Cinema surveillance images are loading at the bottom of the page

Guerrilla: The taking of Patty Hearst (Neverland: The rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army) - Robert Stone

Threat advisory: Under evaluation

Movie propaganda

With Guerrilla, filmmaker Robert Stone takes full advantage of the unique intimacy of cinema to bring into sharp focus the mood of the early 1970s, a mood that inspired the formation of the first radical domestic terrorist cell to become a media sensation in the United States, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The SLA wreaked havoc on the West Coast and our national psyche for over two years, leaving behind a rich trove of paranoid recordings and scores of violent acts that to this day demonstrate just how far out their thinking was. Yet Stone has a keen understanding that context is everything, and within the first reel of his film we get such a profound sense of the times that the reasons behind the formation of the SLA are no longer a mystery.

In the first moments of Guerrilla, we meet SLA founder Russ Little face-to-face in a contemporary interview, the first he has ever given. Little explains that he was born in 1949 and grew up in the safe suburban bubble of 1950s Pensacola, Florida USA. On TV and at the movies he grazed on a steady diet of Robin Hood, Zorro and The Swamp Fox, all stories about heroes who fought valiantly against an oppressive government.

"When I got to college," Little explains, "I ran into a whole new world. I felt, in no uncertain terms, that people like me were being declared the enemy by the government of the United States."

In Guerrilla we also meet Mike Bortin, who joined the SLA much later. Bortin echoes Little: "The thing that you remember growing up was that we saved the world from Hitler," he says. "And then you turn around and we're being Hitler. And you see this [on TV] every night."

The enormous amount of archival footage used throughout this film - some of which hasn't been seen since it originally aired and much of it never before seen - is likely to be totally new to younger viewers. But the footage will also remind these viewers of something they see all the time: The media feeding frenzy surrounding the big story or scandal of the day.

The film in no way sympathises with the SLA, its actions or its agenda. Rather, it views the SLA as living out an extreme fantasy born of a popular culture that romanticises notions of the rebel.

Stone's film uses the SLA and its most notorious act of terrorism - the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst - as a prism through which the country's attitude towards politics, race, class and the media are seen anew.

Persons of interest

Michael Bortin .... Himself
Timothy Findley .... Himself
Russell Little .... Himself
Robert Stone .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Guerrilla: The taking of Patty Hearst (Neverland: The rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army) official movie site
Guerrilla: The taking of Patty Hearst (Neverland: The rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army) QuickTime movie trailers
Awards and film festivals: