films 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/13/2021
The Unsettling Message of "Judas and the Black Messiah"
by Elizabeth Hinton
The film "brings the disparities engendered by a surveillance state into focus, leaving audiences to wonder what this country would look like if the war on white supremacy were fought with the same implacable intensity as the one against the Black Panther Party some 50 years ago."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
12/2/2020
Revisiting Hitler’s Final Days in the Bunker
The use of the German film "Downfall" in internet memes points to the danger of treating Hitler's demise as a closure to the murderous ideologies he propagated.
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SOURCE: New Orleans Times-Picayune
12-4-13
Fully 70 percent of films from silent era are lost, according to Library of Congress report
The report also advocates developing preservation programs.
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SOURCE: BBC News
7-11-13
Alfred Hitchcock joins UNESCO register
Alfred Hitchcock's nine surviving silent films will join artefacts such as the Domesday Book in representing the cultural heritage of the UK.Hitchcock's films - the British director's earliest works - premiered at the British Film Institute last summer following extensive restoration.They have now been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register.The register "reflects the richness of UK culture and history, from medieval manuscripts to ground-breaking cinema"....
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"The Great Gatsby's" Historical Razzle-Dazzle
by Bruce Chadwick
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a wafer thin book about the 1920s Jazz Age, long lost love and the intrepid chase of the American dream. It is considered the best novel ever written by an American not because of what it says, but because of what it implies. A hundred stories drift lazily between the pages, and over the water from Gatsby’s swimming pool to the green light on Daisy’s dock.In Baz Luhrmann’s new movie The Great Gatsby, the sixth film retelling of Fitzgerald’s tale, the story is inflated and expanded, as if it were based on a 700 page Herman Melville work. Everything you wondered about the story and characters is spelled out and everything you wanted said is spoken. Luhrmann and screenwriter Craig Pearce left no stone unturned, and no glass of champagne from one of Gatsby’s wild parties unfinished in the new Roaring Twenties epic.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3-7-13
David Thomson: Schindler's Girl in the Red Coat Speaks Out
David Thomson is a film critic who often writes for The New Republic.Here’s an oddity, from Yahoo Movies this past Monday: two photographs, side by side—a dark-haired woman, apparently 23-years-old, in a belted red raincoat, standing in front of a wall covered with Jewish imagery; and then, a child, 3-years-old, in a red coat, but in the foreground of a black-and-white picture that shows German soldiers guarding abashed citizens. It is the same person in both pictures, Oliwia Dabrowska, from Krakow in Poland. There is a heading to the pictures and the short article that follows: “‘Red coat girl’ from ‘Schindler’s List’: I was ‘horrified.’”
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