Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

The public can sense when they're watching a symbolic tale of the age, especially when there is a young female figure at the centre, representing the soul of a nation, being competed-for by good and evil.

Here the symbolism is as stark as you can get. The heiress to one of the great American dynasties gets kidnapped, brainwashed and reduced to a helpless pawn in the hands of a group claiming to represent 'the will of the people' - supposedly meaning black people, though only one member of the original Symbionese Liberation Army is black. The rest are students from Berkeley, as Patty was, and the whole story is drenched in Californian hippie-talk. You can almost smell the drugs, as these ageing lefties recycle their lazy, dreamy philosophies, and (significantly) try to distance themselves, thirty years on, from the childish antics that surrounded the kidnap.

So, a 'General Field-Marshal' declares all black jailbirds to be political prisoners, though in another breath they have become prisoners-of-war, who need to be exchanged. This is called playing soldiers, though amazingly this rag-tag bunch is able to keep at bay thousands of police and troops for more than a year.

Meanwhile a dubious black preacher in multi-coloured robes has to be appointed as the neutral liaison man, but soon makes clear where his loyalties lie, with a speech that sounds like a send-up of over-emotive ghetto sermonising.

Perhaps most symbolic of all is the demand from the Army council that the Hearst fortune should be spent on 'feeding the poor of California', resulting in a chaotic distribution of groceries to huge, pressing crowds, with at least one person crushed to death. The sheer immaturity of the student-revolutionary mind is writ large in this drama. (One of the retired class-warriors admits he was inspired by the Robin Hood films.) We know, of course, that Patty lived happily ever after, marrying her bodyguard and mothering two children. Yet there is something unreal about her in these few short clips, as though something died inside her during her captivity. And many have noted the irony of her brief jail sentence, reduced to almost nothing, thanks to powerful family connections.

The final irony is that the protest-lobby of 1974/5 did actually have a few grains of justice on their side. After Vietnam (America's first-ever defeat) and Watergate, which made the president look both corrupt and incompetent, young people could not be expected to show the same instinctive regard for authority that their elders had. A more mature form of protest might have gained a willing audience from higher-up. But the Hearst kidnapping demonstrated that students are generally the wrong people to do the bossing, and should go back to their schoolbooks.

to watch this documentary and not have clear answers. The documentary leaves you with a confusion answer, I guess if I'm understanding right that's what was left for people in the 60's and 70's and still today? And I'd say the confusion is what happened to Patty Hearst and what was the mindset of the SLA. Both things we don't see.. It's also hard to understand from the interview's what the Interviewers roles are in the TOTAL picture, this I think this can effectively be blamed on the documentary makers.

One thing this story does recant is human stupidity, which is a age old tale that is endless and never ceases and ironically re-occurs a lot.

'Guerrilla' is a documentary about a bizarre episode in recent American history, the story of a strange left wing terrorist organisation that first kidnapped the daughter of a millionaire, and then made a fellow-terrorist of her. Subsequently, she was captured, recanted, spent time in gaol and then returned to her privileged life. It's a very weird story, and the press didn't quite know how to cover it; as the kidnappers where inaccessible, they focused instead on the millionaire, who found himself at the centre of a media circus with surprisingly little sympathy for him. What's good about this documentary is the extensive use of footage from the time, we see how the story came to be cast by the American media, but we also see a portrait of a climate in which there was a surprising amount of sympathy for the self-styled "Symbianese Liberation Army", perhaps because they more romantic than Marxist, though nonetheless murderous. What the film does not convey (despite access to two SLA members) is the real psychology of those in the movement (the interviewees distance themselves from it's wilder antics), or indeed, that of the Hearst family. Patty has given interviews in the past, but not in this program, and a host of questions about her and her behaviour are raised but not answered. The result is that 'Guerrilla' works as a piece of reconstructed history; but as to whether it is history of significance, or merely a freak show, the jury is still out.

I saw this at the Florida Film Festival and was quite blown away. Taken with the Oscar-nominated doc The Weather Underground, both movies present a jaw-dropping look at just how tumultuous those times were, especially for someone who didn't live through them, like myself. It's amazing to see how far young, well-educated, mostly white kids were willing to go to prove their points about race, money and war. Archival footage, especially that of the harrowing shootout in Los Angeles that was broadcast live on the air, shows you an America that is almost unrecognizable to us. The ending, which juxtaposes images of media-darling Patty with the rest of the SLA either in jail or long-since dead, is truly stunning.

I guess enough time has passed that the strange and fascinating case of Patricia Hearst can be looked at from a safe distance; although the recent post 9/11 interest in terrorism puts the Symbionese Liberation Army and their actions into a whole different context.

This documentary mixes news footage, photographs, tapes recordings and interviews with figures associated with the SLA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst - yet it has to be said that most of these are marginal figures. Given that most SLA members are now dead, this is unavoidable. The real coup would have been scoring interviews with surviving members Bill and Emily Harris or Hearst herself - although her lack of participation is quite understandable given that her version of the case is already well documented.

The film comes ready-made with the gripping narrative of a thriller - and proves the cliché correct that truth is much stranger than fiction. It must have been quite an odd case to watch unravel in the media and could only have happened in the 70's. I can't quite see Paris Hilton robbing banks for the poor, somehow....

The only criticism I would have with the documentary is that plays on the ambiguity of Hearst - the good girl/bad girl, did she or didn't she mythology while conveniently neglecting facts that may have painted her is a more sympathetic light. It's one thing to play tapes of her calling her parents 'pigs' but quite another to fail to mention that all of her communique's were written for her, that she was kept blindfolded for over a month and expected to have sex with SLA members (all within her closet that she was rarely allowed out of). When arrested her IQ had dropped to a near comatose level, she was seriously malnourished and had ceased menstruating. Hardly a cutting revolutionary figure.

Altogether, it is a gripping and often darkly funny insight into one of the strangest cases in pop culture as well as the annuls of crime. It is thorough and impeccably researched. Highly recommended.