“Haiti doesn’t have a voice. It doesn’t have an identity. We, Haitians, need to take back the role of storytellers and tell our own history.” This was one of the reasons for filmmaker Raoul Peck to follow the reconstruction efforts in his home country after the earthquake in January 2010. Peck emphasizes that he was not planning on filming crying women and dead bodies in the streets. His goal was to challenge the country’s role of victim and turn the cameras on those who normally do the storytelling and the observing.

The result is the documentary “Fatal Assistance” (Assistance Mortelle), a painful 100-minute exposé on how international development and humanitarian aid have gone bad. It is a story about well-intentioned donors and aid organizations that have lost themselves in rituals of red tape, having become the inefficient players of a rudderless multinational aid-industry. Last week the documentary had its American premiere during the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in cooperation with the Margaret Mead Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. Peck himself was available for questions after the screening and I had access to an earlier interview that Peck had given to a crew from Haiti Reporters before the film’s first screening in Haiti.

Peck has documented the efforts of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) that was created shortly after the earthquake. With the Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and Bill Clinton as its co-presidents, the IHRC was tasked to oversee the spending of billions of dollars of international assistance in a way that was in alignment with the concerns of Haitians and the Haitian government. It was not new to see that after more than two years of “reconstruction,” too many Haitians are still living in extremely poor living conditions. Or, to quote a man who has lost his house in the earthquake, “in houses that the donors wouldn’t even let their dog live in.” It was new to see a two-hour indictment of those who try to help. The main critiques are that the international organizations left the Haitians and its government out of equation and that subsequently, too much of the money has been spent in terribly inefficient and non-transparent ways.

Economic rules that have long been proven to work elsewhere have been ignored and turned on their head. One example is the problem of NGOs that keep prices and salaries artificially high because it is in the interest of their organizations and their donors, while it ruins the workings of the local market economy and destroys incentives. Another painful phenomenon is the urge and conviction of many do-gooders that this moment in history will be Haiti’s finest hour to start with a clean slate, and en passant can function as a laboratory for people’s craziest ideas. As Priscilla Phelps, an American adviser on housing and neighborhood reconstruction explains in the film, “We’re dealing with what people can think of in their wildest dreams. We had an offer for the development of plastic houses. Plastic houses? But it is not only houses but people come with all kinds of products and ideas!”

Media have long been reinforcing the frame of Haiti as the ultimate example of a failed country. Raoul Peck is tired of the endless refrain that the country is too corrupt, its government too weak and its citizens too helpless. In his film, Peck points the accusing finger at the international organizations, Clinton’s organization chiefly among them, but he lets the Haitian government easily get away without much critical questioning. Only one of the heroes in the film, the Head of Sanitation in Port-au-Prince, squarely puts blame on both the local government and foreign helpers for the overall lack of progress. It causes the film to lose some of its strength and begs the question if this was the trade-off for Peck after getting such extensive access to filming the former prime minister and President René Préval. Interestingly, after the showing in Port-au-Prince, many Haitians were critical of Peck for giving the former Haitian government carte blanche.

While not during the documentary, in interviews Peck admits that corruption in Haiti certainly is a problem, but he says it cannot be used as an excuse. In the meantime, the atmosphere in the streets of Port-au-Prince and among Haitians and the foreign visitors isn’t changing for the better. At a recent conference on investing in Haiti, the Haitian crowd answered a berating of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) practices with cheers and applause. During a walk in the neighborhood of Delmas in Haiti, you will hear young kids at the market place yell at foreigners, “go back to your own country,” and many a disillusioned aid worker is wondering if they have overstayed their welcome.

With his film, Peck wishes to start a discussion, which should have started years ago. And it is not only about Haiti. Of course, discussions about a better approach to foreign aid have been brewing for at least ten years. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly represent the two main camps between a more clinically planned strategy and a local market based approach to foreign assistance. Peck, clearly closer to Easterly, pleads for stronger involvement of the people for whom the assistance is organized in the first place. Peck: “If all these NGOs would have been private companies, they would long have been shut down, and their CEOs would have landed in prison. …We have sixty years of experience of development work. The current approach doesn’t work. It needs to stop.”

These are notes not just for an obituary, but as well for a possible contribution to a broader celebration of Bill Miles’s life and work. I had the pleasure of working with him closely on his first two film projects, but we were friends for fifty years. He died on May 12th.

At the New York Film Festival in 1977, at a time when many held the military and even patriotism in low esteem, more than a few in the audience of generally anti-war film buffs found themselves moved to tears by the patriotic spirit expressed in the first film by African-American filmmaker William Miles, called “Men of Bronze,” about an infantry regiment from Harlem that, along with three others, served as an integral part of the French Army in World War I. That was because the U.S. Army wanted blacks to serve as labor troops, whereas the French needed reinforcements. For many in the audience it may have been the first time in a long while that a love of country had been tapped, and it was done by unwanted black troops in what, under Miles’s direction, became a startlingly good-natured, upbeat attack on American racism. The film went on to repeated broadcasts on PBS and led to Miles’s four-part history of Harlem’s first 370 years, “I Remember Harlem,” another classic of black history.

William Miles became a resident producer at Channel 13, covered many other forgotten chapters of black history from sports to space, and won numerous awards that include an Emmy, the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award, an Oscar nomination, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. His work continues to be seen by PBS viewers, students, and schoolchildren around the country. He always regarded the children as his most important audience.

Bill was born August 19, 1931, on Harlem’s 126^th Street, directly behind the Apollo Theater. As a young kid, he helped the movie projectionist re-wind the films. A graduate of the Benjamin Franklin High School, he found work downtown in the shipping department of a distributor of educational films called Sterling Television. Next door was a company called Killiam Shows that restored and re-issued silent classics, where Bill learned the mechanics of film editing.

