[Going through my papers recently I came across the carbon of a letter nominating Norman Mailer for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It probably dates from around 1980 since it refers to The Executioner’s Song as recently published. The PEN American Center no doubt solicited nominations and this was my response. The occasion seemed to demand an exhaustive C.V., a condensed catalogue raisonée, but even in this pedantic format I notice a few  phrases I’m moderately pleased to have written, since they evoke his talent in ways I had forgotten. The reference to André Gide particularly surprised me. Of course Mailer was not the only perpetual nominee never to be awarded the Nobel Prize. On this distinguished list he joins writers from Tolstoy and Proust to Graham Greene, Nabokov, and (so far) Philip Roth, some of them blocked by the dogged opposition of a single figure on the committee, others by their presumed failure to be sufficiently upbeat and life-enhancing, as the terms of the bequest officially demand.  -M.D.]     

Norman Mailer was born in 1923, attended Harvard University, from which he was graduated in 1943, served with the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater in World War II, and returned to write what is still considered one of the best of all American war novels, The Naked and the Dead (1948).  Yet Mailer was not content to continue writing in the naturalistic vein of this first novel. One of the hallmarks of his career is his shifts of style and ambition from book to book. His second and third novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), remain impressive experiments in allegorical and political writing, especially where they touch on sexual themes. During this period Mailer wrote two of the best American short stories, “The Man Who Studied Yoga” and “The Time of Her Time,” and began a truly extraordinary career as a writer of nonfiction and journalism with “The White Negro” (1957), later collected with his other shorter writings in Advertisements for Myself (1959). Interlaced with a remarkable autobiographical commentary, these writings were truly prophetic and helped usher in the drastic changes in American culture in the 1960s, with their new interest in politics, their fascination with Beat and bohemian countercultures, and their advanced treatment of sex, which was radically new for the still-Puritan American culture of the period.

In 1960 Mailer the journalist, yet in full command of his novelistic skills, wrote the first of a series of reports on American conventions [and] their political personalities, especially the American presidents. These political writings were collected in The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), and St. George and the Godfather (1972). Meanwhile Mailer returned to fiction with what may be his best and most original novel, An American Dream (1965), and Why Are We in Vietnam (1967). During this period he also directed three films and gave a new turn to his career with The Armies of the Night (1968), a report on the American antiwar movement which also is the keenest account of a whole generation and a whole turbulent decade in American culture. In books like this Mailer helped invent the nonfiction novel, and pioneered the introduction of novelistic devices and a subjective persona into journalism.

All this was done in style that remains one of the most eloquent, elaborate, and controlled in modern American writing. Not only does Mailer love language and play it as a musical instrument, but he epitomizes the writer as existentialist, trying on new styles, risking new projects, undertaking new adventures in every work. Yet his enormous body of work in many genres forms a roman fleuve of continuous though fragmentary autobiography. No writer since Gide has written so obsessively about himself, yet managed to make himself so interesting to other people. Yet for all his introspection Mailer is continuously fascinated with the public world and the nature of power. He writes about politics with humane sensitivity yet acute insight.

Only recently, in 1979, Mailer, who seemed to have completely exhausted the vein of nonfiction, took an entirely different turn and produced yet another unexpected masterpiece. In The Executioner’s Song (1979), an enormous roman-vérité about a condemned killer, Mailer kept himself scrupulously out of the picture. Instead he gave an unforgettable picture of the American West with its vast spaces and drifting, dissociated people; this is the best book yet produced in the whole genre of the nonfiction novel. These are ordinary people whose lives are scarcely serious enough for quality fiction but Mailer makes us care about them in the course of the book. The Executioner’s Song confirms the gargantuan size of Mailer’s talent, its variety and unpredictability, and adds measurably to the already large body of his work. At present he is the American writer most deserving of the Nobel Prize.

Some great writers leave books behind that are like monuments, chiseled in alabaster, inviolable, or like tall mountain peaks which must be climbed simply because they’re there. Dostoevsky is one major writer who will never harden into a classic. He forces his readers to grapple with his books in a personal way, with some of the same intensity he brought to writing them. The author of the definitive biography, Joseph Frank, describes “the unusual sense of excitement that Dostoevsky manages to create from page to page, and the almost hypnotic fascination, quite aside from plotting, that he never fails to exercise on his readers.” At moments Dostoevsky seems to reach out and grab the unwary reader by the throat, enclosing us in an atmosphere of emotional violence that is sometimes comical but can also come to feel suffocating.

