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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

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The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

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What I owe to Chris Marker

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His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

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The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia

2016, The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, co-edited by Elizabeth A Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower Press, November 2016 (ISBN: 9780231176958 (pbk), 9780231176941 (hbk), 9780231851039 (e-book).

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. Includes contributions by Luka Arsenjuk, Martine Beugnet, Luca Caminati, Timothy Corrigan, Oliver Gaycken, Anne Eakin-Moss, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Laura U. Marks, Laura Rascaroli, Mauro Resmini, and Eric Zakim.

Related Papers

Jomec Journal

The essay film is one emerging genre in which the sonic elements and the editing characteristics are constructing the basis of its communication structure within and beyond the audiovisual material. This paper will enlighten the unique language and the means of communication of the essay form. In the essay film, the voice functions as a means of expression as opposed to a stack of sounds. With the support of the editing elements, the voice becomes a stylistic reflection towards the world, where the audience perceives the tone of the filmmaker. The voice is also not a rhetoric that oppresses the viewer but functions as a bridge to communicate with, and throughout, the audiovisual material as an artistic act that demands an intellectual response, like an open letter to be finalized in the viewers’ mind. The essay film does not seek to provide answers. Rather, it asks questions to the viewer, directly or indirectly, throughout the dialogue as the core of this filmmaking style. For the filmmaker to communicate with their viewer effectively, they position themselves as part of the audience. The essay film strives to go beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Its structure undermines traditional boundaries, and is both structurally and conceptually transgressive, as well as self-reflective. It also questions the subject positions of the filmmaker and audience as well as the audiovisual medium itself – whether film, video, or digital electronic. This work highlights the dialogical characteristics of the essay film through a selection of essay film works with a focus on the voiceover usage and editing characteristics, to understand how a body of essayistic work addresses the viewer for a dialogical relationship.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (32) 4, 2012: 637-639

Dagmar Brunow

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

carolina sourdis

The essayistic device in film often brings together two temporalities of film creation: the present of the filmed image and the present of the editing process. Through the interaction of both moments, provoked by the critical revision of the raw material and its possibilities of montage, the essay film is constructed through the filmmaker’s exploration of the filmic apparatus, thus revealing film forms as a way of producing and disseminating knowledge. The essay film, therefore, subverts a common theoretical practice: thought is no longer assumed as a procedure for unveiling an image, but it is rather produced by film forms. We claim that the essay film, as a research methodology and a theoretical approximation to film informed by practice, must be unfolded through creative gestures, this is to say, images and sounds that present an audiovisual synthesis of the conscious and intuitive work that both precedes and is synchronic to the moments of filming and editing. This article addre...

Teresa Lima

This article intends to identify characteristic traits of the essay film in The Amazed Spectator / O Espectador Espantado (2016), by the Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra. Throughout the analysis, I reflect on how the use of different types of resources-technical (3D), compositional (color and space) and social (the communities involved)-combine to create a sensory object, one which not only aims to question the relationship between the viewers and the films but is also helpful in understanding the director's praxis. More than providing answers, The Amazed Spectator poses questions, prompting a constant dialogue, be it between the film's interviewees, be it among the actors who represent the different kinds of film audiences or the viewers, who watch Pêra's film. Positioning myself as a viewer of the said film, I try to reproduce sensations, add further layers of doubt to the questions posed and erect a new discourse on the The Amazed Spectator. Amongst enigmas and contradictions, one can state that The Amazed Spectator is an essay film about cinema (more specifically about the opposition between window cinema and screen cinema) but might also be about life. That is to say, the way that the viewers-amongst the fear and the awe-go about assuming either a more passive or a more interventional stance towards the world.

Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.

Rick Warner

Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.

Comparative Cinema

This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for the contemporary essay film based on the comparative study of two Francophone films: Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, 2009) and Jaurès (Vincent Dieutre, 2012). The dialogism of the essay film, the interpellation to the spectator to produce self-reflection on their position and critical thinking about the images shown, is then generated from the premise of identification. The analysis shows how Face aux fantômes offers an audiovisual thinking process on the mobilization of the gaze of the emancipated spectator theorized by Jacques Rancière, while Jaurès provokes the same reflection from the opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.

Studies in European Cinema

Abstract The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process thus develops through a succession of sentence-images, which forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens –film image, television image, electronic image and video game image– in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places or Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism. Keywords: essay film, cinematic thinking, postmodernity, time-image.

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1. The Essay Film and its Global Contexts: Conversations on Forms and Practices

• Published: July 2019
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Based on interviews she conducted with Cuban filmmaker and theorist Susana Barriga, Hanoi-based filmmaker and moving image artist Nguyen Trinh Thi and New York-based artist and filmmaker Bo Wang, essay film theorist Laura Rascaroli investigates the ways global artists who call their films ‘essays’, or whose work has been labelled as such by art institutions, think of their practice in light of this somewhat ambiguous term. Rascaroli is interested in what these non-Western-born artists have to say about a form that has been conceptualised by heavily drawing on Western thought and according to Enlightenment categories of Self, human subject, world/society and the role of the artist. As these interviews confirm, the essay film emerges as a privileged meeting ground of different impulses and hybrid influences.

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years.   Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al.  Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further!  The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics?  Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary?  Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.”  (p. 52.)  Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot.  Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.”   News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

• Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
• Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

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The Film Comment Podcast: The Most Significant Political Films of All Time

By Film Comment on July 4, 2023

Last February, the magazine The New Republic invited a host of film critics to participate in a new poll, curated by esteemed critic and longtime Film Comment  contributor J. Hoberman: a list of the 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time. Not best or favorite political films, mind you—most significant . The New Republic unveiled the results of the poll on June 22, along with an essay by Hoberman analyzing the results. Topped by The Battle of Algiers , the final list is both a fascinating snapshot of what political cinema means to critics today, and the limits of such exercises in ascertaining consensus. On today’s podcast, we invited Jim for a deep-dive into the impetus behind the poll; the surprises, disappointments, and notable entries in the list, from  The Birth of a Nation to La Chinoise to Hour of the Furnaces to All the President’s Men ; and how notions of political cinema have changed over time.

Links & Things

The New Republic ‘s list of 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time J. Hoberman’s essay on the poll The Birth of a Nation  (D.W. Griffith, 1915) The Battle of Algiers  (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) Red Dawn (John Milius, 1984) Triumph of the Will  (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000) The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966) No (Pablo Larrain, 2012) Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975) All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) Newsreel The Film and Photo League The Black Audio Film Collective Be Seeing You ( A Bientot J’espere ) (Chris Marker, 1967) The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak  (Les Insoumuses, 1975) The Monopoly of Violence (David Dufresne, 2020) Afrique sur Seine  (Mamadou Sarr & Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, 1955) My Survival as an Aboriginal (Essie Coffey, 1979) Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective, 1986) Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968) Toward a Third Cinema ,” Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1970 Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940) The Bicycle Thieves  (Vittorio de Sica, 1948) The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) Rocky III (Sylvestor Stallone, 1982) Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972) Attica (Cinda Firestone, 1974) Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014) Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard, 1972) Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Something Like a War (Deepa Dhanraj, 1991) “ Whose History ,” Lis Rhodes, 1978 Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1975-79) Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950) Tele-Machine (Takis, 1960) and its removal from the MoMA’s “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age ” All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)

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Seeing Through the Screen: Interpreting American Political Film

• September 13, 2018

Bruce Altschuler

• Articles , Arts & Culture Articles , Arts & Culture Reviews , Reviews

Understanding Political Films

In choosing movies to include in this book, we had to start by asking what makes a film political. This seemingly simple question has caused considerable debate among those who have tried to answer it. One school of thought opts for a very narrow definition. Harry Keyishian’s textbook includes films “about politicians and the political process in America” whose primary concern is “the relationship between personal integrity and political success” (Keyishian 2003: xiii). This definition is so limited that it excludes Dr. Strangelove “because it does not imagine a connection between a society of real people with a stake in existence and its cartoon versions of national leaders” (Keyishian 2003: 67).

Others take a totally opposite approach, arguing that nearly every American film is political because, as Phillip L. Gianos asserts, an overwhelming majority of them essentially claim that happiness is primarily an individual matter (Gianos 1998: 4). Politics is hidden by personalizing the story, using allegory as code, selecting a formerly controversial topic that has become safe or avoiding specifics about what politics and parties in a particular film stand for (Gianos 1998: 8–9). Even in such noted films about politicians as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Best Man , the specific parties that these office holders belong to and even the one holding its presidential nominating convention are never named. As noted German director Wim Wenders contends, “It’s very hard to grasp what America understands as ‘political’ because this notion all too often exists only in its negation as the absence of the political” (Maltby 2003: 270). Similarly, Chilean director Sebastian Lelio sees The Devil Wears Prada “as completely political. Fashion is totally political, the icon of a political system” (Rohter 2014: AR14).

The dichotomy between foreign and American views is not surprising as, unlike many other countries, the United States has never developed a political film genre. Because the label “political film” is widely considered damaging at the box office, Hollywood tends to discourage the production of such pictures or to disguise their content using methods such as those pointed out by Gianos. Rather than examine political phenomena, American movies prefer to tell tales of individual triumph, simplifying those larger issues to tell a good story while validating the status quo to avoid controversy or offense. As we look at individual films, readers should think about the choices made by the producers, directors and script writers.

Keeping these issues in mind, let us return to the task of definition. The narrow conception of restricting political films to those depicting, in Keyishian’s words, “politicians and the political process” omits numerous movies whose content and themes are clearly political. For example, it would seem to exclude films about the media, interest groups and even many courtroom dramas. Would it include Erin Brokovich , which is more about the legal process and activism than the political process? 1 It also leaves out influential genre films such as westerns, war or gangster films which explore such basic political issues as the state of nature, the basis of law and order, immigration and the treatment of Native Americans.

On the other hand, if we consider all films to be political, we have a category that fails to classify and is therefore of no practical use. Ian Scott (2011: 11–12) tries to bridge the gap by distinguishing between political films and films about politics. Political films (16) “have very direct settings, characters and/or references to politicians, political institutions and political history,” while films about politics often have a subtext in which apparently nonpolitical subjects serve as a metaphor or allegory for more explicitly political topics. The latter is similar to Richard Maltby’s “social problem films” that allow the depiction of controversial issues “by sugaring the didactic political pill with the more pleasurable elements of genre and star performances, and above all by individualizing the issue depicted” (Maltby 2003: 293). However, these new categories don’t help much in defining political film as they leave us with the choice of retaining the narrow definition or adding a second category that could include nearly every film, depending on how much subtext the viewer decodes. Instead, this book will find a middle ground by using a basic definition of politics to determine what should be included in a film to consider it “political.” This method has probably been avoided because defining politics has been no less contentious than defining political film.

Here too, definitions vary between the narrow and the broad, but in very different ways. Lexicographers tend to prefer the narrow such as “the art and science of government or governing” (American Heritage 1992: 1402). In contrast, most political scientists choose to go beyond government to include other actors. Two of the classic definitions come from Harold Lasswell and David Easton. Lasswell’s (1950: 3) pithy definition served as his book’s title, “who gets what, when, how.” Easton’s (1953: 129) classic formulation is “the authoritative allocation of values for a society.” Because policies grant things to some that they deny to others, his focus is on the making of authoritative policy whether by government or private actors. Government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force ensures that its decisions are authoritative, but some private decisions can have comparable finality.

