Fly Away 1968

Director: Bill Kerby

Color UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Made by a collective of student filmmakers and stitched together by Bill Kerby in an MFA Thesis film. Students capture a vision of the counterculture from the inside by filming the music and arts scenes, student protests to end U.S. military occupation in the Vietnam War, and the police repression of the late 1960s on handheld film cameras. Countering the dominant representations from news broadcasts, the students frankly capture the intensity of police repression during anti-war protests. The film appropriates footage of nuclear bomb testing, merged with the footage of rock Musicians Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. This visual merging of film content, overlayed with the music and sounds of the late 1960s paint a pressing portrait of the times. "Dedicated to Ralph Williams and Bob Dylan: May The Best Man Win." Funded by the Louis B. Mayer Grant.