Investigation of a Flame

On May 17, 1968, nine antiwar protesters, including the Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into the Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Maryland, seized scores of draft files, and then burned them with homemade napalm outside the building. Lynne Sachs, a prominent documentary filmmaker who, along with her sister Dana Sachs, also produced the film Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994), tells the story of the Catonsville Nine using black-andwhite footage of the event itself and recent interviews, in color, with many of the participants, including a prosecutor and a juror. The protesters' own documentation of their actions is the centerpiece of the film, to which Sachs returns again and again. Students will be stunned to see that even in 1968, some antiwar activists wore coats and ties or dresses and heels and sported short hair. The reflections of six of the civil disobedients interviewed by the filmmaker all add to our understanding of why they did what they did and, especially, why they remain proud of their actions, including individual decisions to go underground rather than serve prison terms of two to three and a half years. In addition, Sachs offers some balance by including the comments of the Selective Service clerk who was roughed up by the putatively nonviolent nine when she tried to stop them from stealing government files

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