MattRancor

Street Scenes is one of only a very small handful of documentaries of the late 60s/early 70s which accurately capture the tensions, the passions, as the student antiwar movement of the era begins to fragment and cleave itself into two distinct camps: those who believed the movement must continue to be grounded in nonviolent protest tactics, and those who were starting to believe that the violence of the dominant culture when suppressing dissent must be met by the movement itself with a similar response. The film is both time capsule and anthropological document. It is an important record of an integral aspect of an era, and also a record of the intellectual arguments on both sides of the emerging movement divide then occurring. It is also, just solely at the level of its achievements as a film, an important transition point in documentary style between the documentaries of the early to mid-60s, and the later, more narrative-driven documentaries that emerged in the 70s.