Inside Red China / Committee on Un-American Activities

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive series Radical Films: A Weekend with Robert Carl Cohen. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

In-person: Filmmaker Robert Carl Cohen

While an observer at the Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957, Cohen was hired by NBC-TV to report on a group of American students touring China in defiance of the U.S. government's travel ban. Taking the assignment, Cohen became the first U.S. journalist to film in China since the Communist victory there in 1949. The result is a still fascinating travelogue of a country undergoing seismic changes in every aspect of life.

(1957, dir. Robert Carl Cohen., Digital video, b&w, 45 min.)

By 1962, the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities had been riding roughshod over American politics and culture for almost three decades, devastating the lives of countless individual citizens in its paranoid hunt for "subversion." In this first of its kind activist documentary, Robert Carl Cohen takes the Committee to task through a critical history of its founding and its corrosive effects on American public life culminating in an incisive take down of a government-funded propaganda film about student protests in San Francisco as communist subversives.

(1962, dir. Robert Carl Cohen., Digital video, b&w, 45 min.)