It’s no wonder that Dostoevsky has proved such an awesome burden to those who have tried to write about him, especially in the English-speaking world, where he was discovered late and where his work has always seemed a little strange, bizarre, formless, even pathological. To Henry James the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings,” powerful but inimitable. Brilliant critics like R.P. Blackmur and Philip Rahv worked intermittently for decades on books on Dostoevsky and died without completing them. As an independent young critic writing for the literary quarterlies in 1945, Joseph Frank made his reputation with a dazzling and original essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Much later, he taught comparative literature for many years at Princeton and Stanford and published a widely admired collection of essays on modern writers, The Widening Gyre (1963), which included an expanded version of his essay on spatial form. The first volume of his long-awaited book on Dostoevsky, published in 1976, was twenty years in the making, and even the author may have wondered at times whether it would see the light of day. (The fifth and last volume would not appear until 2002.) The book was worth waiting for. From its auspicious beginning, dealing with Dostoevky’s little known early years through his imprisonment and mock execution in 1849, Frank’s book proved to be a masterful work of cultural biography; it explored the young writer’s Russian milieu in a way that had never been attempted in English. Indeed, this biography, with its increasingly detailed successor volumes focusing on major works, including 140 pages on The Brother Karamazov in the final volume, is certainly the most ambitious book on Dostoevsky undertaken in any language. But I found the first volume, dealing with Dostoevsky’s life and work before his arrest, trial, and exile, especially eye-opening, for it cast a fresh light on a poorly understood phase of his career.

Essentially Frank wrote three different but overlapping books within this opening volume, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849. The first is a lively personal biography, the second a close study of Dostoevsky’s intellectual and political development, and the last a thoughtful work of literary criticism on his neglected early novels and stories. Eschewing the speculative flights of more partial critics, whose novel theses are more daring but more questionable, Frank weighs and balances evidence with an appealing judiciousness, yet also a modesty that invites trust and confidence. While mastering all the pertinent scholarship Frank has managed to preserve some of the wide-eyed curiosity of the inquisitive amateur. His cultural expansiveness, which takes the subject in its broadest connections at every moment, reminds one of Michael Holroyd’s panoramic treatment of Lytton Strachey, which singlehandedly revived Bloomsbury as a matter for continuing fascination. But where Holroyd’s book was glib and gossipy, Frank writes with a measured clarity that proves it’s possible to be utterly serious without excluding the general reader.

This is most true of the biographical part, especially the first hundred pages, where Frank keeps Dostoevsky’s early life within a narrative framework and patiently revises the accepted harsh image of Dostoevsky’s childhood and his father, a military physician and small landowner, who was probably murdered by his own serfs in 1839, when his 18-year-old son was away at school. Like Dostoevsky himself in his Diary of a Writer, Frank stresses the piety, near-poverty, and close-knit domesticity of Dostoevsky’s upbringing, which was no different from the wealthier, less religious and more Europeanized upper-class educations of nearly all his great literary rivals. Dostoevsky’s father send him to Petersburg to become and army engineer, but the literary and intellectual ferment of the great city in the 1840’s made him a writer and radical instead, until the Czarist authorities catastrophically intervened.

Frank concludes this volume in 1849 when Dostoevsky’s career seemed to come to an abortive early end. At the age of 27 he and his friends were arrested for their participation in a circle of liberal intellectuals who met weekly to discuss reforming the system, an absolute monarchy which still kept twelve million peasants in a state of agricultural serfdom. Only four years earlier the writer had awakened like Byron to find himself famous, when the celebrated critic Belinsky had proclaimed his first novel, Poor Folk, then still in manuscript, a work of genius. Instead his arrest led to a ten-year hiatus in his writing life, including periods in prison, labor camp, the army, and Siberian exile, as well as a ghastly death-sentence and mock execution that fixed itself in his mind like a burning brand.

These experiences gave a different weight and shape to Dostoevsky’s imagination, so that the book we have here is about Dostoevsky before he became the Dostoevsky we know. Yet the twilight world of prison and exile was all too continuous with the dark, tortured side of his own psyche, fostered by uncertain health and delicate nerves, and the influence of his favorite Romantic writers—Schiller, Hoffmann, Gogol, Balzac—whose passionate work he loved and sometimes imitated. Reading these early works of Dostoevsky, especially the one indubitable masterpiece, The Double (1846), which Frank strangely undervalues, or the brilliant first chapter of Netochka Nezvanova (1849), an unfinished novel cut short by his arrest, we’re amazed at how much is already there of the writer who has become much more than a writer, who has become for us, with Freud and Nietzsche, one of the buccaneers of modern thought, explorers of the irrational and unconscious underpinnings of the human psyche.

The anxious Petersburg clerks, dreamers, and would-be artists who populate these stories not only show the most paradoxical turns of feeling and behavior, but they already reveal the rootlessness and insecurity we associate with the shadowy byways of the modern city. In The Double an ambitious clerk, Golyadkin, is gradually evicted from his own life and driven mad by a diabolical alter-ego, another Golyadkin (who is something between a sordid actuality and a suppressed part of his own mind). As the critic Dmitri Chizhevsky has shown, this displacement highlights the dilemma of “finding one’s place,” a niche of one’s own, and “shows that Golyadkin’s place was illusory to begin with.”

