Yesterday I saw Matt Norman's documentary Salute at the Film Festival. The film tells the story behind this image - arguably one of the most famous of the sixties, and even the century. Taken at the 200m medal ceremony for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Tommy Smith and John Carlos' silent protest (in the same year Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated) saw them sent home, their athletics careers over. Matt Norman's uncle, sprinter Peter Norman, was the 'white guy' in the medal ceremony - the silver medallist. He endorsed their protest, suggested that they share the one pair of black gloves they had between them, and wore a human rights badge as part of his support for their actions.
The film is a loving portrait of Norman, who was clearly a good, decent bloke - although I think the film makes a little too much of his participation. After all, what else was he going to do up there? Smith and Carlos were the ones who really suffered in the wake of their protest. But nonetheless, he was in the right place at the right time and did the right thing.
My quibble with the film was the ways that it retrospectively revisited the history of the sixties in a way that rewrote history. For example, we are told at one point that Australia got involved in the Vietnam war in the mid-sixties, 'a war that nobody wanted'. Now this might be true for Australia in 1971, but the war had majority public support for the first few years - it's just that today we think that Vietnam was always an unpopular war. There was also lots of archival footage used out of context - so to represent the unrest of 1968, we get footage of civil rights protests of the early sixties. Having seen footage of the 1968 protests, this stuff would make more sense and have a greater impact on the viewer. So why do this? Perhaps it comes down to budgets, but I also think it is a general lack of understanding about 'the sixties' that only more research and more films will change.
