BRATTLEBORO-Charlie Light has finally got the film in the can.
Having started to document the development of communes in Guilford and in Montague, Massachusetts in real time in the 1970s, Light is relieved to see Far Out: Life On & After the Commune make it to the big screen.
The gestation period of the film, created by Green Mountain Post (GMP) Films, spans five decades over which "we had shot home movies and tried different iterations," Light explains.
The catalyst for documenting the movement was actor/director Robert Redford's optioning of a 1970 picaresque narrative account, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service by Ray Mungo.
Mungo co-founded Total Loss Farm at Packer Corners in Guilford in the late 1960s with Verandah Porche, Richard Wizansky, Marty Jezer, and others.
"The option lapsed, and even though Mungo has been paid good money over the years by selling the rights, no movie has ever been actually produced," Light tells The Commons.
"Now I'm 75, and this has been on our consciousness since 1972," he notes.
Light describes "different stabs" at documenting the genesis of Packer Corners, efforts that yielded collections of interviews shot in 1993, the 25th anniversary of the farm, and between 2006 and 2010.
"We'd said all along we'll deal with this in middle age, but middle age came and went and it was still sitting there," he says.
Meanwhile, "all our material, records, documents went to UMass archives," Light says. The Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst holds troves of these records documenting life on the communes of the era in the region, including the papers of Raymond Mungo and a number of others involved in the Liberation News Service, whose migration from New York City to Montague, Massachusetts organically evolved into the back-to-the-land movement.
"In 2023," Light writes in a press backgrounder, "I resolved to start again. Gathering and digitizing all of the material that had been shot over a 50-year period in many different formats - 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, super 8mm, Hi8 video, beta SP video, DVCam, and digital - and the recent interviews from 2006 to 2010, I dove into editing this long-delayed opus."
In the process, Light found "my editing system was antiquated, out of date, so I worked with [video producer] Michael Hanish, who lives up the road; he has a new editing system, and he helped me a lot with learning it."
"Basically, I sat down and started editing, and a year later it was done," Light says.
Far Out will resonate, especially with those who grew up in the '60s and '70s: those who remember Kent State, the first Earth Day, their first pair of Levis.
Woven with an ideology that might be construed as naïve in these more jaded times, the film opens in 1968 with a group of radical journalists from Liberation News Service (LNS) leaving New York City for a new life in the country.
The film, a GMP press release explains, "traces 50 years in the lives of a group of New England writers, activists, and artists. It conveys how the 1960s counterculture, embodied in two rural communes, transformed America" and "follows them from the back-to-the-land movement to a new discovery of political commitment."
The documentary doesn't glamorize the time, nor pull on nostalgia's heartstrings. Instead, it tells, through stills, footage, and taped interviews, the history of a time when disenchantment with the establishment, with war makers and policy leaders, with social mores and wealth makers led to cultural revolution and reinvention in a milieu rooted in our agrarian past.
"Our story," the release states, "includes a dramatic act of hometown civil disobedience, the building of a national movement, five nights of sold-out anti-nuclear concerts at Madison Square Garden [in 1979] with the likes of Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and many others, as well as a 250,000-person rally.
"Far Out paints an intimate portrait of how this group [...] dealt with the pressing issues of the day - gay and women's rights, sexual freedom, nuclear power, raising children, the role of the family - to the realities of life, relationships, and money in an anarchic communal setting."
Over the course of the film, we hear from some of these communes' early shapers, among them Ray Mungo.
"Our whole idea of moving to the farm was to get away from the cities, to get away from politics, to get away from the news," he says. "We didn't have a television set, we didn't have a telephone, we didn't have indoor plumbing. We were going to start all over, like refugees from World War III or something."
At these two enclaves, clusters of idealistic twenty-somethings, most having fled urban and suburban lives, worked hard to learn the land - and to learn how to live together communally, which wasn't always easy.
"I think we actually participated in a kind of hopeful idealism, at a time in the world, as well as in our lives, when a lot seemed possible," Susan Mareneck of the Montague collective noted. "And I think most of us still hold that same hope that we had then."
Coming to Vermont
Born in 1949 in New York City, Light came to Brattleboro in 1968 to attend Mark Hopkins College on Solar Hill, which had been founded by Walter Hendricks, who'd started Marlboro and Windham colleges as well.
"A few of us soon rented a house on Jacksonville Stage Road. When we were living there, my future brother-in-law, Michael Carpenter, came by: He had some money from his father to buy land with which he'd hoped to start a commune," Light explains.
Soon, Johnson Pasture was established not far from Packer Corners. It was not quite a commune, Light says. It was "more of a lumpenproletariat."
He recalls meeting residents of Packer Corners "who'd come over on horseback."
Asked how they made ends meet, Light says that "none of us were really trust fund babies."
"We got by with a mix of this and that," he adds.
After a fire at Johnson Pasture in 1970, which killed four people, Light moved with his then-partner to Montague.
"They needed more women, to be frank, so we moved down and spent the next decade or so there," Light says.
They spent "two or three years getting the farm together," he says.
A few residents of a commune nearby in Wendell, Massachusetts - a spinoff of the Montague entity started by Amherst College student Daniel "Dan" Keller - knew about farming, as did Montague's Sam Lovejoy, "so we got fairly OK at it. But in 1973, I went west to spend time in Seattle and realized there that farming's not my forte.
"I came back from Seattle and convinced Dan Keller, who'd lived in Montague at different times" to get into filmmaking, Light says.