In the 1950s we might have treated this (like Chizhevsky) as a psychological or existential problem, an instance of ontological insecurity. To Frank this approach, which he himself took toward the writer in those days, shows the extent to which—in our sense of Dostoevsky’s modernity and immediacy—we tear him from his own place in the Russian world of the mid-nineteenth century. To recapture the texture of that world Frank learned Russian, and came to see Dostoevsky as a writer who brought into sharp focus all the cultural tensions of his age. In dealing with the clerks and dreamers of the early stories he emphasizes the social roots of their personal insecurities, “the crushing of the human personality in the Russian world of despotism and unconditional subordination.” This may account for Frank’s special animus toward Freud’s famous essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” which stresses the neurotic and personal sources of the writer’s imaginative patterns, but which is based on biographical evidence that has since proved flimsy and unreliable.

What most surprised me was that Frank’s attempt to restore Dostoevsky to his historical setting does so little to distance him from us. In an essay on Notes from Underground fifteen years earlier, the first fruit of his research on the Russian milieu, Frank came close to miring Dostoevsky in the local polemics which the story itself works to transcend. But there’s no trace of a reductive approach in book itself, and time and again Dostoevsky’s world reminds us of our own. If the rigid political framework and class structure of the Czarist order seem remote—though less remote, say, than the reactionary monarchist France of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black—yet the passionate ideological ferment inside that constricted world seems eerily familiar to us. Dostoevsky’s pictures of urban bureaucracy and urban poverty are closer to us than the church-and-army world of Stendhal, and the seething tensions of a nascent urban intelligentsia make his characters seem strikingly modern in their hopes and in their marginality.

Russia in the 1840s was a changing world frantically resisting the pressure for change, which came both from within and from Western Europe. Radicals such as Belinsky and Alexander Herzen wrote in an Aesopian language, like Eastern Europeans today, but within the limits of a heavy-handed censorship and a small, fragmented intelligentsia, the latest Western ideas were hotly debated. The Czar himself hinted at the abolition of serfdom, and the debating circle which Dostoevsky attended was quietly ignored for years by the authorities. But the frightened Russian reaction to the European revolutions of 1848 brought all such talk and toleration to an end. Thus the interruption of Dostoevsky’s career in 1849 coincided with a sharp break in Russian political and cultural life, while his return to Petersburg ten years later, under a more liberal Czar, coincided with a turbulent revival of the ferment of the 1840’s. His great political novel The Possessed (1873) deals directly with the links between the radical sixties and the liberal forties.

Though Dostoevsky’s politics were drastically changed by imprisonment and exile, and he reacted with horror (yet a shock of recognition) to the new radicalism, Frank is surely right to treat him as “the chronicler of the moral consequences of flux and change” and “the future novelist of the spiritual crises of the Russian intelligentsia.” Frank’s subtitle, “The Seeds of Revolt,” is well chosen, for his book illuminates both the roots of Russian socialism and the seeds of Dostoevsky’s own rebellion against it, in the name of a Christianity which, in Frank’s words, “always retained the strongly altruistic and social-humanitarian cast of the 1840s.”

The book’s only weakness comes from its painstaking care as it sorts out the strands of Dostoevsky’s political and intellectual development and finally his literary growth, where the brisk pace of the early biographical chapters slows down to something far more detailed and minute. Thanks to Frank, no one in the future will ever doubt the seriousness and depth of Dostoevsky’s involvement with radicalism in the 1840’s, which undermined neither his basic Christianity nor his insistence on the autonomy of art (both under attack then, as later, in radical circles). Valuable as it is for Frank to pin down these loyalties and the friendships that went with them, he risks losing his reader in a proliferation of detail, in minor figures, momentary alliances, and transient ideological currents. Similarly, in the literary-critical chapters that conclude the volume, Frank taxes the reader’s patience by paraphrasing the wildly improbable plots of minor fictional works. Yet he also gratifies us by giving serious attention to each of Dostoevsky’s first three novels.

Despite the value of this criticism, what draws our eye are the anticipations of greater things to come, which break through time and again like lightning bolts across a cloudy sky. Frank resists looking ahead too omnisciently to the later career, but in his immensely eloquent chapter conclusions he allows himself a flash forward that’s like a payoff for the preceding detail. Thus an overlong analysis of some forgotten newspaper columns, which Dostoevsky himself never bothered to reprint, concludes brilliantly with a paragraph showing how this “feuilleton style” foreshadows the unique narrative voice of Notes from Underground. As his subtitle suggests, Franks has a truly organic sense of the writer’s development, and he has a superb grasp of the lines of growth and continuity.

What makes the Russians so interesting, aside from the greatness of their writing, was the furious intensity with which they absorbed ideas and pursued them to their practical conclusions, with inferences which, as Dostoevsky remarked, were “not even suspected” by their European originators. The Germans thought them up; the Russians acted them out. Kirilov in The Possessed commits suicide to assert the freedom of the will. While the ideological passions of will never have the chic appeal of Bloomsbury’s kinky passionlessness, at least those who were involved with the left in our sixties owe it to themselves to discover the antecedents of their hopes and failures.