At 17, he had joined a National Guard unit in Harlem. It was only years later through the accident of an open door that Bill discovered that a “library” otherwise off limits seemed to be full of flags, helmets, and photos. He got special permission to take a look one weekend, and discovered that his National Guard unit had had an apparently glorious and heroic history, but now had a lot of dusty and curling photos. It was the direct descendant of the “369^th,” the Harlem Hellfighters of World War I. With the cooperation of a sergeant, Bill was able to organize a fund-raising ball in order to buy paint and picture frames to make the collection presentable. Among old newspaper clippings, there was a photo of a black soldier in Paris waving an American flag. Since Miles worked with archival films, he thought the flag waver might be on film somewhere.

When he had saved enough money, he spent his two-week vacation at the National Archives in Washington, and found the flag waver and a lot of other beautifully preserved 35mm film on the 369th. It took a couple of years to save enough to spend another vacation in D.C. and to purchase for starters a small sampling of this treasure trove in 16mm. But then came the skeptics, who, for a variety of reasons, especially during and just after the Vietnam War, saw little potential in the project. I was among them.

One day Bill accosted some elderly chess players on upper Broadway to ask whether by any chance one of them knew anyone who had been with the 369^th, and one of them did. And that’s when “Men of Bronze” started rolling.

Bill had also found in an office a few blocks from Killiam’s one of the regiment’s original white officers, Hamilton Fish II, who had later become a prominent Congressman. Fish had pushed through a bill to construct a monument to the black troops, but did not know what ultimately came of it. So Bill took another trip to Washington to visit the Battle Monuments Commission, which had no record of such a monument, but invited Mr. Miles to come down for a look. Cartons of 8-by-10s had been pulled out for him, and in a long-shot of an obelisk in France, Bill noticed a tiny spot near its base and then saw that this was a bas-relief of a French helmet. The Commission had assumed this indicated a French unit, but Bill knew that it had become the insignia of the regiment when it was incorporated into the French Fourth Army. The Commission had not quite finished giving the obelisk a scrub-down when Bill and I arrived to film it for “Men of Bronze.”

His later film “Liberators,” co-directed with Nina Rosenblum, documented the role of a black tank battalion in World War II that took part in the liberation of concentration camp survivors. The film was simultaneously premiered at the Apollo and on PBS as a catalyst for dialogue throughout the city during racial tensions in Crown Heights. Attacked by some for alleged inaccuracies, it won an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary.

Before and during his creative film work Bill, who lived with his wife Gloria and two daughters in Hollis, Queens, was an active member of local initiatives like the United Block Association (organized among other things to help those wives who cleaned offices to get home safely at night) and a summer basketball league for the kids. In 1995, prompted by the story of a young boy’s death in rural Nepal, Bill lent his support to fund-raising efforts to build a hospital where there had been none before.

Bill remained active, though retired, in preserving the history of the 369^th at the National Guard armory on 135th Street by the FDR Drive. And as long as his health permitted, he was a frequent speaker at showings of his films and numerous award ceremonies around the country. His instincts as a photo researcher really paid off one day when he was nostalgically browsing through Manhattan’s municipal archives of official 1930s photos of its streets. He found his own long-since demolished house behind the Apollo, and there in an upstairs window, looking out at the view, was his mother.

It’s been a tough week: the Boston Marathon Bombing on the public stage, and closer to home, the death of a friend, colleague and great scholar, Aristide Zolberg (I will be publishing tributes, including my own,  later this week), and a memorial service for my wife’s uncle Ed Gruson.

“Uncle Eddie” was an extraordinary man, sophisticated and warm, a bit of a rascal, but also a man of high moral principle in his private and public affairs (dating back to his marching in Selma, Alabama as a young man). My special relationship with Ed: he was the ideal reader, with a deep commitment to understanding the world, a trained biologist and urban planner, author of the birding book Words for Birds, who read broadly and seriously, with a sense of responsibility. Anticipating the end about a year ago, he gave me his complete collection of the works of Isaiah Berlin. Making sense of the chaos, while thinking about meaningful lives, is a challenge. Ed knew that thinkers like Berlin and Hannah Arendt, thinkers in dark times, to paraphrase Arendt’s most beautiful book, are important guides.

And as it happens, I did have a related treat planned for myself at the end of the grim dark tunnel of a week: off to see a movie, the Arendt biopic. It is a good movie, though it’s far from perfect. It powerfully and accurately depicts passionate thought. That is a real accomplishment, pushing the film form: “filmed thinking.”

As I prepare this post, I read two very good positive reviews, one in the distinguished Der Spiegel, the other in the more bohemian, Bitch Media. They highlight the film’s accomplishments, recognizing the great direction of Margarethe von Trotta and the superb performance of Barbara Sukowa, and they applaud how the film tells the story of the great controversy surrounding Arendt’s writing, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and her invention of the notion of “the banality of evil,” which she uses to depict Eichmann as the modern everyman, the thoughtless bureaucrat. The film also neatly portrays Arendt’s love affair and ongoing relationship with Martin Heidegger, in my judgment properly presenting it as an unsolved puzzle.

Arendt’s thought is the hero of the film, embellished by her love of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, her friendship with Mary McCarthy, and her apartment, filled with books, wine, cigarettes and émigré conversation, including between Arendt and Han Jonas, another famous New School philosopher. He couldn’t stand her relationship with Heidegger, dating back to the times they were students together, and in the film it seems that they irrevocably estranged over her Eichmann report. After Arendt’s death, I heard Jonas’s telling improvised and unrecorded commentary on Arendt at a memorial conference at NYU. Said Jonas: “Hannah thought that if she exaggerated an insight, it would become true.”

Of course, there were compromises in the film, which I find very interesting. The most significant, but understandable, is that Arendt is defined by her major public and private controversies, Eichmann and Heidegger, while the range of her original thought is named, but not revealed. Certainly this is an effect of the limits of film and the need to appeal to viewers who don’t know much about Arendt and her cultural world.

