Commune (2004)
I bought this movie from Amazon for two reasons. The first and most honest reason was that I’ve always been curious about communes. I was a San Francisco Bay Area teenager in the sixties and identified with hippies and flower children. But by the time I moved to the Haight Ashbury in the early seventies, most hippies had moved on – many of them, to communes. However my life path did not take me to a rural commune so I missed the social experiment aspects of that movement, and I wanted to learn more.
My second reason for watching this movie was for novel research. Back in 2003 when this film was made, I wrote a novel that included some commune scenes. In the process of revising this novel (which has never yet been done) I’ll need more information about what it was really like to live on a commune… so I thought, “Cool! A movie about a commune! I MUST watch it!” … [The commune in my novel, Far Out - The Journey To Oblivion... is not Black Bear Ranch; it is a fictional commune in Southern Oregon.]
W.O.W. …I got more than I expected. The first shock was seeing scenery of the Klamath River Valley and western Siskiyou County – because that’s where I live. I reside near Happy Camp, California. The commune in this movie, Black Bear Ranch, is about fifty miles downriver from where I live. The second shock was that I saw someone who I met last year… at the time I was working in the local pizza restaurant and this person came in to buy… pizza, I guess. Okay, so it is a small world!!
The commune’s motto is “Free Land For Free People” and it still exists today – on the original eighty acres near Somes Bar, California. Since I watched the movie I realized I’ve known people who were living or visiting there. It is definitely cool that there’s a place for people to go live, if they want to take part in that kind of free community… if they like living in the woods, doing communal farming/logging/cooking… whatever it takes to keep the place operational. The commune website: Black Bear Ranch.
The movie starts with film of the social unrest in the sixties, then weaves in interviews with founding members including actor Peter Coyote, artist Elsa Marley, and herbalist Dr. Michael Tierra. There’s plenty of film from the early commune days mixed in with the much more recent interviews, and we get to follow the stories of several founding members from their original commune days to the present in which they reminisce about their experience, considering both the positive aspects as well as the negative, which included a lot of jealousy due to the free-love aspect of commune life.
I would not want to live in those conditions. I see it as an arena for social experimentation and self-expression, especially for youth seeking peaceful and loving alternatives to the crazy civilization we now live in. I found it strange that the topic of drug use was absent in this movie except for a brief anecdote about a drug raid yielding tomato plants that the deputies mistook for marijuana. Another negative factor was a second group called Shiva Lila, a child-worship cult, that took up residence on Black Bear Ranch. When they were forced to leave, they took commune children with them to southeast Asia where half of the children they had with them died. An interview with one of the survivors showed how strange and difficult a childhood it was. Her’s was a fortunate outcome as she returned to California and reunited with her father.
At the website for the movie, Commune, you can watch the trailer, link to the movie’s MySpace page, and download a study guide that includes related links.
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