Before YouTube, guerilla filmmakers captured history

Filmmaker Jon Nealon yearns to bring documentaries back to the early days when nothing got cut and everything was as real as it gets.

Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a loosely organized group of guerilla filmmakers called Videofreex pointed their cameras at all the major events of the day: Woodstock, the Black Panthers movement, and the Chicago Eight trial of a group of antiwar protesters in 1969.

His newest documentary, Here Come the Videofreex, harkens back to the infant stages of documentary filmmaking.

“The story of the Videofreex is an inspiring story for entrepreneurs,” says Nealon, a WeWork Commons member. “They were a group of young people who came across this brand new technology called portable video. They found a voice through portable video and started to make their own way as independent media makers.”

The raw footage was found in attics and basements of people’s homes and collected by the Chicago-based Video Data Bank, which collects rare videos. They inspired Nealon and his wife Jenny Raskin to tell the tale of a group of filmmakers armed with portable video cameras.

Before YouTube, Guerilla Filmmakers Captured History2

“The Videofreex were videomakers, and they filmed the world around them between 1969 and 1974,” Nealon says. “They had thousands of videotapes scattered throughout. These videotapes aren’t the videotapes that we know of today. They’re older, and on an older format, and harder to restore. The restoration process was a big part of the film.”

What inspired NR Productions to spend 10 years interviewing, filming, and editing this documentary?

“I’ve found their story to be energizing because what they represented in the ’60s and ’70s is what I fell in love with as a young filmmaker: their honest approach,” Nealon says. “As reality TV and TV format takes hold, there’s little freedom between the subject and maker. It makes it increasingly difficult to find truth and honesty in that arena of work.”

As they put together pieces of videos discovered all around the country, they never knew exactly what the completed documentary would look like.

“Luckily for us,” Nealon says, “the story turned out to be richer than we even thought it would be when we started.”

Here Come the Videofreex screens on February 23 at New York’s IFC Center. It returns to the same theater for a week starting March 9.

Interested in workspace? Get in touch.