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The People Speak (Extended Edition)
Product Group: DVD
Studio: A&E HOME VIDEO
ISBN: B002W1HBNO
UPC: 733961211948
Binding/Media: DVD
Running Time: 150 minutes
Release Date: 2010-02-09
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
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Editorial Reviews
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Description
The People Speak is a beautiful and moving film inspired by Howard Zinn's books A People's History of the United States--first published in 1980 and one of the bestselling history books in the United States--and Voices of a People's History of the United States, the primary-source companion to A People's History of the United States, edited with Anthony Arnove. The film features the actual words (in letters, songs, poems, speeches, and manifestoes) of rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past--and present--including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Chief Joseph, Muhammad Ali, and unknown veterans, union workers, abolitionists, and many others never featured in high school textbooks. These dramatic moments from our history are brought to life by a group of remarkable musicians and actors. Like Howard Zinn's work as a whole, The People Speak celebrates the extraordinary possibilities for creating social change that ordinary people have realized throughout the course of our nation's rich but often ignored history of dissent and protest. The People Speak is produced by Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore, Anthony Arnove, and Howard Zinn, co-directed by Moore, Arnove and Zinn, and features dramatic and musical performances by Allison Moorer, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chris Robinson, Christina Kirk, Danny Glover, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, David Strathairn, Don Cheadle, Eddie Vedder, Harris Yulin, Jasmine Guy, John Legend, Josh Brolin, Kathleen Chalfant, Kerry Washington, Lupe Fiasco, Marisa Tomei, Mart'n Espada, Matt Damon, Michael Ealy, Mike O'Malley, Morgan Freeman, P!nk, Q'orianka Kilcher, Reg E. Cathey, Rich Robinson, Rosario Dawson, Sandra Oh, Sean Penn, Staceyann Chin, and Viggo Mortensen.
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Amazon.com
The History Channel's The People Speak combines a documentary with a stage show and a concert. The material comes from Howard Zinn's bestselling books, particularly A People's History of the United States. As Zinn narrates, photographs and illustrations alternate with readings and performances that took place in Boston and Malibu, California, between 2008 and 2009 (Zinn passed away in 2010).
Producer Matt Damon, who grew up next door to the history professor, starts by reading from the Declaration of Independence, followed by other notables, among them Morgan Freeman (as Frederick Douglass), David Strathairn (John Brown), Marisa Tomei (Harriet Hanson Robinson), Sean Penn (Kevin Tillman, the brother of Pat Tillman), and coproducer Josh Brolin (Mark Twain). Others include Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Kerry Washington, Benjamin Bratt, Rosario Dawson, and Don Cheadle, most of whom play several parts.
Some of the finest readers, however, aren't actors. Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels, for instance, appears visibly shaken as he reads from "David Walker's Appeal." Except for Bob Dylan's croak on Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Mi" and the edit that splits John Legend's version of the traditional "No More Auction Block" in two, the songs all work well, particularly Eddie Vedder with Dylan's "Masters of War" and Bruce Springsteen with Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," the only selection recorded sans audience (Zinn doesn't mention it, but "Auction Block" inspired Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind"). Supplements include cast interviews and a featurette in which Damon notes that he originally envisioned the production as a television miniseries. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Customer Reviews
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The People Speak, Kinda
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-08-10
Let's be clear from the outset, the late Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, narrator and "guiding light" of the film documentary under review, "The People Speak" and I were leftist political opponents. I, from the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky -influenced, anti-Stalinist branch of modern Marxism, and he, well, I am not altogether sure what branch but, mainly, some form of anarchism. Although we could share common fights, and did, around anti-war, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and other such perspectives, at the end of the day, we parted company on the strategic, and more importantly, the organizational means to create and order that alternative society that we both, desperately, sought and found passionately necessary to replace the madness of the American imperial state.
That said, I nevertheless wrote, around the time of his death earlier this year, an appreciation of his work, especially of his written work, "A People's History Of The United States", which forms the basis for this visual and oral companion to that effort. I am reposting that appreciation below for it contains the main positive points about that important work. I will make additional comments below:
"Howard Zinn's "A People's History Of The United States"
"I have remarked elsewhere on the poverty of information about the `making and doing' of the non-ruling classes, their social concerns, and their hopes and aspirations in America in my own high school history classes in the early 1960s. Such locally important events as the creation of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (led by Robert Gould Shaw) during the American Civil War and the case of the executed anarchist martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, never got onto the radar. This despite the fact that I passed, at one point, the Saint-Gaudens memorial plague to the 54th in front of the State House 54th almost every day and grew up within a stone's throw of where the major events in the Sacco and Vanzetti case took place. All that I know, or almost all that I know, about the micro-history of the American experience (and internationally, as well) came from painfully digging out the information from many scattered sources during my younger political days.
