Berkeley

Berkeley is both a site of immediate political danger and a base for people trying to record it. The city brings Frenesi Gates and DL together during a street confrontation, gives the 24fps filmmaking collective a home, and later becomes the point from which some of its members try to understand the group’s collapse. Its significance lies in the connection between these roles: people arrive in search of action, make images of events, and discover that neither a camera nor a community can guarantee protection.

Setting and Political Atmosphere

The novel presents Berkeley as a place where people drawn by the promise of political action can encounter one another unexpectedly. DL has been traveling along U.S. Route 101, looking for motorcycle gangs and taking risks; she cannot say what she is seeking when she reaches Berkeley, a city she has heard about on the radio. Frenesi, by contrast, is already there with a camera and a bag of film reels, moving through a protest scene on Telegraph Avenue. Their different routes into the city converge in the street.

The setting is not a peaceful backdrop to that convergence. Frenesi has been filming as demonstrators withdraw from the campus area and damage property along the way. She finds herself between the retreating crowd and a paramilitary police line, with no convenient side street by which to leave. Shops have closed their shutters and doors and windows are secured. The bounded street leaves her exposed: continuing to film could be understood as a threat by the nearby officers, while stopping does not by itself provide a way out. Berkeley’s political conflict becomes a physical condition shaping what Frenesi can do.

Frenesi Gates and DL Meet

DL reaches Frenesi on a red-and-silver Czech motorcycle and gets her out of the exposed stretch of Telegraph Avenue. Frenesi leaves with her camera and film bag as well as herself. They ride through the damaged streets, turn onto a side road, and head downhill toward the bay. The rescue gives their first encounter its defining form: DL acts quickly, while Frenesi, frightened and exhilarated by the escape, struggles to make sense of the stranger who has helped her.

Afterward, they stop at a restaurant near the harbor, among people displaced by the fighting on the hill. The scene shifts from danger to a temporary shared refuge, where the two women eat and talk. Frenesi suspects DL may have been sent to find her; DL says she was only passing through. Frenesi interprets what is happening through the language of revolution, while DL’s arrival has been driven by no clear political mission. Berkeley therefore serves not only as the place of their first meeting but as the beginning of a relationship formed through unequal understandings of what political action means.

The 24fps Collective and Its Berkeley Base

Berkeley is also the home of the Nihilist Cinematographic Collective “Death to Pigs,” the predecessor whose remaining members and equipment become part of 24fps. The filmmaking project treats the camera as a political instrument. Its equipment includes cameras, lights, an editing machine, a hydraulic camera mount, and stored film. Some of the older collective’s manifesto is carried into the new group’s program, though its militant rhetoric is contested within the collective itself. The city’s political commitments are thus expressed not as a single agreed doctrine but as arguments about how images should be made and what they can accomplish.

The collective’s work extends beyond Berkeley. Its members travel around the country in a loosely organized convoy, looking for unrest, filming it, and moving the resulting documentary records to safety. They believe close-ups can expose what power does by registering its effects on human faces. Berkeley is the group’s base, but the camera work connects that base to events elsewhere and turns the city into a point of departure for a mobile documentary practice.

The collective’s internal divisions also emerge through its Berkeley work. DL and Sledge Poteet represent a more practical tendency, while Mirage and Howie are described as dreamers; Frenesi and the Pisk sisters occupy a middle position, and Krishna helps manage tensions and practical needs. Frenesi tries to stay out of disputes rather than preside over the group. The different approaches coexist in a shared filmmaking environment, where the members edit footage, debate the collective’s purpose, and try to keep the operation functioning. Berkeley is therefore not simply the home of a unified political community: it is where competing ideas about radical action meet in daily work.

Return and Dispersal

After the group’s crisis, DL returns to Berkeley with Howie and Sledge, reaching the studio near San Pablo. They recognize that they are more or less all that remains of 24fps. DL is badly unsettled and has persistent ringing in her ears and episodes of blurred vision. The return to the city does not restore the collective; it makes its diminished state concrete in the place where its work had been organized.

From Berkeley, the survivors try to learn what happened to Frenesi. People report seeing her leave with a convoy, but those who attempted to follow it lost their way among back roads and restricted turns. The destination is difficult to identify from available maps, which disagree and leave the area beyond the FEER obscure. Berkeley thus becomes the starting point for a search whose central obstacle is not simply distance but the lack of reliable information about where Frenesi has gone.

The city also figures in later reports about former associates. News circulating there says that Rex has left the United States. Separately, calls among old 24fps friends reveal that Howie has been arrested for possession of a drug he had not used, and that two or perhaps three other people have become unreachable without explanation. These reports make Berkeley a place where the group’s dispersed members attempt to assemble fragments of knowledge. The former collective’s social network remains, but it is increasingly marked by absence and uncertainty.

Narrative Significance

Berkeley links political visibility with vulnerability. Frenesi uses a camera to record a confrontation, yet the camera also places her in a position from which she needs rescue. The 24fps collective builds a documentary practice around preserving images of political events, but its members later face the dispersal of their community and the uncertain whereabouts of people they know. The city’s streets, campus area, and studio give those efforts a tangible setting without suggesting that documentation or organization can control what follows.

The novel also makes Berkeley a meeting point between personal history and political history. Frenesi and DL’s relationship begins in the immediate aftermath of street conflict; their shared work is later situated within the broader history of 24fps. When DL returns to the San Pablo studio, the contrast between the collective’s former activity and the few members left behind turns the city’s role inside out: the place that once gathered people and equipment now holds the evidence of a group coming apart.