Time and again the Russians were willing to live or die for ideas that were only debated abstractly in the West; the Russian revolution was one late example, and Lenin gave Marxism that practical bent its founder sometimes lacked. Dostoevsky was appalled by the consequences of these ideological furies, even as he shared them and dramatized them in the riveting emotional atmosphere of his work, whose strength it is to render ordinary life with the terrible clarity and power of hallucination.

Gore Vidal liked to style himself a populist but for his political leanings this hardly fit tha man at all. Populists in America come in many shapes and sizes, from William Jennings Bryan to Frank Capra, from Thomas Hart Benton to Sarah Palin. Vidal didn’t resemble these would-be common folk prone to idealize the salt of the earth. He was a patrician radical, a type more common in Europe than here, since we have never had a formal aristocracy. His prototype was Henry Adams, the grandson and great grandson of presidents, who felt that he had been born to public service but found that the corrupt, rough-hewn America of the Gilded Age had no use for his talents. Becoming a writer instead, he turned his disappointment into cutting irony and wit, surveying the details of American history – and his own life – from an eagle’s perch. After his death in 1918 his autobiography, written largely for private consumption, became a surprise bestseller, evoking an era long gone.

Like Adams, Vidal lived in swiftly changing times, which produced a far more leveling culture. A growing ethnic diversity eroded old traditions of Wasp privilege and authority. The traditional elite was giving way to more meritocratic elites but also to a messy democracy and a boisterous popular culture, including movies, pop music, and television. When Vidal started out as a writer in the mid-1940s, the great field of a young man’s ambitions was the novel, then the crown jewel of the arts. After publishing a Hemingway-style war novel when he was barely twenty, he attracted unusual attention in 1948 with his third novel, The City and the Pillar. The book was a bold step forward in its touching, explicit treatment of homosexuality but an otherwise conventional coming-of-age story. The dazzlingly good-looking young author became an instant star, and over the next five or six years, though he remained extremely productive, his fiction went nowhere. Later he would insist that he was blacklisted for writing sympathetically about the gay demimonde and love between men but at the time he felt that the culture itself had changed: the novel itself was no longer the royal road to success.

Unlike most patricians Vidal was a consummate professional who also had to support himself from an early age. Seeing that movies and TV were supplanting fiction in the shifting galaxy of popular culture, he patiently taught himself to write dialogue, crafting effective small-scale dramas for stage and screen. Even more momentously, he began investing himself in reviews and essays that gradually evolved a distinctive voice and, even more important, a recognizable character behind them. It’s fascinating to see them develop from a flat, impersonal objectivity toward an engaging conversational voice, not exactly intimate but coolly inviting. Other novelists were testing their wings in essay writing, dipping into their own experience in direct ways, including Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy, but Vidal, like Mailer began doing more. He had noticed that the public, though no longer so captivated by novels, had grown more preoccupied with authors, less as writers than as recognizable, sometimes notorious public personalities. Vidal instinctively understood how the nascent celebrity culture could envelope or sideline the literary culture, and he exploited this opening. Mark Twain, with his iconic head, white flannel suits, and irresistible platform manner, had been there before him. So had Hemingway, whose self-cultivated myth had begun to overwhelm his literary conscience.

Vidal created a character quite different from Twain or Hemingway. He took on the role of a sardonic observer, the witty, acerbic outlier commenting on the foibles of the literary scene, the follies of popular taste, and, as time passed, the depredations of the plutocracy and the political class. Where Mailer, partly inspired by the Beats, but also by his own literary frustrations, dabbled in transgression and presented himself as an outlaw, Vidal came out like Adams as the remnant of an older America, its conscience and historian. He ran for public office, quickly making his failed effort a part of his gathering myth, and he began writing political novels, the first of them, Washington, D.C., plainly modeled on Adams’s satiric novel Democracy. Soon he was locking horns with William Buckley as commentators at the 1968 Democratic convention.

As a nonfiction writer, turning the crisis of the novel to his own advantage, Vidal never approached the fictional density of Mailer’s finest work, from The Armies of the Night to The Executioner’s Song, but he bested him in a medium Mailer failed to master and came to loathe, television. Vidal’s coruscating wit, epigrammatic clarity, movie-star good looks, and feline hauteur proved perfectly camera-ready, whether he was chatting with the plebeian Johnny Carson or basking in the fan’s gaze of an adoring Yalie, Dick Cavett, and crossing swords caustically with other guests. No matter what the subject, he came up with a sound bite that could curdle milk. He could be unbearably glib, but his patrician persona and acid tongue, his radiating sense of superiority, made for good showbiz. Despite becoming a public character he survived as a writer as well, chronicling the fate of his own generation and the changing cultural scene in essay after essay, even as he chronicled the earlier history of the nation in his novels. Mailer showed a quirky brilliance in his fiercely competitive takes on his fellow writers, but no one wrote better than Vidal on his friends and contemporaries, among them Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and John Horne Burns. A legion of departed forties writers lives on vividly in his evocative essays.

