The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) 2 x DVD9 and Blu-Ray Criterion Collection
on October 24th, 2016 at 14:47
One of the very best films of the 1980s, The Times of Harvey Milk is an absolutely gripping documentary that works on every level. Informative and balanced, it's also funny and exciting, tragic yet ultimately hopeful. It's one of those tiny handful of movies that's undoubtedly changed many lives.
The self-proclaimed "Mayor Of Castro Street", New York stockbroker turned San Francisco activist Harvey Milk rose to prominence as the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California. By the time Milk was elected to a City Supervisor position in the '70s, San Francisco was already a gay Mecca, but the presence of a successful gay politician was such an anomaly at the time that the reporters who covered Milk practically made "homosexual" his unofficial first name. Milk made the most of his brief time in power, successfully fighting an anti-gay-rights initiative and building a grassroots coalition among gays and other groups marginalized by the political mainstream.
The movie opens on November 27, 1978 when Dianne Feinstein, then president of the city's council, made public the chilling news that Milk, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, had been brutally assassinated in their City Hall offices by disgraced former supervisor Dan White.
Through a perfectly integrated combination of local TV news clips, home movies, archival photos, elegant narration and eight well-chosen interview subjects, the film traces the several years leading up to the tragedy.
As its filmmakers point out, the name of the film is The Times of Harvey Milk, not The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. Though it has biographical aspects, the picture is really about a specific time, a specific place of ultimately positive, historical, tumultuous change -- change that came at a very heavy price.
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