Investigation of a Flame:  A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine by Lynne Sachs

45 min. color and B&W, 2001

plus 5 min. Sundance Channel documentary on Daniel Berrigan and the making of the film

On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm.

“Investigation of a Flame” is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience.

How did the photos, trial publicity and news of the two year prison sentences help to galvanize a disillusioned American public? “Investigation of a Flame” explores this politically and religiously motivated performance of the 1960’s in the context of extremely different times — times in which critics of Middle East peace agreements, abortion and technology resort to violence of the most random and sanguine kind in order to access the public imagination.

DVD:  www.investigationofaflame.com
www.catonsvillenine.com

“BEST DOCUMENTARY in  2001”, Phillip Lopate, Village Voice Critic

“One of the ten best films released in 2002” Phillip Lopate, Film Comment

“A complex rumination on the power of protest…..the trauma of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.” The LA Weekly

“A film to rave about, as well as reckon with.” The Independent Film and Video Monthly

“Sachs’ elegant, elliptical documentary visits with surviving members of what became known as the Catonsville Nine, humble architects of this purposeful yet scathingly metaphoric act of civil disobedience.” The Village Voice

“Investigation of a Flame captures the heartfelt belief behind the Nine’s symbolic action of civil disobedience that sparked other (actions)  like it across the nation. (The film) provides a potent reminder that some Americans are willing to pay a heavy price to promote peace.”  Baltimore City Paper

“This is a documentary about the protest events that made Catonsville, Maryland, an unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore, a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war. Sachs found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic.  She came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages (today).” The New York Times

“This poetic essay offers the perfect antidote to PBS:  there is no omniscient narrator talking down to the viewer, reciting facts and explaining what to think, yet the story is perfectly clear.  Brothers Phil and Dan Berrigan, who led the protest, appear both in the present and in archival footage, a mix that makes their commitment palpable.”  Chicago Reader

“To those who think that everything in a society and its culture must move in lock step at times of crisis, (this film)  might seem to be ‘off-message.’ But it’s in essence  patriotic… saluting U.S. democracy as it pays homage to the U.S. tradition of dissent.” The Baltimore Sun

Screenings: National Broadcast on the Sundance Channel; Maryland Film Festival “Opening Night”; Museum of Modern Art, Documentary Fortnight “Opening Night”; Rhode Island Film Festival; Art Institute of Chicago; Mill Valley Film Festival;  San Francisco Cinematheque;  Pacific Film Archive; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Olympia Film Festival., Providence Women’s Film Festival, Denver Film Festival; Harvard University Film Archive; Cornell University Cinema; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; NY Underground Film Festival; Vassar College; Ithaca College; Massachusetts College of Art; Catholic University; Maine Film Festival; Florida Film Festival; Georgetown University;  Brooklyn Academy of Music, Portland Doc. Festival,  Wisconsin Film Festival,  Georgetown University’s Jesuit Week, American University Center for Social Media

Awards:  Black Maria Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival: New Jersey Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; First Prize Documentary Athens Film Festival

Supported with funding from the Maryland Humanities Council, the Maryland State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation and a Media Arts fellowship from the  Rockefeller Foundation.

First Run/Icarus Films  (Distributor)
32 Court St.,   21st Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201
mail@frif.com   www.frif.com       T:  800.876.1710  or 718.488.8900

Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010

Letter from Bill Nichols
August 31, 2004

Dear Lynne,

It was such a pleasant surprise to see you again after so many years at the benefit for the Anthology Film Archives. Your work has clearly gelled into an oeuvre of some note since we were both, passingly, at San Francisco State University in the late eighties.

I am very glad you were able to send me a copy of Investigation of a Flame, your film about the destruction of draft records in Catonsville, Maryland by Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the seven others. It is quite a compelling work. I think it is extremely revealing in terms of the motivations and consequences of what took place. This was a part of the history of the 1960s that was mediated to us by papers and networks that were in a near hysteria, fueled partly by a fear that the social fabric, and the social contract, was being torn asunder by people who would not accept lies and hypocrisy, and partly by a government that was determined to impose its will on a public vulnerable to a rhetoric of fear—from the specter of Communism that time, the specter of terrorism now. The past does return, doesn’t it, but not always as farce.

I was just getting back from two years in Kenya, where I had gone to teach in a secondary school and to rethink my trajectory toward a medical career, when that and other events occurred. The assassination of Martin Luther King had taken place just before I was due to leave and the May-June events of 1968 in France were at their height. I came back partly with the optimistic thought of resuming my studies, but now in cinema, and partly with the pessimistic dread that my plans would be postponed by the draft. I was eligible but also a bit clueless about what my options were. I had heard news of draft resisters and had friends in Paris who worked with draft deserters; I knew I could go to Paris instead of back to the U.S., but I also knew it would alter the rest of my life more than I could imagine.

Events like the one you reexamine flickered past on the limited news that reached my remote village. Their function on an ethical plane of giving witness to an alternative view of community and relationships was not lost on me, not after having followed King’s efforts in some detail. But this had to be filtered out from the general hysteria, scapegoating and demonizing. I never had access to the interiority of the event, certainly not with the density and complexity that you are now able to offer. You give a delicacy to the representation of what happened that really enlivens memory and enriches history. The sensitivity and strength of the “perpetrators” is quite impressive. They know what they are doing and why and have given it such careful thought. They remain vividly aware of what they wanted to do, how intensely they wished to cause no physical harm to any individuals who may have worked at the draft center, and how visible the symbolic level of their acts had to be. You give these acts, through the archival footage and the very personal, moving testimony of those who participated, an exemplary power: they come to stand for, in your film, those acts we sometimes undertake when we are driven by conscience and a compelling need to give witness to an alternative sense of social responsibility.

I felt at times that Investigation of a Flame bore similarity to The Thin Blue Line with the poetic, evocative quality Errol Morris instills, but without the romantic overtone that his use of Philip Glass’ music imparts. You withhold that kind of musical dramatization; your film remains within a realm of historical witness and physical action that is not now, as it was not then, embroidered with the richness of musical tapestry. The actuality of the event, which in The Thin Blue Line remains, in fact, invisible since no one saw the murder that is at the heart of the film, is rendered visible again. Your rapid pans of flowers and other objects, in an evocative color that evokes the past more than a photo-realist present, have an austere, provocative quality to them. Unlike Glass’ music, whose “work” for Morris’ film is clear, these images of garden flowers challenge us to determine what “work” they do. They do not soften the sharpness of a still vital historical past. They may reduce the pleasures that one ponders upon stepping up to the box office window, but they reward in ways I am still in the process of contemplating.

What I do not need to contemplate but remember is that the efforts of people like the ones you feature did have a profound impact on me. What to do about the draft? I went back to the classes in theology I had had at Duke and to the questions of a just war that St. Augustine had raised so long ago and wound up writing an extremely long explanation of why I felt I had to request status as a conscientious objector to my own draft board on Long Island. Remarkably (because very few boards paid much heed to such requests), my request was granted and, through a series of additional vicissitudes, I was able to resume my studies and continue my opposition to the war in Vietnam without having to enter the Army. People like the Catonsville 9 had a direct influence on the shape of my life and you have now given the shape of their actions and the clarity of their thoughts a brilliant frame. It is a slightly better world now that your film is part of it. Thanks again, so much, for sending it to me.

Bill Nichols is an historian and theoretician of documentary film.