"Dan was largely self-taught and we started working together: it was learn by doing - same as with the farm work," he continues. "Dan had studied film at Amherst and had a little bit of equipment, so I talked to him and we decided to make movies."
And then, in 1973, "the nuclear plant came along," Light says.
A proposal to build a nuclear power plant in Montague started to move forward, and farm members activated.
"We got very involved in that and then Sam [Lovejoy] decided to take the tower down," Light said.
Lovejoy toppled a 500-foot weather monitoring tower on the planned nuclear site on Feb. 22, 1974. "Everyone came along," Light explains. "That whole thing took over our lives totally."
Lovejoy took full responsibility for the act and turned himself in at the local police station. He was charged with malicious destruction. In September 1974, Lovejoy went on trial and represented himself and was ultimately acquitted on a legal technicality.
The act drew national attention and helped serve as the spark for the anti-nuclear-power protests of the 1970s and 1980s.
"Subsequently," a press backgrounder explains, "the group became leaders in the burgeoning No Nukes movement - from the battles over the Seabrook nuclear plant [in New Hampshire], to Diablo Canyon in California and scores of reactor sites in between. In 1979, they teamed up with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and other committed rock stars to help produce five nights of sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden and a 250,000-person rally in New York City.
"The Packer Corners farm also returned to politics, aiding in the antinuclear fight," and, urged and directed by resident John Carroll, producing outdoor plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alice in Wonderland, and The Tempest." Lavish productions and collaborations among myriad area artists became Packer Corners' vehicle for community engagement and influence.
Soon, Packer Corners, Light says, "turned their backs on the political world. They'd still go to occasional demonstrations, but basically it was too much. Verandah said [...] they'd do all this stuff and nothing happened."
Moving on
Porche still lives at Packer Corners, as do a few others from the commune's bygone days, some on land carved out from the original parcel.
"And where I live now," Light adds, "is now a half-mile walk from Packer Corners and Johnson Pasture."
Light and Keller's Green Mountain Post produced films - many of them award winners - on nuclear power, the environment, the Vietnam War, art and politics, cannabis, peace issues, and other topics that, according to the backgrounder, "have been featured at Lincoln Center, as part of the New York Film Festival, Madison Square Garden, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. They have also been broadcast nationally and internationally and shown at theaters, town meetings, colleges, community gatherings, high schools, boardrooms, churches, museums, and congressional and legislative hearing rooms."
Far Out, their latest film, presents in chapters like "Love, Sex, and Relationships" and "The Children," and each take a look at Montague and Guilford communes.
In one, women who'd been at Montague reflect in interviews several decades later that they tended to shoulder more than a fair share of the daily toil.
Montague's Judy Rubenstein recalls: "I found as a feminist, because I had been a feminist since the early women's liberation movement in New York, that the relationship between men and women at the farm, I thought, was very imbalanced, because I didn't see the men doing the cooking, doing the cleaning up. They would sit around talking about their schemes and ideas and their films and their books and what they were going to do in politics, while the women did all the work."
Packer Corners, though, according to Porche, "was not a particularly sexist community, considering the times we lived through. We shared the work according to our desires. Gay men and strong women in the mix. There was drudgery, discord, and disappointment, but we made our way through."
When asked if communal living is sustainable over the long haul, Porche says, "I cannot speak for others. We never called Packer Corners a commune until the press did. We made up the name 'Total Loss Farm,' and that is still how I think of it.
"We lived together in college, and that slipped into our days with Liberation News Service, and then we came here," Porche continues. "People spread across the land. We sold them pieces of the place, but we hold most of it in common. We are trustees of the corporation."
Porche, who'd come to Vermont from New Jersey via Boston University, said of what she'd hope a twenty- or thirty-something today could gain from the film.
"I hope they will see friendship as a creative force," she said. "Friendship was and is a binding force in our lives. Being in a couple is marvelous when it is. We wanted romantic, passionate love and children, but we also valued each other.
"We wrote and made art and put on plays together, and we raised each other's children, put on weddings and, when the time came, we buried our dead, together.
"We grew up believing in collective action, collaboration, and engagement with our community, and I still do."
Far Out incorporates stills and film footage by Harry Saxman, Don McLean, Peter Simon, and others - much of that produced by commune members themselves.
The film also uses material from other filmmakers, notably Alan Dater and John Scagliotti's The Stuff of Dreams, Robbie Leppzer's Seabrook 1977, Nora Jacobson and Alan Dater's Freedom and Unity: The Vermont Movie, and Barbara Kopple and Danny Goldberg's No Nukes.
In the credits, too, one spots many area artists, among them Michael Hanish, Patty Carpenter, Charlie Schneeweis, Dan DeWalt, Draa Hobbs, Eugene Uman, and Jay Cook.
Light plans to enter the film in various festivals and competitions and hopes to land it in theater venues and on a streaming network.
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The Latchis Theatre will show Far Out: Life On & After the Commune for one week, from Friday, Sept. 6 through Thursday, Sept. 12. A special showing with panel discussion with the filmmakers and commune residents will be Sept. 7. Tickets and more information can be accessed at tinyurl.com/780-farout.
A complementary art exhibit will feature work by Stacy Morse, Harry Saxman, Mark Fenwick, Peter Gould, Sheila Adams, Evelyn McLean, Susan Mareneck, David Yaghjian, Tom Hoffman, Susan Bonthron, Kim Murton, Joan Peters, Ruby Rice, Nina Keller, and others. It will remain on display Sept. 6 to 27 at the Latchis Gallery. Its Sept. 6 opening will also feature music and poetry by Patty Carpenter and Verandah Porche.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.