Radio Unnameable Bob Fass

Before NPR, texting, and Facebook, there was WBAI, New York's idiosyncratic, left-of-left-wing public radio station, where Bob Fass has broadcast “Radio Unnameable”—his “free-form” midnight show—for much of the past half-century. Radio Unnameable brings 50 years of its subject’s history to life, intriguingly pairing archival stills and audio with Super 8, 16mm, and Hi-8 video footage to evoke Fass's life and times. Radio Unnameable presents an impressively cogent history of the American Left from 1963 to the present, while profitably abstaining from the pro-forma nostalgia that often saturates documentaries about the Sixties. Convincingly treating WBAI as a microcosm of the Left, the documentary traces the fracturing of the antiwar and civil-rights movements into the many factions of identity politics, and the internecine battles at the station that eventually took it and Fass off the air (if only for a while). It's a mostly focused, moving portrait of a man who has devoted his life to the radio.

Radio Unnameable begins with the unlikely history of WBAI, which was donated to the public by an eccentric millionaire who had tired of commercial radio's glib din. Fass’s show became the central node for the New York end of a movement—complete with be-ins at JFK Airport (well, a “fly-in,” technically) and Grand Central Station, and, during a garbage strike, a New York City street “sweep-in”—that he helped form and foster. The rare archival footage that directors Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson have unearthed is well edited; it’s put to its strongest use in a reconstruction of the brutal 1968 police raid on a peaceful Youth International Party gathering at Grand Central.

A trained actor who performed in The Threepenny Opera before his radio career, Fass is a winning on-screen presence whose unexpected reticence charms. The directors balance their admiration and support for their subject with a studious illumination of the cultural forces swirling around and through him. A host of talking heads express their esteem for Fass, fondly describing how his show served as a kind of cultural clearing house for the politically disenfranchised during a time of political upheaval and war.

Radio Unnameable Bob Fass

Fass has catholic tastes: Bob Dylan, Shirley Clarke, Robert Downey Sr., and Abbie Hoffman shared the airwaves on his show with call-ins from professional conspiracy theorists, politicos, and lonely people working the graveyard shift. One caller helpfully offers Dylan some singing tips; another announces that he is in the process of committing suicide. (Fass saves his life.) Even Joni Mitchell (“Do you prefer Joan or Joni?” asks Fass) made an appearance.

Although Radio Unnameable begins to connect the dots between Fass’s show and today’s mass media phenomena (Occupy, Twitter, YouTube), it does so in faint pencil strokes, not ink, which could be read as a sign of respect for the audience’s intelligence or as a failure on the part of the filmmakers to see their project to its logical end. Above all it’s a film very much dedicated to Fass, who to this day struggles to make ends meet. Seeing him drive his trusty Taurus to the station, we are reminded that he has not been paid by WBAI since his return in 1983. Now 79, Fass says that the feeling of being needed is vital to him and his work, and that he always considered himself a friend to the friendless, a necessary companion to “people alone in their room with a radio.” It is the image of this noble, ill-treated remnant of a more hopeful, less fractious Left that gives Radio Unnameable its soul.