Many contemporary political scientists, however, believe that these definitions are still too restrictive. Eisenstein et. al. (1996: 6) have two criticisms of the Lasswell and Easton definitions. Because cooperation can create additional collective benefits, politics should not be limited to dividing existing resources. Second, they fail to go far enough in including non-governmental actors who have a major impact on people’s lives as in the closing of a factory. Their formulation (16) is an expanded version of Lasswell and Easton: “politics consists of influence processes involving both conflict and cooperation, and occurring both within and outside of government, that authoritatively determine for a wide range of groups who gets what when and how?” Thomas Patterson (2013: 17) provides a more succinct definition: “the means by which society settles its conflicts and allocates the resulting benefits and costs.” These provide a good basis for determining which films to consider political.

As with any definition, there is room for debate at the margins. How much (or how little) political content is necessary for a film to meet the definition? For example, should courtroom comedies such as Adam’s Rib or My Cousin Vinny be included or is their political content too minimal? Do the James Bond and Bourne series fit? Does the emphasis on process exclude films about political outcomes such as the dystopian dramas 1984 or the popular Hunger Games series? Furthermore, definitions of what is political change over time. As Leon H. Hurwitz (1979: 4) writes, every generation has its “own particular (some would say peculiar) view of the nature and components of politics,” but each is limited by its culture to emphasizing those aspects they find most prevalent and important. Our survey has shown significant change from Lasswell and Easton in the mid-twentieth century to more contemporary views. This may also explain our earlier point that conceptions of what makes a film political often vary from one country to another.

Nevertheless, this definition was helpful in choosing what films to include in this book. Try applying it to recent films to evaluate how well it works. Does it help find common factors in political films, while allowing us to compare and contrast them? Is it useful in comparing American films to those of countries that claim to have a more developed genre of political films? Have American political films actually done as poorly at the box office as film company executives seem to think or is that just due to their use of the narrow definition?

The Language of Film

This book consists of a series of essays that attempt to discover the messages communicated by American political films. The language of film is far more than plot and dialogue. As Bill Nichols (2010: 12) has written, films are best understood “when viewers enter into, imaginatively inhabit, collectively reemerge from, and critically reflect on what they have experienced during their encounter with a cinematic world.” To do this, we need to examine the camera’s point of view, the visual images on the screen, music and other sounds along with a variety of other devices used by filmmakers to convey their messages. Because viewers enter a film’s world with diverse experiences and perspectives, the best films are complex enough in their nonverbal messages that more than one interpretation is possible. These essays will provide tools for understanding, but will often ask questions for viewers to answer, using their own perspectives.

Careful attention should be paid to the opening of each film which sets the tone and themes for the remainder of the movie. often with little or no dialogue. In Citizen Kane , the camera penetrates the isolated estate of its title character, Charles Foster Kane, beginning by passing a “No Trespassing” sign. The audience then sees him drop a snow globe as he dies, with only a single word of dialogue, “Rosebud.” The Conversation opens with a series of seemingly random shots and sounds in a San Francisco park that are presented from the point of view of an eavesdropper who is recording the sounds with multiple microphones much as the film recorded the scene using multiple cameras. The audience soon learns that this surveillance expert, Harry Caul, is the film’s protagonist, but by the time it does, we have already begun to identify with Harry and his apparent paranoia. By beginning with a scene of two airplanes rendezvousing to refuel to the strains of “Try a Little Tenderness,” Dr. Strangelove communicates one of its themes, the connection between war and sex.

Because many of these films are based on historical events or utilize actual institutions to tell a fictional story, we will also try to supply the background information necessary to put the movies in context. It is important to keep in mind that even a historically based film is not a documentary. The script writer or director who is not fully faithful to the historical record may have good reasons for this such as adding to the drama or suspense, making a larger point or simply condensing a lengthy historical event into the two hours or so available to view a film. No audience would sit still to watch every trivial moment of a trial that lasted weeks or months. We simply want to understand the larger picture. Also, a film about the past may be trying to use its subtext to make a point about contemporary events. For example, audiences for the 1940 movie Abe Lincoln in Illinois generally understood that in showing how Lincoln decided that taking up the fight against slavery was worth the risk of civil war, the film was arguing that the battle against fascism in Europe was similarly worth risking American involvement in World War II.

That example also illustrates the importance of political films in shaping popular opinion. Daniel Franklin (2006:5) asks whether film is “an influence on or a mirror of society?” He concludes that the influence goes in both directions because movie makers may decide which films to make, but audiences choose which are worth paying to see. Even more important is the need to find financial backing before production can even begin. Because of the high cost of producing and advertising a film, especially if it is intended for a mass market, producers often than play it safe by avoiding controversies that could alienate a significant portion of their potential audience. As noted earlier, this could be a reason that there are not more American political films or that many avoid taking controversial positions. Making films based on comic book superheroes has been a lot more profitable that those about, for example, presidential elections. Nevertheless, as this book demonstrates, there have been quite a few important political films made over the years. Some have a very clear message, but the need for films to entertain and to make a profit will sometimes mean that our essays need to analyze carefully to understand the political point their makers intend.

1. Keyisihian does not include this film or any courtroom dramas other than Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) in his book.

This excerpt is from Seeing through the Screen: Interpreting American Political Film (Lexington Books, 2017) with our review of the book here .

Bruce Altschuler is a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Oswego. He is editor, with Michael Genovese, of Shakespeare and Politics (Paradigm, 2014) and author of several books, including Acting Presidents: 100 Years of Plays About the Presidency (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Seeing through the Screen: Interpreting American Political Film (Lexington Books, 2017).

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The essay film.

Dialogue, Politics, Utopia

Edited by Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades

Wallflower Press

Pub Date: November 2016

ISBN: 9780231176958

Format: Paperback

List Price: $26.00 £22.00

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The long-awaited news flash foregrounded by The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia is that cinema studies has at last parted ways with moldy, genre-based epistemologies. The idea of film-thinking as a philosophia sui generis that opposes formalistic classifications has been there from the get-go—in the hearts and minds of groundbreaking film-heretics. Here we are finally offered a thoroughly researched and carefully thought-out contemplation of the primordial desires and wishful prospects of the art of filmmaking, a distinct form of human expression. This book heralds an advanced phase of maturation for cinema studies. Its straightforward willingness to destabilize its own epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions, generating authentic terms-of-being, perfectly matches the true spiritual and intellectual scope of the essay film as we know it—and, more critically, as we can never truly know its inherently unknowable stratum. The clarity of this book's statement provides a firm foundation for future revelations the essay film holds in store. Dan Geva, Haifa University, and documentary filmmaker

This exciting collection promises to be an important milestone for ongoing debates and discussions about the emergent medium of interactive and nonlinear documentary. Matt Soar, Concordia University

Winner, 2018 Best Essay in an Edited Collection, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

About the Author

• Film and Media Studies
• Film History, Theory, and Criticism
• Nonfictions

What Is a “Political Film,” Anyway?

It’s about revolution. or elections. it can be a thriller. or a comedy. it’s a movie whose politics we love. it’s a movie whose politics we detest. it’s even, sometimes, a zombie movie..

Polls gauge public opinion. So do movies. Seventy-nine expert witnesses—film critics, programmers, and academics—named their candidates for the most significant political movies of the past 120 years , listing a combined total of over 450 individual films. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) won … by a lot. What did we learn?

1) Polls are about the polled as much as the subject. Virtually all who provided lists were based in North America. Consequently, American films and American taste ruled. Six of the 10 highest vote-getters—around 30 of the Top 50, and half of the full 100—were made by Americans. (China and Japan were unrepresented in the Top 50; Iran, Romania, and South Korea in the Top 100.) Nevertheless, the overwhelming primacy of an anti-colonialist Italian-Algerian co-production in which no English was spoken, and which was written, directed, and scored by Italians (two of them associated with spaghetti Westerns), is a victory for cosmopolitanism.

2) Although voters represented several generations, some eras are more politically fraught than others. The oldest and newest films in the Top 50—D.W. Griffith’s fifth-place Birth of a Nation (1915) and Ava DuVernay’s twenty-eighth-place Selma (2014), both screened at the White House—span a century. But so far as decades go, the 1960s dominate—slightly less so among younger voters. Including The Battle of Algiers , 15 out of the Top 50 were produced during the 1960–72 period, with another six set then. No other period came close. Seven films were made or set in the 1940s, three of those detailing wartime atrocities.

3) There is a consensual idea of what constitutes political cinema, if not a universal buy-in. “Every film I care about is political,” a seasoned critic explained by way of declining to participate in the poll. The personal may be the political. Still, subjective evaluations notwithstanding, some movies are understood as more “political” than others.

Over a dozen films in the Top 100 were about elections. Eight concerned the subject of revolution, over 10 depicted anti-democratic coups, and many more focused on political violence ranging from strikes and demonstrations to murder, genocide, and war.

Eight of the American movies in the Top 50 dealt with (or in) racism. Only two of the Top 50 make feminist statements. Younger voters were more militant, supporting The Hour of the Furnaces (#32), The Murder of Fred Hampton (#37), and Born in Flames (#43) in proportionally higher numbers. Roughly half of the Top 50 (and exactly half of the Top 10) could be described as entertainments. (The entertainment quotient falls off a bit between #51 and #100.) Right-wing political icon John Wayne barely makes it into the Top 100 (too bad he turned down the lead in #59 All the King’s Men ). His left-wing analog Jane Fonda appears not at all. On the other hand, Warren Beatty stars in three movies in the Top 50, two of which he directed, thus joining Sergei Eisenstein, Spike Lee, Peter Watkins, Alan J. Pakula, Leni Riefenstahl, Jean-Luc Godard, Oliver Stone, John Ford, Raoul Peck, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Jia Zhangke as the filmmakers with more than one Top 100 picture.

To take a phrase from a young Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s thirteenth-ranked La Chinoise (1967), the list is consecrated to “sincerity and violence.” The Battle of Algiers garnered nearly as many points as the two runners-up— The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)—combined. Cited by 35 voters, Pontecorvo’s painstaking re-creation of an anti-colonial revolt, so naturalistic it was advertised at the time as nondocumentary, headed 12 lists, three times as many as fourth-ranked All the President’s Men (1976), Dr. Strangelove , and The Birth of a Nation , each put first by four voters.

In ways, the poll confirmed popular wisdom. Before the results were tabulated, I asked the chatbot formerly known as Sydney which American and foreign “political movies” were most often cited in lists and polls. “There is no definitive answer,” was the sage response. “Different sources may have different criteria and methods for ranking political movies.” And yet, based on the “web sources” Syd consulted, the most frequently mentioned or praised movies (by critics and audiences) were the poll’s top four vote-getters. And aside from The Battle of Algiers and Battleship Potemkin , the bot’s two other foreign films, Costa-Gavras’s anti-fascist thriller Z (1969) and The Lives of Others (2006), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s account of a lonely Stasi agent, made the Top 20, numbers 15 and 19, respectively.

Consensus within the consensus: Over half of the eligible American films were selected by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry . The pariahs not listed on the registry include three problematic blockbusters that made our list: Warren Beatty’s 1981 pro-Communist Reds (#41), Oliver Stone’s unpatriotic 1991 JFK (#34), and, of course, Griffith’s white supremacist Birth of a Nation , the foundational work of American commercial cinema. None were surprising choices. What made the poll results interesting were the ways in which the notion of “political” was expanded or contracted.

