Commune
Studio: First Run Features
WorkNameSort: Commune
Founded in 1968 and situated on 80 acres of land in isolated Northern California wilderness, the Black Bear Ranch was (and is) one of the more positive examples of the hippie lifestyle. The cultish and highly iconoclastic structures implemented by the residents of the Ranch evoke both the misplaced idealism and predatory danger many people associate with communes, but as director Jonathan Berman makes clear in this excellent documentary, Black Bear was one of the few places that actually got it right. There’s plenty of dirty, naked hippie flesh, lots of pointless polyamory and enough pie-in-the-sky notions of “a new and better world” to make the entirety of the Republican National Convention choke on their cigars. But as commune participants like Peter Coyote make abundantly clear, a place like Black Bear was the only logical response for the hundreds of people who just wanted out of Nixon’s America. The commune residents – probably to the surprise of their parents and their rural neighbors – proved to be adept at the hands-on tasks of building, farming and survival that life there involved. Less surprising are the revelations of petty squabbling, philosophical disconnects and lack of a singular focus that occasionally threatened to fracture the community. However, Black Bear is still, almost 40 years after its founding, still an active commune, proving that a place that offers escapes both temporary and permanent for those who are fed up with a violent, consumerist society will always serve a purpose.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.