the Wexler film) and an epic six-part, 380-minute version of the same project, completed in 2015. Sooner or Later (2007), a feature-length spin-off of the Medium Cool films, focuses on Harold Blankenship, who appears with his younger brother in Medium Cool as the children of a migrant from West Virginia, living in Chicago—now grown up and back in West Virginia. An underappreciated feature about the realities of poverty, Sooner or Later might be mistaken for a film produced by a veteran of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab.

A Time to Stir is Cronin’s epic. It has evolved over a period of fourteen years, during which early edits were presented publicly. A Time to Stir commemorates a transformative moment in the history of American counterculture protest—the Columbia rebellion of 1968, when Columbia University students took control of the university for a week. For A Time to Stir, Cronin tracked down photographs and film footage of the Columbia rebellion from official and personal archives, and he interviewed some seven hundred veterans of the week of April 23–30, 1968, and created a detailed cinematic record of the week-long occupation. The title comes from Thomas Paine’s 1776 booklet, Common Sense: “When the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.” 

A Time to Stir exists in two final versions. A seven-and-a-half-hour version was completed in 2018 for the fiftieth anniversary of the events; a fifteen-hour version was completed in 2020. Both are divided into ten chapters, each with its own title and subtitle. The chapters are of varying lengths, though the general relationship of the lengths of the sections in the 2018 and 2020 versions is relatively consistent. For example, chapter 3, “April 23, 1968,” is the longest episode in both versions (seventy-four minutes in the earlier version, 160 minutes in the 2020 version) and chapter 7, “Faculty,” is the shortest (seventeen minutes; thirty-six minutes).

The 2018 version of A Time to Stir can be thought of as the cinephile’s cut; the 2020 version, the historian’s cut. Experiencing the 2018 version as a theatrical projection (I presented it in 2019, at Hamilton College on two successive days, with a brief intermission on each day) communicates something of the lived experience of the week. The 2020 version is more thorough in terms of the number and kinds of voices we hear. Either version of the film can be sampled or watched in its entirety at Cronin’s Website.  

In 2019, when Cronin told me about A Time to Stir, he warned me that the film was “mostly talking heads.” I was curious. After all, for some aficionados and scholars of documentary, the talking head has become suspect, as well as something of a cine-cliché. Cronin explained, “I figured that if I was going to make a film in what many consider an outdated form, I might as well make the mother of all talking-head documentaries.” In fact, Cronin’s use of talking heads is both consistently engaging and remarkably revealing.

Chapter 1 (“The Sixties” in the 2018 version of the film; “Protest to Resistance” in the 2020 version—the subtitle of both: “A moment of moral clarity”) provides historical background for the rebellion. It is followed by “Students”/”Organizing,” which focuses on the debate between two factions within Columbia SDS (Students for a Democratic Society): the “Praxis Axis” was committed to long-term education while the “Action Faction” believed that immediate, direct action would be more useful in confronting the moral and political issues that were troubling many students, particularly the war in Vietnam and the institutional racism implicit in Columbia’s decision to build a gym in Morningside Park, among the last green spaces in nearby Harlem.

Throughout A Time to Stir, visual texts identify individuals and their roles during the events (“Graduate student,” “Columbia SDS,” “Columbia faculty”). A particular identification is often superimposed on an archival image of a student and remains on screen through a cut to the same person, fifty years later, commenting on the event evident in the archival image (the reverse order is used as well). These juxtapositions are engaging on at least two levels: it is poignant to see how the individuals have aged, and we can hear/see in the talking-heads’ comments how vivid these events, long past, have remained for those who experienced them.

The specifics of what was happening at particular moments during the timeline of the week are reflected in Cronin’s editing of comments by talking heads in relation to each other. Since each moment during the week was fundamentally a group experience, individual talking-head statements are generally less important than their accumulation. Cronin creates chains of talking-head bits that articulate, in varying velocities and with clarity, detail, and often humor, a coherent group-memory of events that occurred half a century earlier. These bit-chains not only demonstrate a psychic coherence among the speakers, they can also critique themselves. Near the beginning of chapter 3, during a moment of growing student anger about the university’s punishment of several students for taking their protest indoors, a series of very brief talking-head bits, each from a different student, “remember” that “200­–300” students, then “300–400,” then “500,” then “maybe 600,” “anywhere from 600–800” students had gathered to protest, demonstrating simultaneously that the protest movement was growing and that individual memories vary as to the numbers of students involved.