One list was headed by Shinsuke Ogawa’s 1971 documentary, Narita: The Peasants of the Second Fortress , detailing the popular armed struggle against the construction of Tokyo’s Narita Airport; another included a 40-minute documentary portrait of sex workers occupying a French church— The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak , by the feminist activist Carole Roussopoulos; and a third listed the long-banned 1943 Warner Bros. cartoon Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs , with the observation: “perennially misunderstood, this is at once a celebration of marginalized Black culture and a still necessary assault on the white supremacist values naturalized as ‘all-American’ by Disney.”

Consensus coalesced around movies that caused, courted, or re-created controversy. Feted in Venice, banned in France, introduced as evidence in the trial of the Panther 13, The Battle of Algiers was as much a political event as a political movie. So too Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front (#45), at least in Germany, where the movie’s antiwar message caused Nazi brownshirts to disrupt screenings and attack movie patrons. Conspiracy buffs imagined The Manchurian Candidate to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s “trigger film,” and, according to Susan Sontag , liberal intellectuals left Dr. Strangelove ’s previews convinced that, once it opened, movie houses would be stormed by “mobs of American Legion types.” (It was in fact delayed two months after Kennedy was shot.) Similarly, a few hysterical pundits expressed concern that Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing (#8) would inspire riots in theaters.

In a class by itself: D.W. Griffith’s openly white supremacist, blatantly demagogic account of America’s Civil War and Reconstruction, quite possibly the most revered and reviled movie ever made and, in many ways, the most influential. It was followed in the poll by a partner in crime, Leni Riefenstahl’s sixth-place love letter to Adolf Hitler, Triumph of the Will (1935). Except for a few outliers, younger critics shunned both The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will —suggesting that objectionable politics trumped historical significance. (It’s notable that younger voters all but ignored the second-place finisher The Manchurian Candidate , perhaps a response to the film’s stereotyped Chinese and North Korean Communist villains.) No films were more reprehensible than Birth or Triumph , but none engaged twentieth-century politics more directly or cast a more powerful spell, not only on audiences but filmmakers.

After that pair comes one of Riefenstahl’s inspirations, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin , which got one first-place vote. (Younger critics didn’t much care for Potemkin either, although Eisenstein’s first feature film, Strike , which came in #25, got five votes.) Variously banned in Britain, France, the United States, and Germany (where it also had its greatest success), Potemkin was the most celebrated and proudly propagandist propaganda film ever made.

Are political films necessarily tendentious? Not necessarily, although, like most movies, many are what the French political philosopher Jacques Ellul termed “sociological propaganda,” implicitly supporting the status quo. Just shy of the Top 10 (with one first-place vote), Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is a case in point. The feel-good spectacle of James Stewart’s Boy Scout freshman senator filibustering a corrupt Congress to its senses may be Hollywood’s most resilient—and universal—political fantasy. Yes, the system works, and one good man can make a difference!

Based on an actual case, All the President’s Men (1976) is also sociological propaganda, illustrating Truth, Justice, and the American Way. On the other hand, despite its nominal happy ending (complete with a We the People–style bromide), Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s tenth-place A Face in the Crowd (1957) is not. Hardly a popular success, the movie was a canary in the coal mine, a warning made by two former Communists against the TV-mediated merger of politics and show business. Another film showing a media-driven map to power, the Robert Redford vehicle The Candidate (1972), in twentieth place, is also more cautionary than comforting.

A more realistic fictional depiction of American electoral politics than The Candidate , Robert Altman’s mockumentary miniseries Tanner ’88 turned an invented candidate loose in the 1988 Democratic primaries. Largely forgotten, it received only a single vote, although it provided as accurate an impression of the 1988 primary season as found in Sidney Blumenthal’s written history, Pledging Allegiance . (Indeed, Blumenthal was credited as a consultant.) However amusing, the movie was hardly a revelation. After eight years of Ronald Reagan, the existence of a National Entertainment State was a given.

Having demonstrated cinema’s power to rewrite the past, D.W. Griffith similarly proved that a film might intervene in history. Shown at the White House and endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson, The Birth of a Nation promoted the myth of the Lost Cause, falsified the history of Reconstruction, reactivated the Ku Klux Klan, and promoted a new national narrative based on Aryan birthright. It also inspired America’s first counter cinema, the “race movies” made by Oscar Micheaux and others.

Other movies have sought to force similar revisionism. If JFK failed to rebut the Warren Commission, it did contribute to a political climate that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992. Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977), ranked #42, may not have toppled the Polish government, but it did cost the head of the Polish film industry his job and got the minister of culture booted from the Politburo. Still, causal effects can be exaggerated. Akin to the belief that All the President’s Men inspired a spike in applications to journalism school is the cinephile legend that La Chinoise inspired the Columbia students who, three weeks after the movie opened in an out-of-the-way Manhattan theater, began occupying campus buildings.

Can TV alter the course of an election? The cynical comedy Wag the Dog (1997) got six votes and placed #54, having provided a new expression for media-manipulated bait and switch. Dramatizing the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that removed Augusto Pinochet from power, Pablo Larraín’s No (2012), which garnered several votes and ranked #79, suggested that TV sorcery might be a source of democratic power.

The 18-minute campaign film A New Beginning (1984) did not by itself reelect Ronald Reagan but immeasurably helped by casting him as the star of a feel-good patriotic spectacle. Sometimes known as Morning in America , it furthered the notion of politician as performer introduced by #38 Primary (1960), Robert Drew’s cinema verité account of JFK on the campaign trail. It also introduced the theme music (Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”) and visual rhetoric that would characterize campaigns for decades to follow.

The 2004 campaign brought Lionel Chet­wynd’s TV film DC 9/11: Time of Crisis , the ineffectual John Kerry biopic Going Upriver , and Michael Moore’s enormously popular Palme d’Or laureate Fahrenheit 9/11 . Did Moore’s movie persuade anyone to support John Kerry? (It received but one vote in our poll.) More recent tendentious campaign features by Dinesh D’Souza and Steve Bannon are essentially Pavlovian infomercials. These belong to that subset of political films that celebrate or, less frequently, satirize political leaders. The exemplar here is Triumph of the Will , surely the greatest photo op of the twentieth century, and a movie that Bannon is not afraid to admire. ( The Great Dictator , Charles Chaplin’s 1940 parody of Hitler, in general, and of Triumph of the Will , in particular, finished #26, with one critic’s vote for #1.)

Still, election-year films can surf the zeitgeist. The bicentennial confluence of two Cinderellas, Jimmy Carter and Rocky Balboa, is a suggestive coincidence. The poll’s two most cited American examples of leadership films—Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X (#22) and Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln (#24)—were election-year period dramas that spoke to the present. Thanks to Denzel Washington’s performance, Lee’s film added its subject’s analysis to the discussion that followed the L.A. riots, while, with its focus on the president’s success in getting the Thirteenth Amendment through the lame-duck House of Representatives, Lincoln could hardly fail to remind the viewer of the shenanigans required to pass the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The most fantastic of straightforward political films, Gregory La Cava’s 1933 Gabriel Over the White House , a movie masterminded by William Randolph Hearst to coincide with FDR’s inauguration and advocate for a Mussolini-style dictatorship, received one first-place vote and, at #30, finished three places ahead of Citizen Kane (1941), which—Henry King’s 1944 flopperoo hagiography Wilson notwithstanding—might be considered Hollywood’s preeminent example of a Great Man film. In addition to Triumph of the Will , these include Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Laurence Olivier’s wartime Henry V (1944). Neither was cited in the poll, although Raoul Peck’s 2000 Lumumba got several votes, including a first-place nod, to rank #63.

It feels more democratic when individual protagonists serve to illuminate a larger social conflict. The poll’s preeminent example is Do the Right Thing , which deploys a host of characters to embody or articulate a range of viewpoints. Two more examples are The Lives of Others and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 Memories of Underdevelopment (#27), a newsreel-enriched portrait of a disaffected bourgeois in revolutionary Havana. The epitome of Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), got two first-place votes but wound up only #52.

Other films privilege movements, like labor unions. Martin Ritt’s inspirational Norma Rae (1979) received but a single vote, although Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) finished twelfth, and Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954), another movie about striking miners, ranked thirty-first. Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) placed twenty-fifth. Edgier movies featured revolutionary cells. In addition to La Chinoise , the Top 50 included Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). A blaxploitation film animated by the ideas of Frantz Fanon, it finished #40, just ahead of Lizzie Borden’s independent feature Born in Flames (1983), which envisions radical feminists fomenting revolution via pirate radio stations.

V for Vendetta (2005), a movie adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, directed by James McTeigue, and subsequently adopted by left-wing anarchists and hard-right libertarians, received only one vote. It’s a curious omission. The movie introduced a political koan (“People should not be afraid of their governments—governments should be afraid of their people”) as well as a rakish, smirking icon. Endorsed by the anarchist hacker group Anonymous and by WikiLeaks, worn in demonstrations from Zuccotti Park to Hong Kong to Washington, D.C., the smiling Guy Fawkes mask was a meme foreshadowing the French yellow vest and the American MAGA cap.

Some films dramatize factual occurrences. Others, like V for Vendetta , imagine political scenarios. (A bootlegged cult film in China, V for Vendetta was unexpectedly telecast in 2012—a portent taken by some as evidence of the new leader Xi Jinping’s reformism. Dream on….) The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove scenarios illuminated and have come to represent the Kennedy era. Released during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the former posited a brainwashed assassin and a fascist coup; made after the crisis, the latter envisioned the end of the world.

While these movies (and A Face in the Crowd ) are self-aware political scenarios, less artful ones abound. Anything but apolitical, Reagan-era action flicks like First Blood (1982) and Top Gun (1986) are too frankly propagandist to be allegories. Westerns, however, as the genre that exemplified America, were implicitly political (Italian as well as American). Rich in Cold War tropes, John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), an anti-blacklist allegory that gave Solidarnosc its poster image and became the favorite film of presidents Eisenhower, Clinton, and George W. Bush, got one vote each.

Particularly during the Cold War, science fiction tended toward political allegory. No less than High Noon (or V for Vendetta ), the scenario advanced by Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers lent itself to multiple, opposite readings. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is one of the most influential political movies ever made—an unfashionably progressive plea for co-existence appearing a year into the Korean War that made so profound an impression on Ronald Reagan that he astonished Mikhail Gorbachev three-plus decades later by recounting the plot. Neither of these films made a single list, but a substantial number of voters read the ultimate ’60s nightmare and original zombie apocalypse film, George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead (#35), as a political allegory of a divided, TV-transfixed, racist America.

Essentially thought experiments, these genre films differ in their imaginative metaphor from more down-to-earth political entertainments-cum-exposés that, in addition to JFK , include two other thrillers dealing with political assassination: Z , set in the early ’60s, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (#14), made in 1970 and set in the fascist 1930s. The opposite of imaginative political scenarios are movies made to commemorate. The Top 50 included three monumental examples. The most cited was Claude Lanzmann’s ninth-place Shoah , a nine-and-a-half-hour portrait of Holocaust witnesses and survivors.

Five-hours-plus and, at #17, the highest-ranked twenty-first-century film (as well as only one of four movies in the Top 100 set in the nineteenth century), Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) restaged the Paris Commune as it might have been reported on live TV. The Battle of Chile (1975–79), Patricio Guzmán’s three-part, four-and-a-half-hour chronicle of the 1973 coup against elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, also finished in the Top 20, along with Alain Resnais’s short Night and Fog (1956) and Ava DuVernay’s Selma , commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade for voting rights.