His political novels, his novels in general, proved less memorable. Their greatest virtue is their uncluttered directness, their fluid mastery of well-researched detail. They sparkled with the effortless clarity of his conversation. Like Robert Graves before him, Vidal cleared out the fusty antiquarian machinery of historical fiction, playing off real and invented characters and providing a feeling of lived reality to the American past. With Burr he had the kind of scoundrel he could identify with, a troublemaker demonized by history for killing one of the founding fathers. But only in Burr’s duel with Hamilton, when one of them is momentarily blinded by the sun, did one get an inkling of some higher imaginative ambition, a place where the novel chose not to go. The book’s perfectly workmanlike sequel, 1876, offered no such exalted moment at all. Vidal had successfully returned to fiction, taking possession of a large slice of American history, but he had chosen the popular route where no real innovation was possible.

In his last decade, beset by old age and illness, the loss of his longtime partner, Howard Austen, Vidal in a way became the despised Burr, finally a marginal figure. He had once said that his goal was to seize the spotlight and hold on to it forever, but now the spotlight turned away from him or else shed an unpleasant light on his bitter mix of conspiracy theories after 9/11. He had always loathed the “American empire” and its neoconservative apologists, especially Jews. Once Bush and Cheney added real substance to the term, Vidal’s cold fury gave cynicism a bad name. His political criticism, once so poised and witty, slid into a sour misanthropy that reminded me of the elder Mark Twain, who was justifiably incensed by our earlier imperial adventures. But no writer should be judged by the diminished work of his last phase. Vidal in his prime was never less than fun to read. As an indelible character and a fine essayist, he added something of his own to the drama of American life that he portrayed with such zest and elan.

Masscult and Midcult (New York Review Books, $16.95) gives us only one phase of Dwight Macdonald’s storied career as a political gadfly, provocative journalist, nonpareil editor, and embattled critic. It showcases Macdonald as an endlessly entertaining highbrow scold, taking up the cudgels for literary standards, drawing a bead on misconceived cultural projects. His political writings are out of print but this side of his work is well worth revisiting. Macdonald died thirty years ago but, as many reviewers seem to agree, this may be the liveliest collection of essays published this year.

Born to modest privilege but not wealth in 1906, he went to Phillips Exeter and Yale in the 1920s and spent much of his later life trying to live this down. In college he was a precocious troublemaker, mocking a celebrated English professor as unqualified to teach and writing to Yale’s president to object to compulsory chapel for its banal sermons. He and some friends started a little magazine in the early thirties while he was writing mainstream profiles for Henry Luce’s new Fortune magazine. Radicalized by the Depression, he briefly became Trotskyist and in 1937 helped relaunch another quarterly, Partisan Review, devoted to anti-Stalinist radicalism and cutting-edge modern literature.

By the 1940s the horrors of the war had turned him from a pacifist into a libertarian anarchist, and for five years he published his own magazine, the legendary Politics, that became a beacon of cosmopolitan humanism in a dark time. At the end of the decade he despaired of politics and turned instead to the cultural subjects that would soon give him a wider audience. The argumentative Macdonald was a lethal polemicist, and he had come to think of mass culture as the latest enemy of personal freedom and genuine art. Just as totalitarianism exacted a terrible conformity, he thought, the postwar avalanche of bestselling books, Hollywood movies, network television, pop music, and mass-market journalism had grown into a soft totalitarianism, undermining essential standards of language, taste, and creative expression. He signed on as a staff writer for The New Yorker and began mounting double-barreled assaults not so much on pop culture as on the well-meaning middlebrow culture of the 1950s, the world of the Book-of-the-Month Club, bestselling fiction, films with literary pretensions, reference works that did little more than decorate the shelves – all watered down versions of real culture, as he saw it.

Several of these terrifically enjoyable screeds are included here, including his attacks on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which dispensed with some of the poetic, archaic language of the King James Version; on Mortimer Adler’s monumental – and monumentally misconceived – Great Books collection; on James Gould Cozzens’s ridiculously overpraised novel By Love Possessed; and on the remarkably permissive third edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Along with this big game, the book’s editor, John Summers, reprints Macdonald’s sweeping but snobbish 70-page overview, “Masscult and Midcult,” along with some very effective literary essays on James Agee and Ernest Hemingway, whose self-imitating later work made him a ripe target for Macdonald, and two later attacks, on Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism and Norman Cousins’s new magazine, World, a short-lived successor to his echt middlebrow Saturday Review. Only Agee, an old friend of Macdonald’s who had recently died young, gets off easily in a balanced tribute. All the others bite the dust.