A lot of good things happened as a result of the social struggles in the 1960s, or at least well-intended things that we can proudly stand on, and the dramatically increased interest in getting the "people's" story out was one of them. And that is where one of the best examples, the late Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, and his book under review, "A People's History Of The United States" comes in. In addition to his up-front radical political activist perspective on the political issues of the day Professor Zinn wrote a number of books, and many articles, about various aspects of the American experience that had been ignored or neglected by those earlier historians who concentrated on the movements of ruling elites, their predilections and their follies or on great events, minus the under classes that bore the brunt of, or carried out, those policies. The most important, of course, is "A People's History".
Under one roof, and in one place Professor Zinn's "A People's History" can act as a primer for those who are interested in the underside of history, and, like Zinn, doing something about it. Of course there is more investigation to do, but that is why I used that word primer. Professor Zinn and I were mainly political opponents within the left. However every young reader, every young searcher for the meaning of the American experience, and every just plain thoughtful budding historian owe the professor a debt of gratitude. Hats off to Professor Zinn. "
This documentary takes the same tack, as various artists and musicians from Danny Glover to Bruce Springsteen, re-enact important speeches, memoir passages, songs and poems from the works of the "voiceless" in previous histories: slavery and Jim Crow Blacks, anti-imperialist fighters, old and new, women's suffragettes and modern women's liberation fighters, Native Americans of all conditions and tribes, Japanese internment victims, Hispanics, and generation after generation of workers of every color and nationality. And, at least passing glances at various political movements like the early socialists and IWW- style anarchists.
But this is where the "kinda" in the headline to this entry comes in. In almost two hours the word communist, American Communist Party, Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, New Left communist (an important component as the 1960s drifted on) or anything associated with those words were never uttered. Oh, as in the real American protest experience that communists participated in (and, more often than not led) for a good part of the 20th century they are there, camouflaged. For example, Dalton Trumbo and his excellent anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun". One would never know that he was a leading Communist Party literary supporter and one of the Hollywood Ten victims of the post World War II, Cold War, "night of the long knives' red scare. Or that Genora Dollinger, who was one of the leading figures in the Flint auto sit-down strikes and whose memoir was given heavy play here, was a supporter of the Trotskyist branch of communism. Or that many of those anti-eviction parties in the 1930s highlighted here were organized by reds. Or that the unemployed were organized by reds. Or that those great workers strikes of the 1930s that created the modern American organized labor movement had reds under every bed. And so on.
Professor Zinn and the producers of this effort are under no obligation to identify known communists in what is after all their own amorous propaganda production, worthy as the overall project is as an educational if not organizational tool. But this is where we come back to political differences. No, more than political differences, political honesty. And that is where the name Leon Trotsky and those who have tried to learn sometime from his struggles comes into the picture. There was a blood line drawn between him and the Stalinists who hunted him down and tried to obliterate him from the history of the Russian revolution. He wrote an important book, among other such writings, entitled "The Stalinist School Of Falsification" in an effort to write himself and others back into that history. Now I have had no truck for a long time with Stalinists, and their distortions in the Marxist movement. But those Stalinists, organized as the American Communist Party (and in other organizations) formed a part, and important part, of the "people's history", warts an all, in the 20th century. They should be written back into that history. So you see the ghost of Professor Zinn and I still have our political differences.
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A Must For Everyone
Rating (5)
Date: 2010-07-13
A must see for all those who are interested in the untold story of our history.
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Just read some of his books instead!
Rating  (2)
Date: 2010-07-06
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have no problem with Mr. Zinn I have great respect for his "People's History," but this DVD sucks! It about as watchable as a goth poerty jam at a community college. I found watching famous airheads dramatically reading the words of the dead interspaced with weak musical preformances unbearable. This is the kind of thing that makes people hate the Left.
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Thank you, Howard Zinn
Rating (5)
Date: 2010-06-29
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I'm watching this (and reading Zinn's "A People's History...) with my 10 year old daughter. I'm so grateful to be able to share this with her. Zinn is the history prof I missed in my education, but with the video (and the book) my daughter can get a different perspective on US history that can help to make her a thinking person. The performances on the DVD are inspiring. Thanks, Howard.
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The Most Important Film I Have Ever Seen
Rating (5)
Date: 2010-05-22
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I find it somewhat difficult to express how impactful this film was on me. I've seen a lot of films. I don't know how many exactly, but it's into the thousands. This film probably left the deepest impression upon me that any film has. I read all of the critical reviews. After seeing the film I can so easily discard them. This was an amazing film to say the least. The musical performances, though they weren't of musicians that I particularly care for, I found myself very moved by them. One of the critical reviews here claims that there is a highlight of the bad things in America. The critical reviews are so feverish that it raises the question to my mind; "Did they even see the film?". This is a beautiful history from the bottom, our history. I find it shameful for these reviewers to disgrace our history. And it is OUR history. I will set aside my bitterness of those who seek, for whatever reason, to omit our history from our schools and from our minds, to say only this: WATCH IT! DECIDE FOR YOURSELF! HAVE FAITH IN YOUR ABILITY TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF! DON'T LET ANYONE TELL YOU NOT TO WATCH IT! It's important.
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Retail Price: $19.95
Amazon.com's Price:$9.71
That's 51% Off!
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