As befits its spot atop the poll, The Battle of Algiers is both commemoration and scenario (and also, thanks in part to Ennio Morricone’s thrilling score, entertainment). On one hand, the movie is appreciated for its seemingly objective documentary realism. On the other, it has been taken as a metaphor for urban guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, Iraq, and the United States, understood as a warning and even an instruction manual—a source of inspiration for radical groups like the Black Panthers and an object of study by the Pentagon and the CIA.

A political film is political not only for what it shows but for what it does. “The problem,” according to Jean-Luc Godard, who led the poll in titles with six films nominated in addition to La Chinoise, “is not to make political films but to make films politically.”

Thus, Salt of the Earth was made by blacklisted Hollywood writers and directors, Chantal Akerman’s thirty-sixth-ranked Jeanne Dielman (1975) with an almost all-female crew, and Jafar Panahi’s unranked This Is Not a Film (2011) under a form of house arrest when he was forbidden to make movies. Plug pulled by its Hollywood studio, the 1974 anti-Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds (#39) was self-distributed, albeit by wealthy independents. Oscar Micheaux, the most independent (and impoverished) of independent filmmakers, did not receive a single vote—not even for God’s Step Children (1938), likely the only movie in American history banned by the U.S. Communist Party—although his successor Melvin Van Peebles did get two votes for his one-man Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Produced by Sam Greenlee from his own novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door was financed mostly by Black investors and directed and scored by Black artists. Several scenes of urban insurrection used Gary, Indiana, one of the first large American cities to elect a Black mayor, as a stand-in for Chicago. Like Salt of the Earth , it was hounded by the FBI (with theaters subjected to intimidation), and like Hearts and Minds , it was abandoned by its distributor. Unlike either, however, The Spook Who Sat by the Door became a cult film, leading a fugitive existence circulating on bootleg VHS tapes.

Some took The Battle of Algiers as a manual. The period’s other great Third Worldist film, #32 The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), clandestinely made by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas in the late 1960s, was designed to instruct. What began as a reform-minded short grew into a four-hour-plus history of left-wing Peronism fashioned largely from interviews and newsreel footage. Dangerous to show in its native Argentina even as it provocatively addressed spectator passivity, Furnaces was structured to create space for discussion.

Nearly six hours long, made for but buried by French television, La Commune (Paris, 1871) integrates that discussion within itself in its critique of the medium. Arguably the most original political film since Battleship Potemkin , if not The Birth of a Nation , La Commune is doubly pedagogical—made to educate its participants as well as its audience. The movie was shot in chronological order in approximately two weeks, after 16 months of preproduction during which the large cast, many of whom were political activists, had to research their characters. Actors merged with their characters as the events of 1871 reflected the situation of France in 2000.

However unusual, these politically made films are all professional motion pictures. A whole other stratum, all but unrecognized in the poll, dates to the early 1930s, with the footage of strikes and demonstrations shot by the Communist-allied Workers Film and Photo League and its European analogues. Not simply documentaries, these films were organizing tools meant to be shown in union halls and at political gatherings. This activist tradition was revived and elaborated in the late 1960s by various New Left collectives, including Newsreel , Third World Newsreel , and the Medvedkin Group , as well as other exponents of what Cuban theorist Julio García Espinosa called “imperfect cinema.”

As so-called guerrilla newsreels were facilitated by lightweight 16-millimeter and later video cameras, the development of the camera-phone in the early twenty-first century created a new sort of political cinema. The 2009 Iranian “Green Movement” and the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war that broke out two years later brought short, phone-made video newsreels and political statements, often uploaded to YouTube. The British filmmaker Peter Snowdon curated a number of these “vernacular videos” in his 2013 feature, The Uprising . The French journalist David Dufresne went a step further with his 2020 documentary, The Monopoly of Violence , using vernacular videos produced during the gilets jaunes demonstrations in France to create a dialogue among police, demonstrators, and the official media. (Dufresne was live-streaming demonstrations during the recent mass protests.)

Political cinema is no longer the province of professionals, if indeed it ever was. One respondent put the 26-second, 8-millimeter Zapruder footage , taken in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, third on their list, behind Shoah and Triumph of the Will . If the Zapruder footage illuminated history, Darnella Frazier’s 10-minute phone-camera documentation of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020 changed it.

There is a case to be made that, along with the various amateur recordings of the January 6 storming of Congress, Frazier’s 10-minute film belongs with the most significant political documentaries made in America over the past few years, if not ever. Because the personal really is the political.`

The New Republic thanks Hoberman for curating this special issue and Julian Epp for his Stakhanovite (as Eisenstein might have put it) labors on its behalf.

J. Hoberman was a staff writer and film critic at The Village Voice for three decades. He currently teaches a yearly seminar in the film department at Columbia University and has written over a dozen books, including The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism and, most recently, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan .

Film Analysis

What this handout is about.

This handout introduces film analysis and and offers strategies and resources for approaching film analysis assignments.

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan.

Watching the film

First it’s important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye. Consider why you’ve been assigned to watch a film and write an analysis. How does this activity fit into the course? Why have you been assigned this particular film? What are you looking for in connection to the course content? Let’s practice with this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Here are some tips on how to watch the clip critically, just as you would an entire film:

• Give the clip your undivided attention at least once. Pay close attention to details and make observations that might start leading to bigger questions.
• Watch the clip a second time. For this viewing, you will want to focus specifically on those elements of film analysis that your class has focused on, so review your course notes. For example, from whose perspective is this clip shot? What choices help convey that perspective? What is the overall tone, theme, or effect of this clip?
• Take notes while you watch for the second time. Notes will help you keep track of what you noticed and when, if you include timestamps in your notes. Timestamps are vital for citing scenes from a film!

For more information on watching a film, check out the Learning Center’s handout on watching film analytically . For more resources on researching film, including glossaries of film terms, see UNC Library’s research guide on film & cinema .

Brainstorming ideas

Once you’ve watched the film twice, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas based on your notes. Brainstorming is a major step that helps develop and explore ideas. As you brainstorm, you may want to cluster your ideas around central topics or themes that emerge as you review your notes. Did you ask several questions about color? Were you curious about repeated images? Perhaps these are directions you can pursue.

If you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can use the connections that you develop while brainstorming to draft a thesis statement . Consider the assignment and prompt when formulating a thesis, as well as what kind of evidence you will present to support your claims. Your evidence could be dialogue, sound edits, cinematography decisions, etc. Much of how you make these decisions will depend on the type of film analysis you are conducting, an important decision covered in the next section.

After brainstorming, you can draft an outline of your film analysis using the same strategies that you would for other writing assignments. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you prepare for this stage of the assignment:

• Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment, so your thesis should answer what the prompt asks. Check with your professor if you are unsure.
• In most cases, the director’s name is used to talk about the film as a whole, for instance, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .” However, some writers may want to include the names of other persons who helped to create the film, including the actors, the cinematographer, and the sound editor, among others.
• When describing a sequence in a film, use the literary present. An example could be, “In Vertigo , Hitchcock employs techniques of observation to dramatize the act of detection.”
• Finding a screenplay/script of the movie may be helpful and save you time when compiling citations. But keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
• Go beyond describing basic film elements by articulating the significance of these elements in support of your particular position. For example, you may have an interpretation of the striking color green in Vertigo , but you would only mention this if it was relevant to your argument. For more help on using evidence effectively, see the section on “using evidence” in our evidence handout .

Also be sure to avoid confusing the terms shot, scene, and sequence. Remember, a shot ends every time the camera cuts; a scene can be composed of several related shots; and a sequence is a set of related scenes.

Different types of film analysis

As you consider your notes, outline, and general thesis about a film, the majority of your assignment will depend on what type of film analysis you are conducting. This section explores some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the interpretation of signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors and analogies to both inanimate objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

For instance, a writer could explore the symbolism of the flowers in Vertigo by connecting the images of them falling apart to the vulnerability of the heroine.

Here are a few other questions to consider for this type of analysis:

• What objects or images are repeated throughout the film?
• How does the director associate a character with small signs, such as certain colors, clothing, food, or language use?
• How does a symbol or object relate to other symbols and objects, that is, what is the relationship between the film’s signs?

Many films are rich with symbolism, and it can be easy to get lost in the details. Remember to bring a semiotic analysis back around to answering the question “So what?” in your thesis.

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

For example, you could take the same object from the previous example—the flowers—which meant one thing in a semiotic analysis, and ask instead about their narrative role. That is, you might analyze how Hitchcock introduces the flowers at the beginning of the film in order to return to them later to draw out the completion of the heroine’s character arc.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

• How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?
• What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?
• Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

When writing a narrative analysis, take care not to spend too time on summarizing at the expense of your argument. See our handout on summarizing for more tips on making summary serve analysis.

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

For example, the clip from Vertigo depicts a man observing a woman without her knowing it. You could examine how this aspect of the film addresses a midcentury social concern about observation, such as the sexual policing of women, or a political one, such as Cold War-era McCarthyism.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

• How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?
• How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?
• How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing. For example, in the clip from Vertigo , a mise-en-scène analysis might ask how numerous elements, from lighting to camera angles, work together to present the viewer with the perspective of Jimmy Stewart’s character.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

• What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
• How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?
• How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.

Reviewing your draft

Once you have a draft, it’s helpful to get feedback on what you’ve written to see if your analysis holds together and you’ve conveyed your point. You may not necessarily need to find someone who has seen the film! Ask a writing coach, roommate, or family member to read over your draft and share key takeaways from what you have written so far.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. 1988. L’analyse Des Films . Paris: Nathan.

Media & Design Center. n.d. “Film and Cinema Research.” UNC University Libraries. Last updated February 10, 2021. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/filmresearch .

Oxford Royale Academy. n.d. “7 Ways to Watch Film.” Oxford Royale Academy. Accessed April 2021. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/7-ways-watch-films-critically/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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This is England: Narrative and Ideology

Binary opposites (Theory by Levi Strauss) How are they used to achieve narrative or aesthetic tension?

Levi Strauss argues that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular culture as more valued than the other (Meadows deliberately places us to side more with Woody than Combo etc)

Skinheads vs Racists Two different types of Skinhead culture presented. Rise in discrimination partly due to economic recession leading to working class insecurities about the stability of their homes/jobs (see ethnic minorities as threats – time of significant unemployment/de-industrialisation).

Youth vs Old

Left-Wing vs Right-Wing (Liberal vs Conservative)

Patriotism vs Nationalism

Violent Masculinity vs Hegemonic Masculinity

White vs Black

Acceptance vs Isolation

Enemies: Foreign vs Domestic

Narrative/Character Development

Opening sequence introducing Shaun : introduces his youthful presence as well as his isolation and discontent with his surroundings (contrasts his later friendship with Woody’s friends as well as contextualising why he joins combo’s gang: in order to achieve a sense of belonging and associate with a new father-figure)

Shaun’s friendship with Woody and pals montage : Shaun has found a purpose in joining the skinhead movement. Introduces other characters and the relationships Shaun forms with them.

Combo arriving at the party

Combo’s This is England Monologue : the catalyst for the central conflict of the film between Woody’s ideology and Combo’s ideology and the trigger for the destruction of Shaun’s friendship with Woody’s group.

