On March 17 at 7:00 p.m., there will be a screening and panel discussion in Broccoli Theater of “Red Storm Rising: The Struggle for the American Communist Party,” the newest documentary film directed by Glenn Gebhard. Gebhard is chair and professor of production at LMU School of Film and Television, as well as an Emmy award-winning film and video maker. Gebhard has long been committed to narrative and documentary forms in his work. He won a regional Emmy award in the category of Best Documentary for “Cuba: The Forgotten Revolution.”
“Red Storm Rising” looks at the rise and fall of the American Communist Party, examining its political context, its leadership, its appeal to the American public, and why it never became mainstream.
“The statement ‘American Communist’ seemed an oxymoron to me; so I became interested in the subject and its historical context,” said Gebhard. “I was compelled to make a film on this particular political movement as it represented not only American radical politics, but also any organization, political or not, with competing personalities driving its direction.”
Of the myriad approaches one can take when making documentary films, Gebhard described this film as more objective, adding, “It was not my intent to say anything about whether the American Communist Party was good or bad. I was just interested in this subject from a point of view of curiosity. What was the institution? How did it work? How did change come to it?”
Collaboration is also key to Gebhard’s approach; he worked extensively with Assistant Professor of Recording Arts Roy Finch, who worked on sound design and editing, and LMU President Timothy Law Snyder, Ph.D., who composed and recorded original music for the film.
Gebhard says that Finch was instrumental in pushing for a much better score and that he loved the music Snyder composed for “Anima Mundi,” an immersive multimedia experience created by Academy for Catholic Thought and Imagination director José García-Moreno.
With so many collaborators and stakeholders within the LMU community, this screening of “Red Storm Rising” has a particular resonance for Gebhard.
“I was interested in bringing a ‘lost history’ back to the present,” said Gebhard. “When we think about the Communist Party, we envision the USSR, Cuba, etc. We rarely envision a Communist Party that had relevancy in a certain period of American history, and that came out of a worker’s movement that went back to the Civil War period. I think the significance of showing ‘Red Storm Rising’ at LMU is to highlight the ideas and research that a top American university does to enrich student knowledge — not just of ideas that are in vogue, but to contextualize those ideas in the history and social movements, known or lost, that are part of our American heritage.”