But thinking of Uncle Eddie and Ary Zolberg, there is a more telling problem. Arendt’s thinking is a little bit too good in this film, while those who oppose her are a bit too bad.

I admire Arendt. She is my favorite political thinker, as I will explain in my next in-depth post, “Hannah and Me.” Yet, even though her insights concerning the banality of evil are extremely important, explaining the cultural support of tyranny large and small, beyond the Holocaust, Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann is not “the truth” as the film’s Hannah declares. Arendt exaggerated her position, in Eichmann and many of her other books. Her factual reports were not always sound. On these and other grounds, Ary Zolberg was highly critical of her masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And while she may have been right about how thoughtlessness and irresponsibility explain the success of the Nazi death machine, and that the Jewish leadership was implicated, her tone indicated that her feelings for the Jewish people were ambivalent. I think I remember talking to Ed about this.

The movie depiction and Arendt herself may have been right when she asserted that we best confine our love for specific people and not a people, but the way Arendt portrays the Israeli prosecutor and judge, and the masses of Jews of Europe in her text, was problematic. Her tone was wrong, while her philosophy was difficult, challenging and of lasting value. The thought in the end won me over as I will explain in  “Hannah and Me.” Her thought is there for us to consider and qualify at the end of this tough week, as we try to make sense of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Brothers Tsarnaev, not only her notion of the banality of evil, but also her ideas about ideology and its relationship to terror.

“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what has since come to be.”

With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, and how the relationships formed the bases for the pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe.

In today’s post, I return to my experience in 1974 (drawing from the report in my book) to further my dialogue with Dayan Dayan, as we explore together the relationship between “monstration” and power. I report here first my recollections of my “trivial day” and why what seemed so unimportant at the time was of practical significance in Poland back then. I close by highlighting what I take to be the theoretical significance of my little story.

The Arrest

Disorientation is what I remember about that April afternoon in Lublin, when the People’s Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters. The bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin that week were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and others of mediocre quality were in great number. Veteran theater critics, journalists, directors, and actors were generally dissatisfied, particularly with one performance I attended, billed as a “happening.” It took place in a gymnasium and involved little more than a rock soundtrack, a colorful slide show, and some student actors playing with an orange and yellow sheet. When it ended, a group of Polish journalists wanted to make things more interesting. They grabbed the sheet and spread it over themselves. They stood on one another’s shoulders, made pyramids, and horsed around. And then they decided to go outside with their merrymaking and turn the pseudo-happening into the real thing.

The journalists under the sheet led the other members of the audience, along with the actors of the failed performance, down two flights of stairs onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Lublin. And as soon as they hit the street, their act of ordinary horseplay became a public event. Crowds formed on both sides of the street. Theater participants mingled with shoppers, clerks, and workers in marveling at an open spontaneous public event.

But a few others, particularly one man in an oversized trench coat, seemed to be offended. He and a woman companion started shouting at those under the sheet: “You will hurt yourselves!” “Not only yourselves, but others!” “You can’t breathe properly under there!” And the like. With a refined, cosmopolitan sense of what happenings were supposed to provoke, the theater people laughed and enjoyed the couple’s contribution to the show. Others just scoffed at them and shouted back at them to leave the kids alone. The couple left. With that the interest of the passersby dissipated, and the happening moved on. The sheet-being turned up a side street and draped itself over a small Italian Fiat 850-S with German tourist license plates: my car.

Some friends coaxed me into the car with the sheet performers. When it was clear that the next logical step was to start the engine, at my Polish colleagues’ instigation, I turned on the ignition. Ten seconds later, the man in the oversized trench coat swept the sheet off my car and, with a paddy wagon behind him, showed us his identification. He was with the People’s Militia, and he politely indicated that we were to follow him.

At the militia headquarters, we had to hand in our papers. The Poles presented their personal “legitimacja,” I my American passport. Then we were taken to a secured lockup area. I presented unanticipated problems. They hadn’t expected an American to be at this obscure performance, let alone at a place where the divide between theater performance and political order had been breached. They wanted to put an end to the event in as uncompromising a way as possible. But the officers on duty did not seem to have the authority to either release us, or further process our detention.

They told us that they had to confirm our story with the theater festival organizers. But first they confiscated film from the cameras of the journalist photographers. And then we waited.

While we were locked up in the militia station, my Polish friends, veterans of Poland’s subtle politics of cultural life, assured me that nothing serious would happen. They realistically assessed our situation. If I weren’t there, some greater unpleasantness might ensue. Maybe they would be detained without being formally charged for the permissible forty-eight hours. But our little escapade on the street was not really significant, and the city wouldn’t want to risk an international incident over it. Indeed, the local party hacks might have been afraid that their actions would meet disapproval in Warsaw. It was the era of détente. Poland was experiencing an apparent economic boom based on loans from Western governments and banks. Tensions were relaxed and political muscle was not to be flexed. Therefore, the Poles predicted that we would wait for a few hours and then would be warned and released. And they turned out to be right. After two hours, our papers were returned (though not the film) and we were released with a warning not to take part again in “an unauthorized theater event.”

In spite of the benign outcome, when I returned to the festival and later to my apartment in Warsaw, I was shaken up. I had not intended to become involved in Polish politics, except to study its relation to Polish culture. I knew the relationship was intimate, but hadn’t expected to be caught up in it. Yet, the whole adventure almost immediately became the subject of jokes, and I soon forgot it. But I was to be reminded of it again.

A photographer in our group, it seemed, had somehow managed to retain a roll of film documenting what had happened. And months after the event, a weekly newspaper in Krakow, Student, published an account – not a news story, but a comic-book rendition of Little Red Riding Hood. The sheet-being was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood, and the city street became the forest in which we met the Big Bad Wolf: the undercover agent who finally showed his teeth when we were in Grandmother’s House – my car. The newspaper didn’t reveal all of the circumstances of the arrest, but it clearly showed the political police doing its work.