Shaun’s conversion to Combo’s racist gang (Combo scaring little boys, robbing Sandhu) : Shaun is transformed as a character becoming corrupted by racism. Although the audience is positioned with Shaun throughout, we are not encouraged to be persuaded by Combo’s views in the way he is thus we become detached from him/aware of his delusion.

Combo beating Milky : catharsis at the end of the film that signifies the extreme level of racism in the 1980s and exemplifies how things have gone too far. This moment also triggers Shaun’s return to his old self as he leaves Combo’s ideology behind him (shown when he throws the flag into the sea) and returns to his isolated presence at the beginning of the film (cyclical narrative).

Ideology (messages and values) embedded in the film by the filmmakers

Differences in characters to strengthen ideological messages (e.g. Woody vs Combo)

Skinhead vs Racism

When Shaun is introduced to Woody’s skinheads, he maintains his character (doesn’t stray from himself the only changes made are to his style and his acceptance by other characters); contrastingly when he joins Combo he is transformed as a character in terms of personality as well as style. Exposes the complexity of the skinhead movement in the 1980s.

Masculinity

The male characters are shown to have violent tendencies rooted in them. In the first scene following Shaun we see him engage in a fistfight at school and Woody and his friends use “rough” humour with each other etc. The violence can be traced to the ideology projected onto them: Combo enforces a strong masculinity (telling Shaun not to cry because “real men don’t cry”) and even the school teacher violently punishing Shaun and the bully for their fight will inevitably contribute to the boys developing ideologies. Father figures: opening shot of Shaun’s deceased father, Woody and Combo both act as surrogate father figures for Shaun.

Masculinity vs Femininity

Gender doesn’t appear to matter within Woody’s group: they are all encapsulated in the skinhead movement (the style, music etc) regardless of their identification.

Anti-Nationalist and Anti-Thatcher

Combo represents nationalism and is portrayed as a bully and violent character etc and his gang are presented as poorly-educated followers searching for purpose/ a place in society. Combo’s monologue criticises political climate, repeated loud shrill oice of Thatcher on the radio throughout, anti-Thatcher graffiti etc all used to clearly indicate that Meadows is challenging Thatcher’s policies/approaches.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Hollywood and Politics

Introduction.

• The Silent Film Era
• Studio System Era
• The New Hollywood Era
• Hollywood in Contemporary America

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Hollywood and Politics by Kathryn Cramer Brownell , Emilie Raymond LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0195

Scholars in history and cinema and media studies have explored various aspects of the relationship between Hollywood and politics. Over the course of the 20th century, Hollywood movies and entertainers within the industry have impacted national politics, influenced cultural constructions of American identity, and affected social change as well. The industry has shaped and been shaped by local, state, national, and international political pressures, decisions, and negotiations. This article focuses on how political priorities within Hollywood have changed over time and how the broader political environment has impacted film production, industry structures, and opportunities for celebrity political activism. While definitions of “politics” can vary, this article focuses on individual involvement with the political process, the construction of political ideology and the creation of national identity through film, propaganda efforts, the shifting political priorities of the industry, and the impact of local, state, and national politics on motion picture productions and business structures. By approaching the topic chronologically through the different “eras” of Hollywood filmmaking, the essay shows how the motion picture industry’s political concerns contributed to and were a product of changing cultural, social, and economic circumstances. At times, the overt politicization of Hollywood has caused intense controversy. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into the Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry during the 1940s and 1950s brought international attention to concerns about the political potential of motion picture propaganda and celebrity political activism. During the 1960s, movie stars became more active in grassroots movements and national politics. The following decade, as Hollywood movies were freed from the regulations of the Hays Code and the strict confines of studio system production regulations, films began to critique American foreign policy and advocate for liberal social and cultural change. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency encouraged more scholars to study the deeper connections between the entertainment industry and politics, which had seemingly reached an apex with the actor-turned-politician taking the presidential oath of office on 20 January 1981. During Reagan’s administration, scholars further assessed how American film had transformed American culture and politics. Amidst Ronald Reagan’s use of stories and Hollywood imagery to advance domestic and international policies, historians also pursued archival research about the politics of such imagery and the meaning of silver-screen images and constructions of American identity through film. As the vast range of scholarship exposes, since the beginning of the motion picture industry, movies have played an extremely important, if frequently controversial, role in American political culture. Connections between Hollywood and the political arena have permeated the industry in a variety of ways since the early 20th century.

General Overviews

Several works offer broad assessments of 20th-century film history and the impact of Hollywood on American social, political, economic, and cultural structures. The industry began as a tool for labor leaders to preach unionism and a cultural product popular among workers and immigrants in urban centers. The popularization of the industry among a middle-class, and eventually upper-class, public brought dramatic changes in conceptions of Americanism as the screen emerged as a powerful tool for national unity. General overview studies focus on how the politics of the screen impacted American cultural values by pitting the values of a white, Protestant, Victorian culture against those of a more democratic working-class culture derived from newly arrived immigrants. During the 1930s, as the industry grew, sociologists sought to understand the structure and social impact of Hollywood on American culture ( Thorp 1939 ). By World War II, entertainment on the silver screen had become a weapon of war, and the concern over the use of movies in spreading political ideology permeated postwar political debates, ultimately culminating in the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into the Communist subversion of the motion picture industry. Amidst popular concern about the propaganda power of Hollywood films, Powdermaker 1950 presents a critical analysis of the studio system and its economic structures and cultural influence just as the vertical studio system itself had begun to splinter under legal decree. By the 1970s, Sklar 1975 and Jowett 1976 exemplify historical scholarship that offered an analysis of the industry’s political and cultural development. While earlier works, such as Thorp 1939 and Powdermaker 1950 , presented a sociological examination of the motion picture community, Sklar 1975 and Jowett 1976 offer scholarly analyses about the cultural impact of Hollywood Jewish entrepreneurs as they challenged the dominant Protestant political and social hierarchies. Bogle 2016 (first edition published in 1973) discusses how African American actors also challenged political and cultural norms. Subsequent works have shifted their focus to how the consumer-based, democratic culture promoted by Hollywood as an industry impacted and reflected broader changes in the political culture of the United States over the course of the 20th century. Brownstein 1990 explores how a symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and Washington, D.C., developed between the 1920s and the 1990s. Ross 2002 examines the ways that political pressures impact the production of motion pictures through a combination of scholarly articles and primary source documents. Critchlow and Raymond 2009 also provides a range of primary sources for scholars to see the variety of ways that film and celebrities have impacted national politics, while Toplin 2010 analyzes Hollywood’s record of interpreting political history. Ross 2011 divides celebrity activism into six categories: visual politics, electoral politics, issue-oriented politics, movement politics, image politics, and celebrity politics. Scholarship on celebrity political activism shows not just the political experiences or impact of one individual but also the broader power of celebrity-driven publicity to shape strategies of political communication in the increasingly mass-media-oriented world ( Giglio 2014 and Peretti 2012 as well as Brownell 2014 , cited under Studio System Era ).

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films . 5th ed. New York: Continuum, 2016.

A classic study that examines black images in Hollywood films, focusing on the development and evolution of deeply ingrained stereotypes of African Americans during social and political changes from early Hollywood through the 1990s.

Brownstein, Ronald. The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection . New York: Random House, 1990.

Written by a journalist, this book chronicles the “mutual fascination” of the show business world with the political elite. Brownstein examines how Hollywood has increasingly asserted its authority in a political world dependent on television and image.

Critchlow, Donald, and Emilie Raymond, ed. Hollywood and Politics: A Sourcebook . New York: Routledge, 2009.

This sourcebook presents a compilation of primary sources that examines intersections of Hollywood and politics in the electoral realm, public policy, propaganda efforts, social movements, and the construction of cultural values. The book presents private correspondences, public statements, congressional interviews, oral history, and legislative excerpts to provide a well-rounded portrayal of Hollywood’s multifaceted involvement with state and national politics.

Giglio, Ernest. Here’s Looking at You: Hollywood, Film and Politics . 4th ed. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.

DOI: 10.3726/b15627

Examines both the historical relationship between film and politics on the silver screen and in the political arena, ultimately advancing an analysis of how the lines between entertainment and politics (and more broadly fantasy and reality) have become muddled over the course of the 20th century. Originally published in 2000.

Jowett, Garth. Film: The Democratic Art . New York: Little, Brown, 1976.

Examines how the motion picture industry dramatically transformed American society from a fragmented rural nation to an urbanized society with shared cultural values. Rather than focusing on movie productions, Jowett examines the makeup of audiences, censorship pressures, and business structure of the Hollywood that ultimately raised consumption expectations and standards among American citizens.

Peretti, Burt. The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Explores the political use of Hollywood imagery to promote presidents and their policies. By focusing on the image of the “leading man,” Peretti juxtaposes the cinematic portrayal of the Hollywood star with political attempts to do the same with American presidents.

Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood: The Dream Factory . Boston: Little, Brown, 1950.

Written by an anthropologist, this book offers a critical study of what Powdermaker calls the oppressive economic structures and pressures of the studio system. Powdermaker examines the “social structure” in which movies are made, highlighting how the production process, with its business priorities, shapes the values put forth on the silver screen.

Ross, Steven. Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shape American Politics . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Examines the political activism of Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to show strategies employed by celebrity activists to push for political change on the left and the right over the course of the 20th century.

Ross, Steven, ed. Movies and American Society . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.

Provides primary sources and secondary analyses on the longer political and cultural history of Hollywood, from the rise of the Hays Code in the 1920s to the global impact of Hollywood film in contemporary America. Essays in this collection provide the context for the primary documents and examine changing political pressures that film regularly faced in the 20th century.

Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: A Social History of American Movies . New York: Random House, 1975.

This groundbreaking book offers a scholarly analysis of how Hollywood movies shattered the cultural control held in American society by Victorian elites and ushered in the values of mass consumption, ultimately making the country itself “movie made.”

Thorp, Margaret Ferrand. America at the Movies . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939.

This sociological study seeks to understand why eighty-five million Americans flocked to the movies each week, and how the silver screen’s fashions and values impacted American consumption and attitudes. The book also examines the political concerns surrounding censorship and concludes with an examination of the idea of “propaganda” and the debate surrounding the use of movies to disseminate political ideas.

Toplin, Robert. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past . 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Examines how filmmakers have interpreted history on screen, paying special attention to the production process and audience response of twelve Hollywood films. Many portray political figures or significant political events, including Sargent York , Norma Rae , The Patriot , Mississippi Burning , All the President’s Men . Throughout, Toplin analyzes the political culture at the time of each film’s release. Originally published 1996.

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50 best movies about politics

Movies about politics can provide perspective, history, comic relief, and uncanny insight as life sometimes imitates art. As America tumbles through this stormy and unprecedented election year, Stacker took a look at the 50 best films made about politics.

Some offer comfort and wisdom that heroes can prevail, like "Hotel Rwanda" or stirring portrayals of "Lincoln," "Gandhi," and the swashbuckling "Lawrence of Arabia." Others are thrillers that tell of realistic mysteries and conspiracies, like "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty," that keep audiences at the edge of their seats. Many teach lessons from history, such as the generations-long conflict in Northern Ireland, the Cold War, and the historic rifts in the Middle East. "Frost/Nixon" and "All the President's Men" are reminders of corruption in the White House that led to a president's downfall.

