Ultime ore della Repubblica Popolare del Rock and Roll

Ultime ore della Repubblica Popolare del Rock and Roll is the name given to the threatened community’s final night: not a single decisive assault, but a prolonged, disorienting unmaking recorded by the 24fps film collective. The period brings the movement’s hopes and internal divisions into collision with state force, while the camera becomes both witness and a fragile means of carrying evidence out of the dark.

Background and the 24fps project

The collective that became 24fps inherited the remains of a Berkeley film group built around the idea that a camera could function as a weapon. Its equipment included cameras, lights, an editing table, a hydraulic camera mount, and a refrigerator stocked with film; some holdovers also carried the earlier group’s uncompromising revolutionary manifesto into 24fps. The collective’s work was dangerous well before the crisis at the College of the Surf. Its members had encountered batons, water cannons, and tear gas, and their first-aid cabinets accumulated a supply of painkillers. DL Chastain, responsible for security, regarded the young filmmakers as at times too careless about the risks.

That confidence in filming as political action had a practical limit. During the events at the College of the Surf in Trasero County, the collective found itself trapped on campus after the last surrender offer. Roads, waterways, sewers, and bicycle paths were all closed; phones had been cut off, and the mainstream media were kept at a safe distance. The group had exclusive access to the unfolding event, but only on the condition that someone might survive to take the film away.

The republic and the fracture within it

The campus community first became a small, improbable refuge beside a military reservation. As weeks passed, its residents developed an urgent appetite for knowledge and investigated the institution they occupied. Their research revealed that the College of the Surf had never been intended as a genuine center of learning: it was a real-estate venture disguised as a public gift, with vacation developments planned for the coast after five years of depreciation. Concluding that the state and judiciary were implicated in the scheme and would not offer them fair treatment, the students declared independence from California. After a tumultuous all-night assembly, they named their new state the People's Republic of Rock and Roll.

The declaration did not resolve the political danger or the republic’s internal disputes. Frenesi Gates and Rex Snuvvle accused Weed Atman of being an FBI informant. Howie recoiled at the claim and urged a collective meeting, but Frenesi rejected the idea that betrayal was a childish game. Rex insisted that the authorities were imprisoning and dismantling them and that Weed had always been spying for them. Frenesi, holding Howie’s face, framed the choice as one of absolute solidarity: the republic had been founded to shelter people whom other institutions rejected, and expelling someone risked reproducing the authoritarian logic they opposed. Her appeal exposes a real contradiction in the community: its open refuge depends on trust, but its refusal to exclude anyone makes betrayal harder to confront.

The final night

The approach of the break is first registered as a change in the crowd. At dusk, people gather around the campus fountain without posters, announcements, or formal statements. DL is filming with an Arri camera, with Zipi Pisk assisting on a spring-wound Bolex. Beneath the black silhouette of the Nixon Monument, fading megaphones go unheard and familiar faces seem suddenly unrecognizable. Those present share a sense that the recent past is about to end; some later describe it as an ending, others as a transition, but the approaching rupture feels as unmistakable as an eclipse or an impending catastrophe.

The documentary 24fps is making follows the last hours of the republic through a night of scattered violence rather than one concentrated, Attica-style assault. Skirmishes, shooting, tear gas dropped from above, and fires spread through a darkness made worse by the loss of electricity and water. Fog and the absence of moonlight or stars leave enemies impossible to locate: they could be anywhere, or anyone. The collective is caught in a night without a clear future, with no reliable boundary between the community and the forces attacking it.

A trailer behind the Film Arts building holds a Mole-Richardson generator, while unfamiliar people begin to emerge cautiously from the surrounding dark. The distant sound of Blue Cheer carries from Anaheim Stadium. The filmmakers gather valuable equipment from the department, including Eclair cameras, Miller heads, Fastax slow-motion cameras, and Norwood light meters. They illuminate the scene with lamps and use their most sensitive available stock, 7242, opening the lenses as wide as possible even though doing so sacrifices the depth of field Ditzah Pisk would prefer. Helicopters descend; young people dance in time to the same radio station; soldiers in camouflage and blackened faces move furtively and then target the sudden arc lights. The cameras do not retreat from the action. Prairie Wheeler watches the footage and recognizes the danger the filming puts its operators in.

Recording, exposure, and aftermath

The camera’s role is double-edged. 24fps had inherited the conviction that images could serve as a weapon against political power, and on this night its equipment continues to face what confronts it. Yet the cameras cannot make the people behind them invulnerable, and the collective’s claim to exclusive footage is precarious: its members are trapped, the lights attract attack, and the films have to be carried beyond the campus to matter as testimony.

Elsewhere in the novel, this danger takes a less spectacular form. Frenesi later sees people vanish from a computer, and understands the Reagan-era cuts as a threat that she and Flash may lose the protected, suspended life they had occupied and be returned to ordinary cause and effect. DL Chastain also finds a rudimentary listening device in a later investigation, while an assault on Ditzah Pisk’s home ends with 24fps film and papers burning in the street. These later episodes do not alter the events of the final night, but they sharpen the stakes of the collective’s attempt to preserve images: surveillance can listen, records can disappear, and archives can be destroyed. The crisis of PR3 is therefore not only the end of a short-lived political refuge; it is also a struggle over whether anyone will be able to see, remember, and transmit what happened there.