In retrospect, I realize that this happening was more successful than any other I have observed or read about. It crossed the divide between the aesthetic and the social, and it developed a life of its own, encompassing a large and formidable territory. These reflections included. It began inside its own repressive context: it was confined to a gymnasium, because the authorities did not permit performances outside of conventional settings. The authorities wanted only channeled innovation, knowing that without the proper channels, cultural autonomy might not easily find acceptable limits. But those in the world of theater, as well as in the other arts and sciences, pushed limits as a matter of fundamental principle; and in Lublin that day, they improvised.

This activity of the young intellectuals was part of a long struggle with totalized political regimes over the issue of free public space. The happening revealed the nature of the battlefield. On the one side were the soft and hard totalitarians. On the other side were those who provoked the rulers, who struggled for room to act on their own, who were true to their cultural vocations, and those who saw the room so created, enjoyed it, and became collaborators with their resistance.

For the authorities, youth theater was a safety valve. For those involved in this theater, well understanding their situation, it was a base for freedom and for what I call the politics of small things.

The Ironies of Consequence

I discussed this event in Paris with Daniel Dayan and his student at Sciences Po. My key reasons for recalling that long ago, far away event here and in Paris: the Polish authorities worked to keep free speech and action as invisible as possible. The project of monstration, of showing such speech and action to a public, was enacted on that day in an improvised street theater happening, leading to my arrest. The authorities worked to restrict visibility, as my Polish friends and I worked to expand it. They wanted to block the show, but months later a Polish newspaper, retold the story as a fairy tale, elliptically but clearly monstrated the repressive apparatus in action. This media institution witnessed, recorded, translated (avoiding censorship) and illustrated the workings of both the power of the Party State and of an emerging opposition to this power before this opposition was organized. Later this power developed more fully in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc, with internal and international media reporting. It is important to note that the showing on that day in Lublin and later in the Krakow newspaper in important ways made the later developments possible. A seemingly trivial event, after the fact, was consequential. Dayan and I are struck by this, by the ironies of consequence, when the small turns out to be large, and the large, small. The monstration of official politics and the politics of small thing, needs careful examination.

To be continued…

Andrea Hajek’s post on the seamy side of satire and the Italian elections  and Iddo Tavory’s post on humor and the social condition got me thinking about the promise and perils of political humor. This has fascinated me ever since I made it a nightly habit to tune into Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as a refuge from the madness that were the George W. Bush years.

I have wondered: why has my regular dose of political satire seemed so essential to my mental health? Why has it been so appealing to so many of us? On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend too much time wondering. Most scholarly accounts of humor seem to miss the point, and they are decidedly not entertaining. I feel like responding to the authors of such serious reflections: please just relax and enjoy.

But Iddo’s analysis, which is part of our on-going dialogue on the social condition, seemed to hit just the right notes: it moved our deliberations on the social condition forward, as it helped me understand important developments in global political culture, and it had a light informative touch, focused on a joke. A Jewish father warns his son not to marry outside of the faith, finding confirmation in his warning when the son’s new wife takes the faith too seriously, insisting that her husband no longer work on Saturdays, both the Jewish Sabbath and the most important day of his father’s business week.

The joke is funny in the telling. Social structure as it is manifested in interaction makes the “funny telling” possible. Social structure – the family, religion and the economy – informs the structure of the joke, which sets the stage for the performance. As Tavory maintains: “If we attend to the structure of humor, we can see that jokes work precisely because they shine light on dilemmas that are built into the social fabric.”

Political satirists work with this, for better and for worse. They provide momentary liberation from the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) when they highlight the tensions we must live with, mocking easy, or foolish or dictated answers, the positions of the other, the distrusted, the opponent, the enemy, and even with friends, families, loved ones. But when they take their own answers too seriously, with too much self assurance, they skirt with danger, the danger we now see in Italy, but can be found in many other times and places.

I remember having a sick feeling watching Poland’s famous satirical cabaret, Piwnica pod Baranami in Krakow in the early 1970s. The cabaret was past its prime. In 1956, it was one of the key creative locations where Polish Stalinism was sharply questioned and overturned. They questioned totalitarian authority. They expanded the possible, by mocking the dictatorial. But the show I saw was odd. The audience seemed to be enjoying itself, but the performance seemed quite racist to me. There was one anti-China joke after another (this at the time of the Sino – Soviet split). I understood, as a friend explained, that when they said China, they meant and the audience heard Russia, but the mocking of the Orient was off putting. So much so that it stays with me. I thought of it then as an example of satire growing old and stale, in marked contrast with the student theater I was then observing. But now, I perceive more, thinking about my discussions with Tavory. The satire was drawn too easily. It referred to the sorry state of living in a society where a foreign power stifled daily life, but that insight was just too thin. That the Russians, or the Communists, were to blame for everything wrong in Poland explained too much with too little. Rather than confronting the social condition and providing relief from its tensions, the satire turned away from textured experience and flattened it.

On the other hand, take Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, please! (I’m echoing Henny Youngman here, just for fun) In their nightly shows, they illuminate. Mocking the dogmatic, they show how simple-mindedness stumbles over complexity, how the social condition is ignored. Colbert is more clearly aiming at the nuttiness of the right, through his Bill O’Reilly impersonation. Stewart tries to be more even handed, reporting absurdities wherever he sees them.

Not all their jokes work. Sometimes, it seems to me, Stewart mocks difficulties that he and his audience don’t understand. Nonetheless, unlike the Polish cabaret, he and Colbert work with tensions and ambiguities, posing questions, rather than providing easy answers. Posing questions, not providing answers is their democratic role, like that of intellectuals more generally, which I explored in depth in my book Civility and Subversion.