Given the length and complexity of A Time to Stir, the subtlety of Cronin’s editing is easy to overlook. For example, near the end of “Students”/“Organizing,” Mark Rudd, Columbia SDS leader at the time, interrupts a university event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated on April 4th. Various witnesses are remembering the event, including John Cannon, then Columbia University chaplain, who explains, “Mark Rudd stood up and just came down to the microphone. He didn’t grab it [here, Cronin cuts to a photograph of Rudd at the podium] or wrest it from anyone…,” at which point, a cut, midsentence, reveals Eric Foner (then a Columbia graduate student), who continues, “…and quite correctly pointed out the hypocrisy of all the nice rhetoric of President Kirk commemorating Martin Luther King where Columbia was guilty of some fairly racist practices right at home.” Cronin allows us to “see” this moment from the multiple angles of the various speakers, and in two different ways simultaneously (what we imagine from what we hear and what we see in the photograph), while echoing Rudd’s interruption of the event with his own visual interruption (by the Rudd photograph) of Chaplain Cannon’s comment.

The best chapter for sampling A Time to Stir is probably Chapter 3, where the students begin the rebellion by attempting to occupy Low Library and, when that fails, rush to the site of the proposed gym in Morningside Park where they tear down a fence, then return to campus to occupy Hamilton Hall. The accelerating excitement of the day is obvious throughout. The following eight chapters of A Time to Stir recount the events of the week, as we see new and now familiar interviewees describing their experiences, supplemented by visual and sonic archival material. Each new section provides a particular focus.  

Chapter 4, “Inside,” focuses on activities of students now in Low Library and other occupied buildings—including high jinks (goofing around in the president’s office) and teach-ins. On the Broadway side of Mathematics Hall supporters supply food and offer other kinds of encouragement to students sitting and standing on the second-floor ledge. Across the surrounding campus, various speakers (Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Allen Ginsberg) visit to support the occupation.

During Chapter 5, “Participation,” the student occupiers involve themselves in “endless” meetings about what to do next, and reveal how the male protesters tended to take over the discussions and treat their women colleagues in conventionally sexist ways. Chapter 6, “Hamilton,” focuses on Hamilton Hall, now occupied by most of the African American students. This group was not interested in shutting Columbia down, but in making the university more responsive to their academic needs—for example, by expanding the curriculum to include Black Studies. Early in the takeover of Hamilton Hall, when the white students had seemed less seriously committed, they were asked to leave and support the African American students in Hamilton Hall by occupying other buildings. The subtitle of “Faculty,” chapter 7—“Three hundred opinions”—reflects independent negotiator Theodore Kheel’s sense that the faculty “became enamored of their own discourse, the way academics do” and were not able to contribute meaningfully to either continuing or ending the protest.

In “Politics” the focus is the differences between those within the buildings and those outside, including that substantial number of students, some calling themselves the “Majority Coalition,” who were not in support of the protest. “Leadership” reveals the struggles going on inside the buildings, where, as the chapter subtitle indicates, there was increasingly only “the appearance of a democratic process” on the part of the “Action Faction” of SDS and, in a different way, on the part of the leadership of SAS.

The final chapter, “Bust,” documents the buildup to the university administration’s retaking the buildings, the bust itself, and the overwhelmingly negative response to the brutality of the Tactical Patrol Force, which had apparently been sent to Columbia not only to move the students out of the buildings but also to administer as much physical punishment as they could get away with. The brutality of the bust created its own protest and continued disruption at Columbia through the summer.

A Time to Stir is Cronin’s masterwork, simultaneously an invigorating way to learn about the history of a significant moment in modern American culture and a cine-document resonant with visual and auditory invention. And in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol this past January, A Time to Stir has taken on a strange new relevance.  

Cronin-the-historian prefers the fifteen-hour version of the film; for him, “more is more”—the more complete the documentation, the better. The ten sections of this version are available at www.atimetostir.com; by clicking on “illustrated history,” you’ll see seven windows (sections 1/2, 3, 4/5, 6/7, 8, 9, 10). I prefer what I’ve called the cinephile’s version, more practical for theatrical presentation. Contact Cronin directly at paul.cronin@thestickingplace.com and he’ll gladly supply a link.

Scott MacDonald is author of many books on independent and avant-garde cinema, most recently The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3