Macdonald was a born contrarian who thrived on controversy. When he reprinted his essays he often appended harsh attacks on him along with his own feisty responses, which could be devastating but never bitter or malicious. But as a person, even with his own children (according to his biographer, Michael Wreszin), “he seemed unaware of the intimidating intensity of his verbal aggression.” A jovial, rotund man himself, he delighted in mischief and was surprised when anyone took his attacks personally. He took on his victims in the name of serious cultural ideals, pointing to how their nobler aspirations were betrayed or their style was pretentious, cliched, or riddled with cant. The trouble with popular culture, he felt, was that it was impersonal, mass-produced, mechanical, never the product of an individual vision, a vibrant imagination finding its own form. In both politics and cultural controversy he was the closest American equivalent of George Orwell, appealingly direct in his own writing, seeing himself as a guardian of the language but also of the gift of freedom that made honest language possible.

This double mission leads to a paradox in Macdonald’s work, for as much as he is a democrat and even a radical in politics he is every inch the elitist in culture and the arts. He shares common ground with backward-looking social critics like T. S. Eliot and José Ortega y Gasset, prophets of decline who were implacable foes of mass society. Like them, Macdonald believed that “the great cultures of the past had all been elite affairs, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common,” encouraging creativity and criticism. He was sure there was a universal standard of excellence that clashed with the needs of a broad, undiscriminating audience. He identified with the minority appeal of early modern art and literature and hated to see its techniques diluted for mass consumption, though he allowed that some great writers of the past, like Dickens, had almost accidentally been popular.

This is a key to the major flaw in his work, which struck me even as an undergraduate first reading Partisan Review some fifty years ago. Macdonald’s attachment to tradition, his idealized sense of the past, makes it difficult for him to discriminate – his own favorite word -among new directions in the present. He hated the ponderous but upbeat themes of most ‘serious’ works of the 1950s like Cozzens’s overblown novel, Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B., a verse update of the Book of Job, or Thornton Wilder’s ever-popular Our Town. But he was just as dismissive of the would-be radicals of the era: the Beats in America, the Angry Young Men in Britain. Macdonald claimed to admire Picasso but saw Jackson Pollock and his friends as “drip and dribble” painters.

He loved the avant garde only when it belonged safely to the past, when its spare intransigence was already hallowed by time. He revered the King James Bible as a grave monument of English poetry and prose, deeply integrated into the fabric of later literature, but could not acknowledge how much its archaisms, obscurities, and mistranslations needed respectful correction and clarification, especially where original was pithy, direct. To him such “trivial gains in accuracy” are not worth the loss of “long-cherished beauty of phrasing.” Yet those gains were anything but trivial, and much of the hallowed phrasing was preserved. His attack on the new dictionary, though in many ways justified, was even more of a rear-guard action. Multiplying example after example, Macdonald wins every local skirmish but loses the war. The day was past when a dictionary could serve as the sovereign arbiter of usage rather than an alert recorder of how the living language continued to evolve.

Macdonald was most effective on easier targets. As a matchless critic of style, he could deftly puncture Norman Cousins’s gaseous editorial statements or the other Cozzens’s arch, pompous language. In Cozzens he detects the prig under the cover of the moralist. He calls By Love Possessed a “neo-Victorian cakewalk” and demolishes its gullible reviewers: “Confusing laboriousness with profundity, the reviewers have for the most part not detected the imposture.” The impact of Macdonald’s meticulous takedown was immediate. Rarely has a single review so deflated a writer’s reputation, yet Macdonald happily sent the piece to Cozzens himself – in case he missed it, as if any writer ever missed the current buzz about his work. Macdonald could be ingenious even in overkill, as when he compares the Bible revisers’ work to the saturation bombing of German cities, leaving large monuments intact while leveling all their surroundings.

Macdonald’s one-liners still resonate. He wonders why Hollywood moguls are called producers “when their function is to prevent the production of art.” They charge screenwriters with “licking the book,” like bears licking their cubs, but here “the process is reversed and the book is licked not into but out of shape.” Of Time magazine he writes: “As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” Anticipating current criticisms of the Internet, he complains about the proliferation of newspapers and magazines which substitute facts and information for thinking and imagination, and even compares reading this mountain of material to the work of a calculating machine, an ancestor of today’s computers. “This gives a greatly extended coverage to our minds, but also makes them, compared to the kinds of minds similar people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal.” Amid these distractions, he concludes, “the real problem of our day is how to escape being ‘well informed,’ how to resist the temptation to acquire too much information.” Sound familiar?

Macdonald is right to say that the real challenge is not wide reading, which he feels has deteriorated into skimming, but deep reading, “to bring the slow, cumbersome depths into play, to ruminate, speculate, reflect, wonder, experience what the eye has seen.” This is usually the mandate of art rather than journalism or information, and no computer can supply it any more than Time could. But the arts themselves, much like language, were evolving in Macdonald’s day, and his stubborn adherence to the past, his faith in continuity or very slow change, kept him from appreciating this.

The very distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow that he tried so hard to uphold were falling apart. The arts and even the politics of the 1960s made no sense in terms of these cultural hierarchies. The songs of Dylan or the Beatles, the films of Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, and Robert Altman, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg of Roy Lichtenstein, the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, or Kurt Vonnegut – all these bridged or shattered such jerry-built cultural categories.

