MOVIE REVIEW : A Passionate View of ‘Berkeley in Sixties’ : Documentary: The film challenges the notion that the activists were mostly adventurers on a shallow quest for kicks.

Violence was such an omnipresent fact on some major university campuses in the 1960s that, for some of us, it’s difficult to recall student life without getting instant chaotic flashes: mass marches, demonstrations with bullhorns, bloody confrontations, students scattering as canisters explode, the acrid teary stink of the gas, distant gunshots or fires raging ominously in the night.

Did all this happen? Did once placid groves of academe explode into street fights and tumult? Mark Kitchell’s superb, heartfelt documentary, “Berkeley in the Sixties” (Nuart), reminds us that indeed they did.

Kitchell’s subject is Berkeley, the campus widely regarded as flash point for all radical student activity in the decade. And, in the course of his densely packed and continuously absorbing two hours, he shows every major event: from the early civil rights and free-speech protests through the inferno of the Vietnam War clashes, to the increasingly mock-apocalyptic, theatrical and half-crazy escapades of the years after the Kennedy and King assassinations.

The movie is both coherent and inclusive. It distills the ‘60s expertly, both evoking and commenting on the era. It brings back the major players: free-speech dynamo Mario Savio, stuttering with anger; glum California president Clark Kerr; poet Allen Ginsberg; and Black Panther Huey Newton. It fills the sound track with the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish. We are continuously swung back and forth between the violent immediacy of events and reflections on riots past.

Kitchell’s form is conventional: 15 main interviews cut into a wealth of archival material. His tone is celebratory and reflective, just like his main interviewees, who project pride at their youthful fire and idealism, twinges of regret at opportunities lost, naivete exposed.

There is one important perception in “Berkeley.” It attacks the idea--popularly held among their opponents--that ‘60s activists were mostly irresponsible adventurers, pursuing allegedly idealistic goals out of a shallow quest for kicks. (“Civil rights panty raids” one nabob sneeringly describes their efforts.)

No doubt Vietnam’s violence fueled violence on some campuses. It’s possible some young male protesters were driven to demonstrate physical courage to deflect the argument that they opposed a war to save their hides. But, over and over, one is struck by how seriously these activists took their actions, how they weighed--even years after the fact--their consequences.

Contrastingly, one is struck by how unserious their establishment foes often seem: Lyndon Johnson, who seems to be trying to stare down the camera as he unleashes each new prevarication; Kerr, who seems somehow dead behind the eyes; and Ronald Reagan, who emerges here as a somewhat comical figure, reading with purse-lipped outrage a report from Ed Meese on the “sensual gyrations” taking place at a student dance, or erupting into schoolmarmish petulance at a news conference, scolding his questioners for coddling ruffians. The hipper Reagan media image came a decade later, when he ran for President.

Is “Berkeley in the Sixties” (Times-rated: family, despite mature themes and discussion) objective? Of course not. No one could make a film like this, independently, without immense passion for the subject, and the political passions of Kitchell and his co-workers (editor Veronica Selver, cinematographer Stephen Lighthill) show through clearly.