This was especially evident in their mock mass demonstration on the Washington Mall, “The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Stewart was for sanity; Colbert for fear. It’s interesting to note how many participants and observers wanted the rally to be partisan, and how the comedians understood that this wasn’t their role or their point. They weren’t working as propagandists for the Democrats, or just attacking the Republicans. They weren’t working with a clear political end. They were fake activists, extending their performances as fake newscaster and commentator. And as such, they revealed the transgression of the fine line between the serious and the comic by those who purport to be serious. The comics understand the difference, while so many in the news media and in politics don’t. Brilliant and funny.

But satirists may lose sight of their distinctive role, becoming convinced their jokes can substitute for serious political analysis and engagement. They may come to believe and convince their audiences, as I saw in Krakow many years ago, that their mocking illumination of the powers’ insufficient packaged answers to the questions posed by the enduring problems of the social condition is the answer. Thus, the Italian case: from a satirical V, “vaffanculo,” Day, (fuck them all day) to a party that won 25% of the vote, and has continued to follow the “vaffanculo” line. Hajek observed before the elections about the intentions of the leader of the anti-political party, The Five Star Movement: “It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution.”

Humor responds to and illuminates “the social condition.” Herein lies its personal and political significance and power, why Colbert and Stewart speak to me as I endure my daily struggles, and why it can matter, for example, in the role satire played around the old Soviet bloc. It can be a survival strategy for persecuted minorities, Jews and blacks, for example, and majorities, women, or just anyone, for example, in Youngman, husbands and wives. And because humor and satire refer to both the concerns of daily life and greater social structure, the social condition writ large and writ small, they have potentially significant political meaning and impact. But, handle with care.

With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.

And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on the weekly current affairs program, Ballarò, aired on the most left-centered of the three state-run RAI channels – was attacked by members of the audience at the yearly musical festival of San Remo. At the end of an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes, with which Crozza started his performance, people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off the stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.

Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics: Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s, Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the street where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, an Internet entrepreneur who eventually became the guru behind Grillo’s “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 the duo organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy. Grillo indeed claims to promote neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies. (Hence, his recent opening up to the neo-fascist Casa Pound movement in the name of non-partisanship.)

It is mostly on the web that Grillo’s anti-politics take shape. Journalist Giuliano Santoro – author of an interesting study of the Grillo phenomenon (Un grillo qualunque. Il movimento 5 stelle e il populismo digitale nella crisi dei partiti italiani, 2012) – claims that Facebook in particular favors Grillo in that it creates “a bond between the Comedian and the People which makes possible keeping together […] both the propagandist strength of the “logo” that is so typical of the classical relation of consumerism, and the emotive and intimate power of ‘friendship,’ typical of social networks such as Facebook.” Put simply, Facebook allows Grillo to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging to community, a “product” which he can sell without having to gain the consumer’s confidence, considering his notoriety and Facebook’s capacity to create online – and subsequently also real – communities. And what Grillo has to sell, sells well, particularly since the political scandals of 2012. Recent opinion polls indicated that the “5 star Movement” is gaining support and may do well in the upcoming elections, due also to Grillo’s so-called “Tsunami tour” across the peninsula, these past few weeks. Grillo’s returning to old-fashioned street politics and online democracy seems to be paying off.

Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Rather, they were programmed and effectively “sold” by the Casaleggio-Grillo duo. Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, the people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media. Things apparently change, but are essentially the same.

The obsession with new media reached a climax when it was decided that people could present themselves as candidates for the 5 star Movement primaries in 2012 by uploading videos of themselves to the Internet, where they would receive votes, a form of democracy from below. But this failed horribly as only a very small number of Italians voted, which was to be expected, with Italy still lagging behind in Internet usage.

Grillo’s hierarchical and undemocratic nature, finally, was revealed when he expelled a regional and a communal councilor of the “5 star Movement” in the city of Bologna. One of them had participated in the abovementioned TV program Ballarò, a decision which clashed with Grillo’s number one rule of complete absence from the mainstream media, although he does not always apply that rule to himself. In October 2012, he pulled off a publicity stunt as he swam the Straits of Messina for the launch of his local election campaign in Sicily, where the “5 star Movement” would be very successful.

Clearly, Grillo is afraid of losing control. Or maybe he just doesn’t like it when someone draws attention away from him, as also became clear after a member of the “5 star Movement” was elected mayor of Parma during local elections in 2012, leading to polemics with Grillo who tried to dictate his next moves. The Movement does indeed come across very much as an army of little soldiers, who are dismissed as soon as they step out of line.

So how would they govern Italy, should they win the elections? Of course, they won’t, but if they would, Grillo-Casaleggio would probably dissolve the movement. It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution. At a local level, though, the Movement is doing well, which illustrates an increasing call for local activism and participant democracy, due not in the least to a discontent with European politics in these times of crisis and austerity.

Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, Italy having been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.

Yet, to a certain degree, Grillo’s assault on the political caste is a good thing. In a country where traditional political parties have exploited ordinary citizens for far too long, distracting them with semi-nude ballerinas or simply brainwashing them through television, it is time people wake up and smell the coffee. But I’m afraid Grillo is not our man. Although many of the things he says are true, they do no more than feed grudges. Grillo does not offer any real alternative, so that voting for him is not a vote for something but against, and that is never really productive.

A friend on Facebook declared: “if you want to know everything wrong in the world, all you have to do is watch the stupid bowl.” Written during the course of the great event, I missed the comment in real time, as I missed the game. But I suspect she is right. And for this reason, I generally stay away, though with some ambivalence.

As a good American boy, I enjoyed playing the game and watching, and the memories of pleasures past linger (including watching games, in the less distant past, with my son, who was without my provocation a fan). Yet, football is more and more clearly brutal, with its special cult of violence becoming increasingly problematic. And the Super Bowl is not just another game; it has specific repulsive dressing. The ads are a spectacle of consumerism and all I hate about capitalism. Even though I begrudgingly offer capitalism two cheers, seeing no practical alternative in our world, I see no reason to see virtue in necessity, and it is off putting to celebrate. Super Bowl Sunday is a media event from which I abstain.

