Cover photo: Hennepin County Library archives

“The Dinkytown Uprising” trailer/Daniel Geiger via YouTube

Story by Barry Lytton for Murphy News Service

The spring’s air was heavy with tear gas and a sense of revolution: It was 1970 and Paul Tidmarsh was 19 years old.

Tidmarsh, now 64, was standing on the floral carpeting of St. Anthony Main Theater in mid April. He stood there and at times sat on an adjacent bench near the back of a rush-line of 27 people waiting to see the sold-out documentary “The Dinkytown Uprising” at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.

“Tell them we’re veterans of the Dinkytown Uprising and we’re gonna rush it.” Tidmarsh said to a volunteer wearing lived-in jeans and a festival lanyard around her neck.

“It’s not looking good for Dinkytown,” she said. Tidmarsh and the 26 others weren’t going to see the movie. It had been sold-out for a week, but he, and they, still showed up.

Instead of watching the film, Tidmarsh stood on the rush-line with fellow “veterans,” and as the line dissipated, he walked over to where the film’s poster was hung on one of the theater’s grungy brick walls and pointed at it.

“You think you’ll forget it,” he said. “But you never do.” His fingers glossed over the film’s poster only to stop at every storefront in the image. He remembered almost of all of them. “Where the hell was I in 1970?”

And although he wasn’t sure if he lived in southeast Como or on the West Bank that year, he said he was sure that he protested.

“I’m sure the FBI still knows my name,” he chuckled.

The large bearish fingers that pointed at the film’s poster were the same one’s that shoveled “peoples’ park” out of rubble after the area was demolished to make space for a Red Barn hamburger joint. “It became a fairly nice little park,” he said.

“The Dinkytown Uprising” is a film 45 years in the making. Al Milgrom, the 92-year-old director, began shooting 16-millimeter film when the protests began and he was a teaching assistant in the University of Minnesota’s film department. While the years churned on, the footage sat in canisters in his southeast Como home while he became a film icon in the Twin Cities.

He created the University Film Society — now called the Film Society of Minneapolis Saint Paul — in 1962 and he has worked on-and-off as a film programmer since.

The film focuses on seven major players in the protest and compresses years of footage and a slew of follow-up interviews into a 96-minute feature. The film only attempts to capture the lives of seven people, but Milgrom estimates hundreds attended the demonstrations and protested in different capacities during the 40-day occupation of the 1300 block of Fourth Street Southeast.

Glenwood Boatman, 69, was there the night police kicked the protesters off of the block. Boatman returned two days later and planted in “peoples’ park.”

“It was seen, by us, as another attempt of corporate America to shove something down our throat, and the police working hand and glove with them,” he said.

He was 25, a transfer student from Mankato State (now called Minnesota State University, Mankato) and a former Marine in training. And although he was heavily involved in the Red Barn protests, he remembers them as just a part of that rebellious spring.

Boatman said he remembers being tear-gassed on the University of Minnesota Mall, ripping down fences around the the Armory building, throwing marshmallows at police down Fourth Street Southeast, and all classes at the U getting canceled.

There is no note of  damage to the Armory or tear-gas in the Mall area in the University of Minnesota’s archives, but some classes were canceled.

Along with tear-gas and marshmallows, Boatman said he remembers a cultural shift lofting in the air. He was the manager of the old Campus Theater cinema and said he was the only theater administrator in Minneapolis to screen “Easy Rider” in 1969.

“There were lines around the block,” he said. “You could see things were changing.” Boatman became fed-up with America in 1970, he left for Cuba that summer only to return and join the Socialist Workers Party, still a member today.

“I learned my formative radical politics then,” he said.

Tidmarsh was drafted, but he was a conscientious objector. He left Minneapolis to work in an Indiana military factory in 1972.

“A lot of veterans just want to put it all behind them,” he said.

But that is not an option. Vietnam is burnt into silver nitrate, caught on film, and projected on screens again and again. Al Milgrom wasn’t the only person with a camera in 1970, but he was among the few to be at the 40-day Red Barn protest.

“So much of history is lost, whether you can communicate the emotion of the time, no one can know,” Boatman said.

Milgrom said he is interested in the in the interplay between film, history and human memory.

Anaïs Nony, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian and Moving Image Studies at the U, said documentary film is a different — technical — form of memory, and although it can convey emotions such as human memory, it’s different.

“It is always only a fragment of the whole,” Nony said, “[and] it is not only a fragment, but it is also only a point of view.”

While a person can remember a time, such as Boatman and Tidmarsh remember the spring of 1970, a film can only remember fragments. It can remember — and then screen — what the camera saw and heard, but nothing more. Film as a form of memory cannot remember the intricacies of a time or the emotions associated with a cultural shift.

And even though documentary films are perceived to be “real,” they are but a subjective technical form of memory, she said.

While Milgrom interviews seven people in the“Dinkytown Uprising,” everything from the questions he asked in the interviews to the camera angles he chose in early May 1970 are from his eye and outlook.

“You see it in the news; the use of video as a witness,” Nony said. “[But] the ability to witness is held back by a point of view.”

Reporter Barry Lytton is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.