William Shakespeare provided tragedies and historic dramas that ring true centuries later, while more contemporary tales like "Network" have become cultural touchstones, with dialogue that has joined the political lexicon. Some are chilling, painting pictures of worlds people hope never to see or nightmarish dystopias set in futuristic, lawless worlds. Some threaten to break hearts with stories of brutality, pain, and compassion. But others make audiences laugh at absurdity, like the twisted comedies "Death of Stalin" and "Dr. Strangelove," the cheery satire of "Being There," or the Marx Brothers' timeless silliness in "Duck Soup."

Nearly all of the best took home armfuls of Oscars and other prestigious honors.

Stacker compiled data on all movies about politics to rank them, using a weighted index split evenly between Aug. 26 IMDb and Metacritic scores. To qualify, the film had to have an explicitly political premise, a Metascore, and at least 5,000 IMDb votes. Ties were broken by Metascore, and further ties were broken by IMDb user rating. Every film on the list has been considered according to the cinematic history and development of political films.

#50. The Constant Gardener (2005)

- Director: Fernando Meirelles - Stacker score: 81 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 129 minutes

“The Constant Gardener,” about the murder of a British diplomat’s wife in Kenya, was based on a novel by John le Carre. It delves into conspiracies and corruption by multinational corporations and governments. Actress Rachel Weisz won an Academy Award, a Golden Globes award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance.

#49. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

- Director: Ken Loach - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 127 minutes

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” about two brothers fighting in the Irish War for Independence, earned director Ken Loach the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. In the film, the director’s biggest commercial success, two brothers join the Irish Republican Army after a friend is killed by the British, but are driven apart as the violence worsens.

#48. Frost/Nixon (2008)

- Director: Ron Howard - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 80 - IMDb user rating: 7.7 - Runtime: 122 minutes

“Frost/Nixon” stars Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in a dramatization of interviews with the former president three years after he left office during the Watergate scandal. Nixon is looking to reshape his legacy, and Frost is trying to overcome doubts that he is up to the task of such a high profile confrontation.

#47. Bridge of Spies (2015)

- Director: Steven Spielberg - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 81 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 142 minutes

Capturing the dark tensions of the Cold War, “Bridge of Spies” is based on the true story of a 1962 prisoner exchange with the U.S.S.R. to bring home American pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union two years earlier. It was drawn from the memoir of lawyer James Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, whose client, a Soviet spy played by Mark Rylance, was being sent home in return. Rylance, a heralded British stage actor, won an Oscar for best supporting actor.

#46. In the Loop (2009)

- Director: Armando Iannucci - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 106 minutes

The political satire "In the Loop" takes a darkly comical look at government missteps, damage control, scheming functionaries, and the media amid the threat of war. It's drawn from the relations between Britain and the United States before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Among its actors was the late James Gandolfini, star of the hit television series "The Sopranos."

#45. Pride (2014)

- Director: Matthew Warchus - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 7.8 - Runtime: 119 minutes

“Pride” tells the story of a group of gay and lesbian activists from London who pitch in to help striking miners in South Wales in 1984, and the friendships that emerged in the process. It is based on a true story , and several of the real-life characters were involved in the making and promotion of the film. Writer Stephen Beresford and producer David Livingstone won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer.

#44. Election 2 (2006)

- Director: Johnnie To - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 93 minutes

Set in the gangster underworld of Hong Kong, action film “Election 2” is the saga of a bloody fight for power as the head of a crime syndicate faces a lower-ranking challenger. It features violent scenes of torture, bludgeoning, and rabid dog attacks. It follows the first “Election” film and was also released under the title “Triad Election.”

#43. Sicario (2015)

- Director: Denis Villeneuve - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 121 minutes

The U.S.-Mexico border provides the setting for “Sicario,” a thriller about corruption, duplicity, and ethics of the U.S.-led war on drugs. Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent, joined in battle by Josh Brolin, playing a government task force officer, and Benicio del Toro as a former cartel member with a dangerous past. It was praised for its cinematography of the desert landscape, dramatic aerials, and tense action scenes inside a smuggling tunnel.

#42. BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017)

- Director: Robin Campillo - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 143 minutes

AIDS activists in Paris in the 1990s are the focus of “ BPM (Beats Per Minute) .” The kinetic drama portrays their passions, struggles, and conflicts as they face the growing health crisis and try to spur the government and pharmaceutical companies into action. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but is considered to have been snubbed by the Oscars.

#41. Henry V (1989)

- Director: Kenneth Branagh - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 137 minutes

Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in this film version of William Shakespeare's battle-filled "Henry V." The historical drama follows the newly crowned monarch as he makes plans to invade France, beset by betrayals, treachery, and power struggles. It features Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson, Ian Holm, Judi Dench, and Christian Bale.

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#40. Hamlet (1948)

- Director: Laurence Olivier - Stacker score: 82 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 154 minutes

This version of Shakepeare’s drama, starring Laurence Olivier, is the one by which all others are measured many decades later. “Hamlet” won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor. Olivier focused on a psychological interpretation of the play, like Hamlet’s Oedipus complex, and his decision to cut out large sections of the play rankled some. It uses long, slow shots and shadowy, misty camerawork that underscores Hamlet’s indecision and isolation.

#39. Lincoln (2012)

- Director: Steven Spielberg - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 86 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 150 minutes

Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his lead performance in “Lincoln,” which also won an Oscar for production. The drama explored the president’s political maneuvering, oratory talents, and moral courage as he tried to build support for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery and unite a divided country against the backdrop of Civil War carnage.

#38. Milk (2008)

- Director: Gus Van Sant - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 128 minutes

Gus Van Sant’s film “Milk” follows Harvey Milk as he grows into his historic role as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the country. Sean Penn’s character moves to San Francisco, where he is elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977 and becomes a voice for gay rights. Penn won an Academy Award for best actor, and writer Dustin Lance Black won for best writing of an original screenplay.

#37. Gandhi (1982)

- Director: Richard Attenborough - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 191 minutes

“Gandhi” won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, and best actor, which went to Ben Kingsley for his portrayal of the Indian leader. The film is a lengthy biopic of Mahatma Gandhi’s life as he gives up his possessions, cultivates nonviolent resistance, and leads the cause of Indian independence. In making the film , a crowd of a half million people was needed for its funeral scene, so the filmmakers donated to various charities in exchange for help getting people to appear. The film had more than 430 speaking parts and nearly 30,000 paid extras.

#36. Russian Ark (2002)

- Director: Aleksandr Sokurov - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 86 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 99 minutes

"Russian Ark" is an experimental political fantasy about a 19th-century aristocrat who travels through time, arriving at historical events and meeting historical figures portrayed in the Winter Palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The film was shot in one day in a single continuous shot, using hundreds of actors throughout almost three-quarters of a mile of the Hermitage's courtyards and corridors.

#35. The Death of Stalin (2017)

- Director: Armando Iannucci - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 88 - IMDb user rating: 7.2 - Runtime: 107 minutes

“ The Death of Stalin ” is a black comedy about the machinations of the Soviet leader’s coterie of advisors and Central Committee members as he is dying. They jockey for power and position, hide from responsibility and making decisions, and busily plot against one another. Risque and darkly funny, it features Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Isaacs, and Rupert Friend.

#34. Hotel Rwanda (2004)

- Director: Terry George - Stacker score: 83 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 8.1 - Runtime: 121 minutes

Don Cheadle starred as the manager in “ Hotel Rwanda ,” a Hutu who sheltered and protected some 1,200 Tutsi and Hutu people during the bloody genocide of a million people in 1994. The film was based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, who recently was detained by Rwandan authorities on charges of terrorism, arson, and murder. He has become a critic of the Rwandan government, which has accused him of supporting opposition rebels.

#33. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

- Director: Paul Schrader - Stacker score: 84 - Metascore: 81 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 120 minutes

“ Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ” portrays the life, works, and final day of Japanese playwright and author Yukio Mishima, who publicly killed himself by the rite of seppuku, or disembowelment, and had himself decapitated by a follower. The film delves into his torments, his intensity, and his fanatical belief in waging a mutiny to overthrow democracy and restore Japan’s emperor to power. It features a highly regarded score by composer Philip Glass.

#32. American Hustle (2013)

- Director: David O. Russell - Stacker score: 84 - Metascore: 90 - IMDb user rating: 7.2 - Runtime: 138 minutes

“American Hustle,” a political crime caper, is based on the true story of Abscam , an FBI sting staged in the late 1970s. In the scheme, FBI agents impersonated Arab sheikhs seeking citizenship, building permits, casino licenses, and other favors, offering cash to politicians who would help. The sting led to several convictions, including a U.S. senator, six members of the House, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and city council members in Philadelphia. Nominated for 10 Oscars, “American Hustle” starred Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner. When U.S. public sentiment later changed, Abscam came to be viewed as an expensive entrapment plot, and the U.S. Attorney General issued guidelines limiting undercover operations aimed at elected officials.

#31. Traffic (2000)

- Director: Steven Soderbergh - Stacker score: 84 - Metascore: 86 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 147 minutes

" Traffic " is set in the thick of America's war on drugs, weaving together stories of cartels, smuggling, politics, addiction, law enforcement, and corruption. It earned four Academy Awards, including best director for Steven Soderbergh and best supporting actor for Benicio Del Toro. The film was based on an award-winning European miniseries from 1989.

#30. Brazil (1985)

- Director: Terry Gilliam - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 132 minutes

The futuristic story of “Brazil” centers on a technocrat trying to escape a dystopian, nightmarish tangle of bureaucracy and technology. Disturbing and absurd, the film was directed by Terry Gilliam, a former member of the comic troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Gilliam was born in the United States and renounced his U.S. citizenship for British in 2006.

#29. Being There (1979)

- Director: Hal Ashby - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 130 minutes

In the satirical “Being There,” Peter Sellers plays a gardener with a simple naivete who is mistaken for a political sage and rises to Washington’s highest echelons. With gentle humor, the film makes fun of politics, the media, and public gullibility. The film earned a best supporting actor Oscar for Melvyn Douglas.

#28. The Edge of Heaven (2007)

- Director: Fatih Akin - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 85 - IMDb user rating: 7.8 - Runtime: 122 minutes

The German film “The Edge of Heaven” looks at a host of political, cultural, and social issues as it interweaves the stories of three families in Germany and Turkey. It tackles thorny questions of immigration, class, religion, activism, radicalism, and idealism. Released in Germany with the title “Auf der anderen Seite” or “On the Other Side,” it was awarded for best screenplay at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

#27. Children of Men (2006)

- Director: Alfonso Cuarón - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 102 minutes

“ Children of Men ” is a bleak science-fiction thriller set in a squalid, collapsing world besieged by xenophobia, hatred, terror, and chaos in which women can no longer bear children. The movie was celebrated for its long, uninterrupted action shots, and it won British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards for cinematography and production design.

#26. Argo (2012)

- Director: Ben Affleck - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 86 - IMDb user rating: 7.7 - Runtime: 120 minutes

"Argo" is a tense thriller about the real-life rescue of six Americans who were trapped in Iran and hiding at the residence of the Canadian ambassador during the 1979 hostage crisis. Led by a CIA operative played by Ben Affleck, the risky plan called for them to escape while posing as a Canadian film crew. "Argo" gets a boost from actors John Goodman and Alan Arkin as Hollywood characters who help produce the phony movie and Bryan Cranston as Affleck's boss.

#25. Incendies (2010)

- Director: Denis Villeneuve - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 80 - IMDb user rating: 8.3 - Runtime: 131 minutes

Shot in Jordan, “Incendies” is the story of adult twins, a brother and sister, who travel to the Middle East to fulfill their mother’s dying wishes and find family they never knew. On their journey , they learn of the politics, war, and horrors that shaped their mother’s life. “Incendies” is a Canadian movie, based on a stage play, with dialogue in French and Arabic, and it was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film.

