Movie Review: 'Far Out: Life on After the Commune'
Jan 15, 2025
It's hard to imagine a Vermont-ier documentary than Charles Light's homegrown phenomenon Far Out: Life on & After the Commune. The local filmmaker's feature drew a crowd of more than 550 to its premiere at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro and played there for more than a month. Winner of Best New England Feature at Massachusetts' Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, Far Out chronicles the 50-year history of sister communes Packer Corners in Guilford, Vt., and Montague Farm in Montague, Mass. On Thursday, January 16, the doc lands at Essex Cinemas with a 7 p.m. screening featuring a Q&A with Light, longtime Packer Corners resident and poet Verandah Porche, and soundtrack composer and performer Patty Carpenter. A weeklong run at the Essex will follow, beginning on January 24. The deal Far Out sets the scene with vintage news footage of protests against the Vietnam War, when the counterculture first exploded into mainstream consciousness. Then Light zeroes in on Liberation News Service, an underground journalism outfit whose founders, Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo, relocated in 1968 from the radical hotbed of New York City to the pastoral wilds of Vermont and western Massachusetts. Fleeing the fallout of an ideological schism that escalated to a violent standoff, the activist-journalists started two communes and went back to the land. In interviews, commune members reminisce about how they made connections in their new communities and learned the skills they needed to survive off the grid, milking cows and plowing fields. Bloom's 1969 suicide was a dark moment in the Montague commune's early history. But in the 1970s, its members rallied around high-profile antinuclear protests, defeating a proposed Montague plant and organizing a massive action against one in Seabrook, N.H. Their efforts eventually produced a 1979 No Nukes concert and rally in New York City featuring stars such as Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt. Meanwhile, the Packer Corners farm staged open-air theatrical spectacles, bringing Shakespeare to new- and old-school Vermonters alike. Many of the commune members and their offspring became active in Vermont politics and culture, helping to change the public image and the whole fabric of the state. Will you like it? In the 1970s, I was a kid with an idealistic parent who gravitated toward communal living. The places where we sojourned were too rule-bound to be idyllic, and I never quite took to daily 5 a.m. chapel or being known as…
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