Macdonald’s values are sound yet his essays survive less for what they say, which is too often anchored in an idealized past, than for how they say it: their wit and rhetorical verve, their uproarious satire and sheer love of disputation, the way they marshal unanswerable facts and embarrassing quotations. His designated victims often hang themselves as he chuckles from the sidelines. Great satirists and parodists rarely swim with the tide. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, they gained energy, as he does, from their articulate distaste for the newfangled. And as he says about one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, “while his works are sometimes absurd, they are rarely dull.”

At a time when movies seem more mass-produced than ever, we have every reason to wax nostalgic about the French New Wave. Rarely have so many divergent but pathfinding talents emerged at the same time and place. The New Wave was essentially the product of a single decade, from 1959 to 1969, set in motion by a handful of directors who had sharpened their teeth as film critics in the 1950s. Their gift for offbeat storytelling, propelled by an invigorating spontaneity, ran parallel to the social upheavals of that era.. Yet each had his own personality, and their most characteristic films are surprisingly unlike each other. What they had in common needs no rehearsing here: their dislike of the upholstered, screenplay- and star-driven French cinema of their day; their preference for underrated Hollywood directors ranging from Hitchcock, Hawks, and Welles to hard-boiled outliers like Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray; their warm affinity for the European humanistic cinema of independent spirits like Vigo and Renoir, Cocteau and Melville, Bresson and Becker. With Melville they shared a love of the unsentimental brooding fatalism of American gangster films and pulp fiction, which were part of the heritage of postwar existentialism. But they were also caught between the buoyant, life-affirming legacy of Renoir, who showed them how to improvise and sympathize, and the plot-driven aesthetics of the more macabre Hitchcock, whose darker humor demanded iron control.

Though most of the New Wave directors enjoyed long careers, their best films came early on. Truffaut never equaled his first three breathtaking features, The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim. These are the films I’ve invariably used in courses, and they still play beautifully, each in its own way. In his next feature, The Soft Skin, the Hitchcock influence weighs heavily on him, even as it kindles the imagination of Claude Chabrol who after his first features, such as the superb Les Bonnes Femmes, evolved his own style of bourgeois thriller over five productive decades. Yet his work too crested early, at the end of the 1960s with La Femme Infidle, This Man Must Die, and Le Boucher, all introduced here at the New York Film Festival under the Francophile direction of its devoted founder, Richard Roud. Godard is a special case since he produced so many varied films in the decade that followed the release of Breathless in 1960 – perhaps the film that most defines the New Wave and one that holds up astonishingly well on repeated viewings.

In Breathless Godard’s jump cuts, improvisational camera work, casual location shooting, and often tongue-in-cheek dialogue created perhaps the archetype of the New Wave film, and it continues to exert its influence over both indie and mainstream filmmaking today. But the more disjunctive films he made afterward, full of Brechtian alienation effects, can now be seen as period pieces, though everything he made through Weekend in 1967 is worth seeing. The other defining feature of early New Wave films are certain iconic performances: Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, Anna Karina in several early Godard films. Yet how disparate these performances are. Belmondo’s punk imitation of Bogart is cool and ironic yet projects an undertone of fatal arbitrary attraction. Where Karina comes across as waif-like, passive, and playful, Moreau is willful, infinitely alluring, yet ultimately inaccessible, a baroque period turn on the femme fatale. Léaud, Truffaut’s autobiographical stand-in, resonates with the director’s memories and a sense of entrapment that echoes American youth films of the 1950s such as Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.

The ultimate importance of the New Wave, besides the enduring films and exceptional artists it gave us, was to break down the pattern of the classic Hollywood cinema that been dominant from the thirties through the fifties, the well-made story with impeccable production values directed at a broad audience. There were many other influences that contributed to this opening: the example of postwar Italian neorealism, with it documentary aesthetic and powerful, heartbreaking immediacy, but also the subsequent work of Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Bunuel, and others, which arrived on the American film scene along with the New Wave, just as the sixties broke out. Their work represented a modernist, experimental turn in filmmaking, yet the New Wave movies were not really art films as these were. They emerged from a dialogue with American genre films, which they deepened and interrogated in highly personal ways. The first American film influenced by the New Wave was probably Bonnie and Clyde; its screenwriters tried to convince Truffaut to direct it, but that job fell instead to Arthur Penn. Its combination of crime, love, period detail, comedy, and graphic violence mystified and outraged traditional reviewers like Bosley Crowther but proved decisive for American filmmakers who came into their own in the 1970s, beginning with Robert Altman. The techniques and sensibility of the New Wave also helped inspire the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, and Schlöndorff.

The New Wave directors themselves each went their own way. The work of Godard and Rivette grew more personal and intransigent, though Rivette occasionally emerged with perfectly accessible films like La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and Va Savoir (2001), both cut down from much longer versions. Truffaut and Chabrol, on the other hand, made their piece with commercial cinema, which enabled them to work regularly, still exercising their craft in inimitable ways. Between these two poles their colleague Eric Rohmer produced delicious movies over some four decades, at once sensuous and intellectual, baked in rich sunlight yet leavened with civilized conversation, carrying the legacy of the New Wave into the twenty-first century.

