Capturing the Culture: Modern Film, Art and Politics

✍ Scribed by Richard Grenier

• Publisher: Ethics & Public Policy Center Inc.,U.S.
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 452
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this series of essays, Grenier seeks to debunk fashionable film portrayals of less-than-saintly historical figures and cultural sacred cows. Mahatma Gandhi, Alice Walker, Isaak Dinesen, the French New Wave cinema and the American PEN Chapter of writers are just some of his targets.

✦ Table of Contents

For Arnaud Qui Fa toujours su
Contents
Introduction Robert H. Bork
The Back Story
Coming Attractions
Feature Films
1 The True Child: George Lucas and the Star Wars Series
2 The Uniforms That Guard: Kipling, Orwell, and Australia’s Breaker Morant
3 Bolshevism as the Politics of Intent: Warren Beatty’s Reds
4 Is It a Cuddly Universe? Spielberg’s E.T. and Scott’s Blade Runner
5 Fassbinder, Germany, and the Bloomingdale’s Factor
6 The Gandhi Nobody Knows
7 The Hard Left and the Soft: Hollywood Tests Its Radical Limits
8 The Feminization of Henry James: Vanessa Redgrave and The Bostonians
9 The Clint Eastwood Phenomenon: How He Became the World’s Favorite Movie Star
10 Treason Chic: Britain Acclaims Its Traitors
11 Eddie Murphy in Post-Racist America
12 The ‘Auteur’ Cult: Truffaut and What France’s Nouvelle Vague Was All About
Quick Takes
1 Writing Under a Dark Spell: George Orwell’s 1984
2 The Serene Republic of Letters: The PEN Club
4 African Dreaming: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
6 For Export Only: PBS’s The Africans
7 Virtue in an Unknown Land: Argentina’s Official Story
8 Sex and the Military Man: Laclos’s Liaisons Dangeureuses
9 Cry Fraud: Attenborough’s Cry Freedom
10 Splendor and the Beijing Party Line: Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor
11 From Russia With Angst: The Burglar
12 Fidel and Vanity Fair Get Married: The Havana Film Festival
13 Art Hysteria: The Modern’s “Committed to Print”
14 Eggs for the Soviet Omelette: The Russian Avant-Garde of the 1920s
15 The Ruckus Over Jesus: Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Chris
16 PBS at the Bat: Nestor Almendros’s Nobody Listened
17 The Film Director as Nazi: Ingmar Bergman
18 The Romance of Cocaine: Tequila Sunrise
19 The Politics of Sentimentality: Charlie Chaplin
20 Heavy Thinking in the Afternoon: Oprah Winfrey and Shirley MacLaine
21 Burning the Flag and Robert Mapplethorpe
22 Mad Manichaeanism: Summer Blockbuster Movies
23 Whose Vietnam? Casualties of War
24 The Year of the Orgasmic Woman: When Harry Met Sally
25 Treason Redux: Le Carre’s Russia Hou
26 Madame Butterfly’s Revenge: M. Butterfly on Broadway
27 The FBI, the KKK, and a Sartrian Marxist: Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed
28 Britain’s Loony Left: Letter to Brezhnev
29 The Sneaky Side of Pacificism: Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun
30 Can Jesus Save Madonna? “Like a Prayer
31 Culture’s Mega-Stalinist: Brecht and The Threepenny Opera
32 A Broadway Flop Goes Downmarket: CBS’s Pack of Lies
33 Jane Fonda Saves Mexico: Carlos Fuentes’s Old Gringo
34 Was Shakespeare Alienated? Branagh’s Anti-War Henry V
Index of Names