Last night, I followed my Super Bowl tradition, and went to the movies. I finally pushed myself to go see Zero Dark Thirty, with less than ten other people in the audience. I very reluctantly went. Following the debates about the film, I didn’t want to support a work that apparently credited torture for the killing of Osama bin Laden. I expected to be repulsed, not by the gratuitous violence of the film  (in football’s spirit). It was the violence of the message that concerned me. Proponents of torture applauded this Hollywood production as the exception that proves the rule of Hollywood’s liberal bias. Opponents of the use of “enhanced interrogation” denounced the film. And esthetes of various sorts, including the film’s director, claimed that as a work of art, one based on our very recent past, Zero Dark Thirty is intentionally without a clear political message, depicting the facts, opening discussion. I decided to decide for myself, and what better day to do so than the day of the “stupid bowl.”

To my surprise, my first impression was that the film isn’t nearly as objectionable as I had expected. Zero Dark Thirty is a successful Hollywood flick, flawed by political and moral mixed messages. Using the language of Malgorzata Bakalarz, it was presented as an important film and a work of art, but seemed to be, rather, an entertaining unimportant movie, which despite itself poses serious and important problems.

The film is gripping. Torture, the tortured and, especially, the torturers are immediately revealed, all properly repulsive. Knowing the end of the story heightens rather than reduces the drama, as one feels and doesn’t only view the advanced military maneuver, the attack on Bin Laden’s hideout. The unlikely hero, a young, petite, obsessed, female intelligence officer, attractively dominates the screen, alongside of her CIA superiors and the super macho Navy Seals of the successful operation. All, strikingly, offered her the proper deference in the end. This, along with the killing of Osama, provided for the required Hollywood happy ending.

Yet, the moral and political problems of this entertainment are very real. It is pretty clear that both torture and more acceptable forms of interrogation were used by the CIA and military intelligence in the pursuit of bin Laden. It is a matter of debate which was more important. Although the film doesn’t take a stand on this issue, it is notable that the story moves from torture to the capture and killing of bin Laden. Non-violent forms of interrogation are hardly noticeable. I think because torture makes for good pictures, while the more conventional and acceptable questioning of subjects doesn’t film as well or as easily, the film seems to argue, even when it doesn’t explicitly, that torture was a necessary evil, this, despite the fact that the evil was portrayed.

Our attractive hero observed and condoned torture, and even actively tortured. The normalization of this, its presentation without criticism is disturbing. I fear that this will become a dominant story line. A problem with film as the popular democratic form of telling history is that it has a way of becoming definitive.

On second thought maybe the Super Bowl would have been more benign thing to do yesterday. And perhaps there is a connection between American reading of our recent past and the collective ritual that is Super Bowl Sunday. As H. Rap Brown, the radical black nationalist in the sixties, once said, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”

A few years ago, Detroit-born painter Nancy Mitchnick began working on a series of canvases inspired by her hometown. Living at the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mitchnick had left the Motor City long ago, relocating to New York in mid-1970s, then moving to California to teach at CalArts in the late 1980s, and ending up at Harvard, where she held the position of Arnheim Lecturer on the Visual Arts for more than a decade.  “The Detroit Project,” as she called this series of paintings, prompted her to move back to the Motor City earlier this year to live and work.

One of the original members of the legendary Cass Corridor Group, Mitchnick settled in another of the region’s noted bohemias, Hamtramck, a small ethnic enclave virtually surrounded by Detroit, which had been incorporated as a separate city in 1922 essentially as a tax haven for the Dodge Brothers Company, which for decades operated their main assembly plant nearby. The artist took a studio in the Russell Industrial Center, a mammoth seven-building complex designed by architect Albert Kahn in 1915 for the Murray Body Company, a supplier of stamped metal automotive components for manufacturers who lacked large-scale fabrication facilities, including Dodge, Hudson, Hupmobile, and Studebaker, and now home to artists studios and other creative enterprises.

Once Mitchnick arrived in the city and set up shop, however, she found that she was unable to develop the “Detroit Project” as the ideas simply wouldn’t come. Instead, she began working on a series of “covers,” i.e., works that reinterpret famous masterpieces that have influenced her development as artist and to which she returns in times when her creative batteries need recharging. Some 20 of these paintings were on view at the historic Scarab Club in Detroit this past fall in an exhibition titled “Time Travel.”

In discussing the series, Mitchnick has confessed to not really knowing what to make of it. But it just so happens that at the time I was reading Alfred Gell‘s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Clarendon: 1998), which offered some insight. A Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Gell died of cancer in 1997 at age 51, and he only published three books in his lifetime. Considered one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation, Gell completed the full draft of Art and Agency shortly before his untimely death. He sought in this posthumous work to posit a theory of art that was, as the postmodernists have it, de-centered, that is, specifically extricated from Western aesthetic ideology. And I have to admit that for me it was a game changer.

Instead of looking at art (a problematic word in this context) as a form of expression, Gell asserts it as a form of doing, a nexus of complex intentionalities, not always conscious, that mediates social agency (in social science, the capacity to act). Not unlike Bruno Latour‘s concept of the actant in actor-network theory, agency in Gell’s view may be situated in any number of places, not just the artist’s intention. For example, the demands of religious ritual exert agency over the creator of sacred objects. More prosaically, a patron exerts agency over a portraitist, who is bound to execute a likeness in fulfilling a commission. Even the contemporary artist is in a very real sense subject to the agency of an artworld with which he or she must negotiate, socially, economically, intellectually, and aesthetically. Working off of the thought of American pragmatist philosopher and coiner of the term “semiotics,” Charles Sanders Peirce, Gell understands art as constituting the “abduction of agency,” the trace by which agency can be inferred similarly to the way we infer fire by the presence of smoke.

The art nexus has four elementary nodes:

• First, is the index, which is the material thing that motivates abductive inferences, interpretation, and so on.
• Second, is the artist (or other originator) responsible for the existence and characteristics of the index.
• Third, is the recipient, those upon whom agency is exerted by the index or who exerts agency via the index.
• Fourth, is the prototype, which is what is represented in the index and which may or may not entail resemblance.