#24. The Fool (2014)

- Director: Yuriy Bykov - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 116 minutes

In the Russian drama “The Fool,” a morally upright plumber does battle with an army of corrupt and greedy bureaucrats. At stake are the lives of hundreds of residents living in a building poised to collapse. Underscoring the dismal saga, the movie is set entirely at night.

#23. Network (1976)

- Director: Sidney Lumet - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 8.1 - Runtime: 121 minutes

In “ Network ,” a scathing takedown of political culture and the news media, television anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, comes unraveled as his network is taken over by a multinational conglomerate. His memorable character gave the world the now oft-quoted line: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” More than four decades on, “Network” gets kudos for its insight into political demagoguery, corporate power, and the integrity of journalism. It won four Oscars—best screenplay for Paddy Chayefsky, best supporting actress for Beatrice Straight, best actress for Faye Dunaway, and best actor for Finch, who died before the awards ceremony was held.

#22. Downfall (2004)

- Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 8.2 - Runtime: 156 minutes

“Downfall,” released in German as “Der Untergang,” depicts the last days in the life of Adolf Hitler as the Third Reich collapses in defeat in 1945. It’s set in Berlin in Hitler’s labyrinth bunker underground and in the fighting in the streets above. The movie is based in part on a memoir by Hitler’s personal secretary Traudl Junge, who was with Hitler in his final days. Excerpts of interviews with Junge, who was jailed after the war, are included in the film.

#21. All the President's Men (1976)

- Director: Alan J. Pakula - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 138 minutes

Based on the true story of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, "All the President's Men" recounts the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974. The reporters cover a seemingly minor break-in at the Democratic Party's national headquarters and, suspicions aroused, "follow the money" under the guidance of the mysterious source Deep Throat and the courageous wisdom of Post editor Ben Bradlee. It earned four Oscars, including best supporting actor for Jason Robards, who played Bradlee, and best screenplay for William Goldman.

#20. The Queen (2006)

- Director: Stephen Frears - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 91 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 103 minutes

“ The Queen ” provides a fictionalized glimpse of royal life when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in 1997. It delves into the emotional and political response of the Queen, played by Helen Mirren, and others in the royal family as they struggle with how to respond to the public’s deep mourning. Mirren won the Oscar for best actress.

#19. Kagemusha (1980)

- Director: Akira Kurosawa - Stacker score: 85 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 162 minutes

The drama “ Kagemusha ,” set in feudal Japan, portrays a thief who, because of his appearance, is pressed into service as a double for a slain warlord. The film is filled with epic battles and political intrigue. Hollywood’s George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped Kurosawa get financing when he ran into budget trouble. The film took nine months to shoot, with 200 specially trained horses shipped to Japan from the United States and 5,000 extras used in its battle scene finale.

#18. In the Name of the Father (1993)

- Director: Jim Sheridan - Stacker score: 86 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 8.1 - Runtime: 133 minutes

Based on a true story, “In the Name of the Father” recounts the case of the Guildford Four—four men accused of being members of the provisional IRA and bombing a London pub in 1974, killing several people. They were convicted and sentenced to life in prison amid doubts over their guilt. The film draws from the memoir of one of the men, Gerry Conlon, played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

#17. Bloody Sunday (2002)

- Director: Paul Greengrass - Stacker score: 86 - Metascore: 90 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 107 minutes

“ Bloody Sunday ” tells the story of the fatal shooting of 13 unarmed civilians during a demonstration in Northern Ireland in 1972. Based on true events, it’s filmed like a documentary and tensions build as marchers face off with uneasy British soldiers. Actor James Nesbitt and director Paul Greengrass were winners at the British Independent Film Awards. The film credits list the names of those killed, and U2’s song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” plays over a darkened screen when the credits finish.

#16. The Favourite (2018)

- Director: Yorgos Lanthimos - Stacker score: 86 - Metascore: 91 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 119 minutes

In "The Favourite," actress Olivia Colman portrays a sickly, petulant Queen Anne playing her closest confidants against one another. While England is at war with France, life in the palace is a nest of treachery, political shenanigans, and debauchery. Colman scooped up an Oscar, Golden Globes award, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for her performance.

#15. Spartacus (1960)

- Director: Stanley Kubrick - Stacker score: 86 - Metascore: 87 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 197 minutes

The epic film “Spartacus” recounts a slave revolt led by Spartacus, played by Kirk Douglas, against the Roman Empire. The cast included such greats as Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov who won an Oscar for best supporting actor. It also won a Golden Globes award for best motion picture—drama.

#14. To Be or Not to Be (1942)

- Director: Ernst Lubitsch - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 86 - IMDb user rating: 8.2 - Runtime: 99 minutes

The satirical “To Be or Not to Be” revolves around a Polish theater troupe that is drawn into spying during the Nazi occupation. Despite its dark setting, the film is considered a comic masterpiece . It starred Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash a month before its release.

#13. The King’s Speech (2010)

- Director: Tom Hooper - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 88 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 118 minutes

“ The King’s Speech ” is based on the true story of Britain’s King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II’s father, as he struggled to overcome a stutter and secure his public image as the country stood at the brink of war. He was helped by speech therapist Lionel Logue, whose diary about working with the king was used in making the film. The monarch was played by Colin Firth, who won an Oscar for his lead performance. The film also won Oscars for best picture, best director, and best original screenplay.

#12. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

- Director: Kathryn Bigelow - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 95 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 157 minutes

“ Zero Dark Thirty ” is a thriller based on the U.S. hunt for Osama bin Laden and depicted the controversial use of torture in prisoner interrogation. The star of the movie is Jessica Chastain, who played a CIA counterterrorism officer and won a Golden Globes award.

#11. Persepolis (2007)

- Directors: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi - Stacker score: 89 - Metascore: 90 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 96 minutes

Based on a graphic novel, "Persepolis" is an animated film about an Iranian girl named Marjane during the Islamic Revolution in the 1970s. She is sent away for her protection from the rise in fundamental extremism, but returns several years later. Voices are provided by Chiara Mastroianni as Marjane, Catherine Deneuve as her mother—and Mastroianni's real-life mother, Sean Penn as her father, and Gena Rowlands as her grandmother.

#10. Duck Soup (1933)

- Director: Leo McCarey - Stacker score: 89 - Metascore: 93 - IMDb user rating: 7.8 - Runtime: 69 minutes

“ Duck Soup ” is a Marx Brothers classic featuring Groucho as Rufus T. Firefly, the ruler of Fredonia; Zeppo as his secretary; and Harpo and Chico as enemy spies for a neighboring country. The movie with its suggestive insults and double entendres was made just before the Hays Code , which set “moral standards” for movies, was fully enforced in Hollywood.

#9. The Lives of Others (2006)

- Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - Stacker score: 90 - Metascore: 89 - IMDb user rating: 8.4 - Runtime: 137 minutes

Set in Berlin in 1984, “ The Lives of Others ” is a haunting drama about an East German intelligence officer whose job it is to spy on a successful playwright. As the agent listens in on the intimate details of the playwright’s life, he comes to question the decency, morality, and humanity of his job. The film won an Oscar for best foreign language film.

#8. The Irishman (2019)

- Director: Martin Scorsese - Stacker score: 90 - Metascore: 94 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 209 minutes

In Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” an aged hitman played by Robert De Niro reflects on his life and his involvement with the disappearance of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa. It also stars mobster film veterans Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel. Financed by Netflix, the film is three-and-a-half hours long.

#7. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

- Director: John Frankenheimer - Stacker score: 90 - Metascore: 94 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 126 minutes

“The Manchurian Candidate” is a Cold War thriller about a prisoner of war who is brainwashed as part of a Communist conspiracy against the United States to become a political assassin. It starred Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Frank Sinatra, who helped finance the production. Sinatra got President John F. Kennedy to support the making of the film when executives at United Artists balked at the subject matter.

#6. The Battle of Algiers (1966)

- Director: Gillo Pontecorvo - Stacker score: 92 - Metascore: 96 - IMDb user rating: 8.1 - Runtime: 121 minutes

" The Battle of Algiers " recreates scenes from the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the 1950s. A classic of cinema verite, it was shot in black-and-white documentary style, unflinchingly portraying urban warfare, bomb blasts, and rioting mobs.

#5. The Conformist (1970)

- Director: Bernardo Bertolucci - Stacker score: 94 - Metascore: 100 - IMDb user rating: 8 - Runtime: 113 minutes

“ The Conformist ” follows a member of an Italian fascist organization ordered to assassinate a political dissident who is his former university professor. The dark, shady imagery and eerily confining sets of the film, considered a political masterpiece, provide a backdrop to the assassin on his way to fulfilling his duty.

#4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

- Director: Stanley Kubrick - Stacker score: 94 - Metascore: 97 - IMDb user rating: 8.4 - Runtime: 95 minutes

“Dr. Strangelove” is a black comedy about a wildly unhinged general threatening to launch a nuclear bomb attack against the Soviet Union, convinced that the Communists have poisoned the American water supply with fluoride. Peter Sellars plays three roles with panache in the Cold War satire , including U.S. President Merkin Muffley and the heavily accented Dr. Strangelove, whose gloved arm uncontrollably flies into Nazi salutes.

#3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

- Director: David Lean - Stacker score: 95 - Metascore: 100 - IMDb user rating: 8.3 - Runtime: 228 minutes

The epic “Lawrence of Arabia” is based on the story of T.E. Lawrence, an English officer who banded together Arab tribes in World War I in Britain’s battles against the Turks. Played by Peter O’Toole, Lawrence led surprise raids, perilous desert journeys, and daring rescues. It took home seven Oscars, including best picture, best director, and best color cinematography.

#2. Citizen Kane (1941)

- Director: Orson Welles - Stacker score: 95 - Metascore: 100 - IMDb user rating: 8.3 - Runtime: 119 minutes

Orson Welles was director, producer, and star of “Citizen Kane,” the story of an enigmatic newspaper tycoon. It follows the efforts of a reporter trying to decipher why the once powerful Charles Foster Kane died alone and the meaning of his last word, “Rosebud.” Claiming it constituted defamation, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst tried to stop the release of the film and would not allow it to be advertised in his newspapers.

#1. Schindler's List (1993)

- Director: Steven Spielberg - Stacker score: 95 - Metascore: 94 - IMDb user rating: 8.9 - Runtime: 195 minutes

"Schindler's List" is a powerful, moving film based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who initially used Jews in Krakow's ghetto as free labor for his factory. As he awakens to the realization that they would otherwise be sent to death camps, he schemes to get more workers for his munitions factory. By the war's end, it is estimated that he saved the lives of 1,100 people, several of whom appeared in the final scene of the heart-wrenching film at the grave of the real-life Schindler in Jerusalem. "Schindler's List," which stars Liam Neeson, won seven Oscars, including best picture, best director, best cinematography, and best film editing.

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Tcm screening ‘the most significant political films of all time’ (exclusive).

The movies will run on nine successive Fridays starting Sept. 6 and include guest presenters from Hollywood, journalism and, yes, politics.

By Mike Barnes

Mike Barnes

Senior Editor

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In the run-up to Election Day, TCM is going after the movie lovers’ popular vote by showing 50 films over nine successive Fridays under the banner Making Change: The Most Significant Political Films of All Time .

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Bill maher is confused why charli xcx labeled kamala harris "brat": "it sounds like trump", stephen colbert jokes about false beyoncé dnc rumors, praises kamala harris' speech.

Watch the trailer here .

Making Change showcases half of the movies unveiled by The New Republic in the rankings it released in June 2023. The films on TCM span the years 1915 to 2016 (from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro ); the whole thing kicks off with the No. 1 film on the list, The Battle of Algiers (1966).

(While you’re at it, check out THR’s list of the top 20 political movies , recently curated by chief film critic David Rooney.)

“I learned at an early age that, whether we like it or not, politics intersect with our culture every day,” Ben Mankiewicz (younger brother of Josh) said in a statement. “And the movies, since before the arrival of sound, have long served as a barometer of our political climate.

“This series brings an eclectic mix of filmmakers, actors, political figures and journalists to TCM to discuss a varied selection of brilliant movies. Along the way, we’ll discuss how great films have managed to predict political culture, to reflect it and to challenge it.”

Here’s the full schedule, along with the guest presenters and New Republic rankings (all times Eastern/Pacific):

Friday, Sept. 13 8 p.m. Reds (1981) (Bill Maher – No. 41) 11:30 p.m. The Parallax View (1974) (Kyle Smith – No. 47) 1:30 a.m. Germany, Year Zero (1948) (Alexander Payne – No. 97) 3 a.m. Gabriel Over the White House (1933) (No. 30) 4:30 a.m. The Battleship Potemkin (1925) (No. 7) 6 a.m. The Fog of War (2003) (No. 56) Friday, Sept. 20 8 p.m. Dr. Strangelove (1964) (Spike Lee – No. 3) 9:45 p.m. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) (Stacey Abrams – No. 11) 12:15 a.m. Hearts and Minds (1974) (Phil Mattingly – No. 39) 2:15 a.m. The Lives of Others (2006) (No. 19) 4:45 a.m. Born in Flames (1983) (No. 43) 6:15 a.m. Bicycle Thieves (1948) (No. 52) Friday, Sept. 27 8 p.m. Three Days of the Condor (1975) (Maureen Dowd – No. 72) 10:15 p.m. I Am Not Your Negro (2016) (Sara Sidner – No. 58) 12 a.m. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) (Melissa Etheridge – No. 88) 1:30 a.m. The Last Hurrah (1958) (No. 57) 3:45 a.m. Night of the Living Dead (1968) (No. 35) 5:15 a.m. The Tin Drum (1979) (No. 92)

Friday, Oct. 4 8 p.m. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) (Sally Field – No. 81) 10 p.m. The Best Man (1964) (Josh Mankiewicz – No. 69) 12 a.m. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) (Lonnie Bunch III – No. 95) 1:45 a.m. City Hall (1996) (No. 80) 3:45 a.m. Strike (1924) (No. 25) 5:15 a.m. High and Low (1963) (No. 84)

Friday, Oct. 11 8 p.m. A Face in the Crowd (1957) (Barry Levinson – No. 10) 10:15 p.m. Wag the Dog (1997) (Diane Lane – No. 54) 12 a.m. The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) (Abby Phillip – No. 37) 1:45 a.m. JFK (1991) (No. 34) 5 a.m. Z (1969) (No. 15) 7:15 a.m. Night and Fog (1956) (No. 21)

Friday, Oct. 18 8 p.m. The Birth of a Nation (1915) (Jamelle Bouie – No. 5) 11:30 p.m. Lincoln (2012) (Robert Gates – No. 24) 2:15 a.m. Malcolm X (1992) (No. 22) 6 a.m. Primary (1960) (No. 38)

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The Cinematic Political

DOI link for The Cinematic Political

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In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text’s distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and cinema, the book’s critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds.

The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film (or set of films) constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 25  pages, introduction, chapter chapter 1 | 26  pages, extracting political theory from lars von trier, chapter chapter 2 | 29  pages, toward a critical assessment of “now-time”, chapter chapter 3 | 32  pages, resituating hiroshima, chapter chapter 4 | 33  pages, “the light of reason”, chapter chapter 5 | 32  pages, “borderline justice” 1, chapter chapter 6 | 25  pages, a bi-city cinematic experience, chapter chapter 7 | 26  pages, the phenomenology of the cinema experience, chapter | 5  pages.

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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

‘The people’s bae’: Ndlozi puts an end to rumours of him exiting EFF

Published Aug 26, 2024

Floyd Shivambu’s exit from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has left ripples in the political party, with all eyes on Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi , popularly known as ‘the people’s bae,’ as rumours spread that his exit is imminent.

However, Ndlozi has quelled these speculations with numerous photo ops with EFF leader Julius Malema and subtle subtweets (a post that refers to a particular user without directly mentioning them) on X (formerly Twitter).

On the same platform, Truth and Solidarity Movement leader Mehmed Vefa Dag posted: “Dr Mbuyiseni Quintin Ndlozi has also submitted a resignation letter to the EFF leadership. Now, Julius Malema really has to do some self-introspection.”

But the EFF’s national spokesperson clapped back and quoted the post saying it was rubbish. Ndlozi himself reposted this quote.

Rubbish!! https://t.co/XVM7tUovXk — LeighAnn Mathys (@LeighAnnMathys) August 21, 2024

The EFF commissar also reposted numerous post about the party.

He was also present at Mama Twala, the mother of the EFF KZN provincial chairperson and commissar Mongezi Twala’s funeral on Sunday, at the Osizweni Community Hall in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal.

He passionately gave a rendition of the ‘from Cape to Cairo’ struggle song in which he sang that the Azania (South Africa) will be won by the EFF and led by Malema while the party’s leader watched on and joined in the singing.

♦️Must Watch♦️ We are at Osizweni Community Hall to lay Mama Twala, the mother of the EFF KZN Provincial Chairperson, Commissar Mongezi Twala to rest today. From Cape To Cairo! pic.twitter.com/miyvmbCf9C — Economic Freedom Fighters (@EFFSouthAfrica) August 25, 2024

Under the post, an X user by the handle gistwhere replied : “So emotional because I nearly died last week. Ndlozi ngumntu wethu (He is our person).

“I am a die hard ANC member but watching EFF united like this makes me happy. The EFF needs each other more than before enemies are watching to divide you more,” commented another user, azwivhudzu29804.

Elinoyolo added that there was finally light at the end of the tunnel after weeks of uncertainty and darkness. “Ow Madoda kwatsho kwa Khanya after last weeks darkness. Forward EFF. Forward Fighters.”

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Guest Essay

What the Lobstermen of Maine Tell Us About the Election

By Scott Ellsworth

Mr. Ellsworth, a historian, traveled to Maine for this essay.

Mid-July is peak season on the central Maine coast. The blueberries — the small, low-bush kind long prized by the state’s jam makers and pie bakers — had started to appear in the farmers markets, along with the first of the tomatoes. Bright orange tiger lilies burst from front yards, while Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod line the two-lane roads. The summer light dazzles, falling in soft waves upon the spruce and cedar, and brightening the paint on both midcentury saltboxes and grander Victorian homes. It’s no wonder that people want to come here.

Stonington is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest towns on the Maine coast. Over breakfast one morning at Stonecutters Kitchen, I asked Linda Nelson, the town’s economic and community development director, how many Hallmark movies had been filmed there.

“Not enough,” she replied.

Stonington also happens to be the largest lobster port in America. Dozens of fishing boats are anchored in the harbor, while lobsters caught in nearby Blue Hill, Jericho and Isle au Haut Bays are exported across the country and, more recently, across the globe. I was told by locals that not one of the beautiful wooden homes that form Stonington’s classic picture postcard view is owned by a fishing family, who now live elsewhere on Deer Isle or over the bridge on the mainland. From the perspective of a lobsterman, many of whom have deep Maine roots, the P.F.A.s — People From Away, as locals call them — are a presence to be tolerated. The lobster fishermen and the tourists and part-time residents coexist in two separate worlds, one that is changing beneath the surface.

In a significant political year, when a small group of voters in a few places will most likely shape the answers to pivotal questions about our government, how does a community living out climate change feel to its residents? This part of Maine is represented by a Democrat in Congress, but the district, Maine’s second, has voted for Donald Trump twice by decent margins; this is one of those places where every vote can matter. Here, the punishing demands of the present, how hard everyday work is, how important costs and prices are, make the pivotal nature of this time feel very distant from politics.

During much of the past two decades, record numbers of lobsters have been caught off the Maine coast, providing a steady living for scores of lobster fishermen and their families. But a host of recent pressures has been building up that may upend a way of life that, for some, stretches back for generations. Indeed, as far as climate change goes, Maine’s lobster fishing community may well be America’s own canary in the coal mine.

“Everything has changed. Everything is changing,” said Dana Black, age 50, who is a fourth-generation fisherman and lives with his wife and two daughters over the bridge in Brooksville. “That’s all I’ve done,” he said. Mr. Black got his first job, on a lobster boat, when he was 12. By the time he was in high school he had gotten a taste of what kind of money could sometimes be made on the water. He skipped school one Friday to work as a sternman on an offshore boat, hauling lobster traps. By the time he got back on dry land on Monday, he recalled, “I had made 2,700 bucks.” Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, Mr. Black had found his calling.

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Tony award winner kecia lewis signs with paradigm, breaking news.

• Phil Jones Dies: Longtime CBS News Correspondent Who Reported On Vietnam, Watergate, Politics Was 87

By Ted Johnson

Ted Johnson

Political Editor

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Phil Jones , who as a CBS News correspondent covered some of Washington’s most momentous political battles including Watergate and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, has died. He was 87.

The network said that Jones died over the weekend in Florida. Watch a CBS News tribute reel below.

Jones began his career at an Indiana TV station before leaving to work at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis for seven years. He was one of the first local reporters to go to Vietnam, in 1965, and he later returned, according to the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

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Jones was present on the White House lawn as Richard Nixon resigned and left on Marine One, and then covered the administration of his successor, Gerald Ford.

As Douglas Brinkley wrote in his biography of Cronkite, Jones was part of a “first rate” CBS Evening News lineup in the mid-1970s, “perhaps even hitting a high mark” with its team. “Some media critics credited the success of the CBS Evening News to the excellence of the roving correspondents rather than to the anchor,” Brinkley wrote.

Jones had been transferred to Washington in 1972, covering legal aspects of Watergate from the federal court building. The next year, he was working a Saturday shift when he was assigned to do a story on a day in the life of Ford, then just designated to be the next vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned.

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Later, Jones covered Capitol Hill, including the Iran Contra scandal in 1987 and the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1999. He also was a correspondent for 48 Hours . One of his most memorable assignments for the newsmagazine was interviewing Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry, then suspected of drug use.

CBS News’ Susan Zirinsky wrote on Threads that Jones “did it all.”

“So many stories from all over the globe” she wrote, adding that “he made us better journalists and he made us laugh.”

Jones retired from CBS News in 2001.

Jones grew up on a farm in Indiana, where he recalled in the 2009 interview that he “used to milk cows by hand and drove the tractor, and I was a farm-son. When I was on the farm I wanted to be a broadcaster, and I wanted to be a newsman.”

“I don’t know what inspired it. Suddenly I had this desire to do it,” Jones said in the interview with Richard Norton Smith.

Jones is survived by a son, Paul, and a daughter, Pam, the network said.

Here is CBS News’ video tribute to Jones:

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