It is this fourth node that is key to understanding what’s going on in the “Time Travel” series and what interested me in the paintings Mitchnick executed as part of it.

In relation to the prototype, the artist (in this case Mitchnick) is actually the recipient of agency (in the form of the impetus of the sources she reworks), and the index (each individual painting) is its material embodiment. Every artist, of the trained variety at least, studies the canon of previous creations (AKA art historical masterworks) and identifies those that inspire and/or influence him or her. The various paintings in “Time Travel” are indexes of prototypes Mitchnick encountered either in person or through printed sources. That Is One Mean Mother Fucking Shark, 2012, is based on John Singelton Copley‘s 1778 oil painting Watson and the Shark (itself likely influenced by, among other sources, Peter Paul Rubens‘s Jonah Thrown into the Sea, 1618), a version of which is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art. It is a painting Mitchnick has viewed countless times going back to her childhood.

The prototype also factors significantly, according to Gell, in understanding the ebbs and flows of an artist’s oeuvre. Contrary to the teleological view of conventional art history, artists move back and forth in their development, taking some steps forward and some steps back, leaving behind indexes of the process that are dispersed in space and time. Those works that serve as prototypes for later works are identified by Gell as indexing “pretension,” which can be “weak” in the case of precursors or “strong” in the case of preparatory studies and sketches. Those that refer to previous prototypes index “retention,” which also can be “weak” in the case of recapitulations or “strong” in the case of copies. (The DIA’s version of Watson and the Shark, the third version Copley did of the subject, fits in between the two poles of retention in that it isn’t an exact copy of earlier iterations but neither is it a recapitulation in the same way as, say, Paul Cezanne‘s later views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a prototype Mitchnick explores in The Cezanne Quartet, 2012.)

In discussing the relationship of artwork to artist, Gell takes a phenomenological approach. From this perspective, the artwork is an index of the artist’s subjective mental processes that both registers what has gone before and announces what is yet to come. The major piece in the “Time Travel” exhibit in this regard is Memory and Ruin, 2012, not just because it happens to be the largest in scale but because it recapitulates the moment in Mitchnick’s experience that informs the entire series, what led up to it, and where it might go. Based on an example of the Illusionistic, or Architectural, Style of Roman wall painting reproduced in the book Domus: Wall Painting in the Roman House (Oxford: 2005), it reproduces two of the works from the “Detroit Project” on either end. It also features portraits of the artist as a child on the left and her mother in her prime on the right, posed as caryatids in the manner of Classical art holding up the Detroit images.

Memory and Ruin adds original details to the prototype, which none of the other paintings in the series does. (The typical conceit of the other works is to focus on a particular detail of the prototype and riff off that but not to really add anything new to it.) The work indexes the future past of the stalled series begun in anticipation of ending a self-imposed exile, precursors to the work that will be done when the “Detroit Project” is taken up again (which as of this writing the artist has begun to do). It also indexes the artist’s personal history along with her creative one. All of them together constitute what phenomenologists term a “sedimentation,” the physical record of experience evidenced through layers of space and time. Each of the sedimentary strata also indexes the various sorts of prototypes exerting agency over the artist’s production. (As an aside, all artworks are essentially existential ruins, vestiges of the artist’s agency in the moment of creation, which at the instant the brush touches the canvas begins to fade into memory.)

While “Time Travel” is in some respects a detour from the artist’s trajectory, a retention that melds weak and strong prototypes in anticipation of the next chapter in the development of an oeuvre, it offers insight not only into Mitchnick’s specific practice but artmaking in general. It is a most interesting case to consider, and it will be even more interesting to see what comes next.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

University of Illinois Chicago political scientist Kelly LeRoux (who got her PhD at Wayne State University here in the D) and co-author Anna Bernadska recently published a study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, that shows a positive correlation between participation in the arts and engagement with civil society. They analyzed more than 2700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends. Their analysis found that people who have direct or indirect involvement with the arts are more likely to also have direct participation in three dimensions of civil society: engagement in civic activities, social tolerance, and other-regarding (i.e., altruistic) behavior. These results hold true even when factoring in demographic variables for age, race, and education.

Most studies on the social impact of the arts address economics and related externalities such as improved educational outcomes and general community well being. (See, for example, the work of Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota summarized in my blog post here.) The study by LeRoux and Bernadska is different in that it empiricially investigates ties between the arts and citizenship. Instead of seeking a market rationale for arts patronage, the authors stress the benefits for civic virtue. The study is also noteworthy because rather than looking at the direct impact of community and other arts projects, such as mural painting, theatrical productions, and the like, it takes an audience-studies approach more typically associated with media and communications analysis.

It’s important to note that the authors demonstrate correlation not causation. In statistics, correlation establishes the dependence of certain variables on one another, which is useful in predictive modeling. But the relationship, either positive (the more of one variable, the more of the other) or negative (the more of one variable, the less of the other), doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is specifically the cause of the other. There may be other factors at work (called intervening variables) not measured in the analysis. While that may be the case, the study is still useful in suggesting additional ways in which the arts benefit society.

Not the least of these is the development of the critical function, which is fundamental to the advancement of discourse and building consensus on matters of common concern within the public sphere, which civil society theorists see as key to a viable, participatory democracy. Indeed, German social scientist and political philosopher Jurgen Habermas in his important study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT: 1991 [1962]), cites the development of the field of literary criticism and aesthetics over the roughly 150-year period in Europe starting in the late 17th century as laying the groundwork for citizens to think independently and thus reflect upon their role in society and ultimately act as political agents. More recently, French philospher Jacques Ranciere in books such as The Future of the Image (Verso: 2009), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum: 2010), and The Emancipated Spectator (Verso: 2011), has established the link between aesthetic practice and political action.

This also explains why anti-democratic forces in American society have worked so hard, starting with the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, to eliminate public funding for the arts. It turns out, that Big Bird really is potentially subversive.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

It’s a great, but not a flawless, movie. Steven Spielberg, the King of Hollywood, and Tony Kushner, Angels in America author, teamed up to create an illuminating and entertaining snapshot of the icon of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln, and of legislative politics. The artistry is impressive, as usual for Spielberg, and Kushner. Politically, it raises interesting questions, provoking important debates: a work of art, not a polemic.

The opening battle scene was striking and gruesome, though reminiscent of Spielberg’s early works: hand-to-hand combat, less mechanized than in Saving Private Ryan, with the interracial struggle emphasized. As in Schindler’s List, the human tragedy is compactly presented. The great moral outrage in Schindler, the ferocity of the anti-Semitic genocide, was graphically depicted in the clearing of the ghetto scene. It was at the core of the film and its greatness (despite its problematic Hollywood wrapping, “happy end” and all that, as I argued in my essay on anti-Americanism). I think Spielberg was trying to do the same in this battle scene, though with less success. The interracial struggle for justice and its brutality were there to see, but because the battle somehow didn’t engage as the ghetto scene did, critics, Kate Masur and Corey Robin, among many others, have noted that African Americans appear in the film merely as on-lookers in a story about their liberation.

I was deeply impressed by the clearing of the ghetto in Schindler’s List and the battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. These are cinematic high points, great moments in the history of film. They are difficult to watch, though impossible to turn away from. The opening scene of Lincoln is not as compelling. Perhaps because it so directly quotes from the Ryan battle scene: strange how it is that art doesn’t work the second time around. I think this is at the root of the political criticism of the movie. If the scene had worked, the criticism would not have made sense.

On the other hand, the film accomplishes more than its strongest critics and supporters maintain. Its political strengths are connected to its artistic accomplishment. It asks questions in engaging ways, avoiding simple answers to complex problems. It illuminates the dilemmas of enduring the tragedies of the social condition (more on this in future posts), showing how dilemmas sometimes can be overcome with creativity. The film does not provide simple formulas about the tension between idealism and realism, moderation and radicalism, fact and fantasy. I think this is Lincoln’s greatest strength.

David Brooks of the Times and Al Hunt, at Bloomberg, loved the film. As mainstream commentators of American politics, conservative and liberal, they particularly appreciated the realistic account of how things get done in official politics.

Brooks:

“The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.”

Hunt:

“It’s the best movie about Washington politics I’ve seen…It brilliantly captures him doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective.”

I agree with these judgments, but also think they miss important points. Politicians acting forthrightly on high principle provide the bargaining capacity of the tough realists – in Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens for Abraham Lincoln. And high-principled social movements, definitive elections and significant military action set the stage for realist deals – here the abolitionists, the re-election of Lincoln and the union victories of the Civil War.

It is the need for a broader focus that concerns radical critics of the film, such as Aaron Bady, at Jacobin.

“Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people.

…It is about the triumph of a political compromiser, and it argues that radical change comes about by triangulation, by back-room deals, and by a willingness to forego ideological purity.”

Bady maintains that “slavery was already all but dead by the time Lincoln got around to declaring himself an abolitionist.” On the battlefield and throughout the countryside a new status quo had already been established. The amendment was a formality. The passage of the Thirteenth amendment was a mere confirmation in law what had already happened in society. Mere?

I think Bady misses the artistic point, as he makes a perfectly reasonable political one. The tight focus, it seems to me, is presented not because Spielberg and Kushner are proposing that this is where the real political action is, but because this focus brings us in, gives the viewer a sense of intimate participation in a turning point in American history, through an aesthetic experience. Hunt, Brooks and Bady confuse art with politics, with a political theory or interpretation. They miss the power of Daniel Day Lewis’s brilliant performance.

The film successfully paints a cinematic canvas, which suggests multiple political responses, inviting discussion about politics then and now. The film enriches experience, providing an intimate knowledge of a time, place and people, in the way only a film can. This is to be found in the details of the film. An alternative reality is created through art: the performance of Day Lewis, the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, along with the directing of Spielberg and the writing of Kushner, down to the fine details, including, the most surprising, the sound.

I actually agree with Hunt, Brooks and Bady, along with Masur and Robins about the politics of the film. It is a wonderful depiction of the interplay between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ends, as Max Weber would put it, and as Brooks and Hunt applaud. The films narrow focus on gritty official politics, on the other hand, leaves out a great deal, including the importance of social movement and war, and the agency of African Americans, as is highlighted in responses of Robins, Masur and significantly the great historian of the era, Eric Foner. The accomplishment is that this artwork inspires an audience to discuss these issues, about emancipation and about the politics of our times.

My note in this regard, despite the liberal, conservative and radical takes: in a functioning democracy the legislative arena doesn’t make social change but confirms change that is forged elsewhere. Think civil rights, gay rights, women rights and, of course, workers rights. Major social change, on the other hand, needs the official politics to ratify, institutionalize and protect the social change. There is nothing in the film that denies this. Think Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ as partners, and realize this film is the equivalent of one that focuses on LBJ. Which is more important? An interesting discussion, an interesting film.

A final observation on Spielberg as an artist: I think his children and family movies are his unambiguous best, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. They create complete imaginative worlds that engage and are believable. Fantasy and story, and their technics are in harmony. The power of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln, along with The Color Purple, Amistad, and Munich is that they use Spielberg’s capacity to imagine worlds to connect us with history and pressing social problems. As a result, we get inside history, we live through history, in a way that only film can provide. By getting details right, or at least giving us a sense that they are right, we experience history. This is the magic of art, the magic of Lincoln, which explains its appeal. But there are dissonant notes. Sometimes sentiment gets in the way of historical engagement. Hollywood happy end is a problem, but, in my judgment, not a fatal one. It is a great, but not a flawless movie.