The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they imagine for themselves and the audience they address. Academic critics writing for their peers will take a different tack from public critics speaking to a general audience, large or small, or from writers themselves using criticism to carve out a space for their own work. Surprisingly, novelists and especially poets have proved to be among our best critics. Poet-critics from Johnson to Eliot form the main line of the English critical tradition, while the foundations for a coherent criticism of the novel were laid by Henry James. Yet American writers are better known for their prickly aversion to critics rather than their appreciation, even when critics built up the following for their work. My favorite example, one that set my blood boiling, was Saul Bellow’s likening of the critic to a deaf man tuning a piano. (Had he merely said “tone deaf” I wouldn’t have been so offended.) Then there are the old saws that continue to surface: “Those who can’t, criticize.” “No one ever grew up dreaming of becoming a critic.” All this implies that critics, with little imagination themselves, are hardly more than mechanical observers or failed writers, stewing in their inadequacy and taking out this resentment on their betters, the really creative spirits. As one wag put it, a critic is one who arrives late on the battlefield to kill off the survivors.

In fact, really good critics are writers, with their own style and literary personality, though their works feeds off other writing, as novelists and poets feed off the text of our common life. Both kinds of writers must somehow be faithful to their subjects yet find their own angle of vision. They have to tell the truth, a truth we’ll acknowledge, but, like Emily Dickinson, “tell it slant.” They distill art into meaning, they punish failure and lionize success, but like all writers they work by way of selection, even distortion. We remember critics for their temperament as much as their critical judgment: the pugilistic vigor of Hazlitt, the digressive idiosyncrasies of Ruskin, the clerical acerbity of Eliot, the transparent windowpane of Orwell, the poetic conjunctions of Benjamin, the Hegelian dynamics of Adorno. We can forgive a great deal in a critic who manifests a striking sensibility or a startling point of view, as we are seduced by writers who freshen our sense of the familiar world. Some critics survive on the strength of their prose alone; some by promoting new artists and movements; others by introducing seminal concepts (the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility); by demonstrating sheer intelligence or depth of learning; or by helping reorient the history and direction of an art form. As it happens, T. S. Eliot could qualify under any of these categories.

So let me lay down a few principles that are simply features of the kind of criticism I love to read and have tried to write.

–It was only in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the New Criticism, that criticism itself began to play a major role in the academic study of literature, which previously was focused on textual scholarship and factual research. Because of the new emphasis on close reading, most academic criticism grew too long, too pedantic and detailed. The critic felt obliged to lay out every step of the reading, not simply the interpretive outcome, the take-away or upshot of disciplined attention. Such monographs too often became little more than stepping stones in the job market, rungs in the accreditation process. Earlier critics read just as closely but luxuriated in aphorism, intuition, and apodictic summation, writerly vices. They kicked away the analytic ladder that brought them to their destination. Most journalistic criticism, on the other hand, is too brief and superficial, too uninformed, almost weightlessly opinionated. Trapped by space limitations and deadlines, such pieces habitually default on context, ignoring much that undergirds the work and conditions its meaning. With the exception of longer, more intricate reviews in little magazines and intellectual journals, they reduce criticism to consumer guidance. They strike attitudes and ventilate feelings, largely unsupported by argument or evidence. If criticism must make its case as illuminating commentary on works of art, then the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay, personal, reflective, attuned to an ongoing conversation. This is why critical journals (like the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) and critical schools (the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics) were so important to twentieth-century criticism: they kept a conversation going, they responded to new movements in the arts with strong revaluations and critical methods that were responsive to difficult new writing.

–It follows that the criticism I enjoy is more affective than cerebral, more empirical than theoretical. The glory of the essay, since Montaigne, comes in the way it generalizes from the concrete, raising “perception to the point of principle and definition,” as Eliot put it. Much of recent criticism works the other way around, setting up a template of theory or method and shoehorning arbitrary examples into it. It has little truck with aesthetics, too readily dismissed as an ideology. In rare cases this theoretical approach shines a different light on an individual work or a larger issue; too often it is counter-intuitive, distorting literary works with it own ideological agenda, or simply missing the mark. Do we experience a shock of recognition when we read such a commentary? Does it open up a new path of understanding for us, or merely serve as a vehicle for our political or moral prejudices? Does the reading actually confront the power of the literary work or its agonizing failure to muster that power? Love and hate are crucial for critics, along with deep-seated ambivalence. They give evidence that the writer’s work has really touched us. They feed the flame of good critical prose and supply energy that empowers the critic to bring a bolt of clarity to the reader. This is why sharply formulated, deeply felt literary judgment, not simply analytic interpretation, is vital to the critic’s task. It tracks the movement of a genuine critical sensibility. Make-or-break evaluation gives evidence that the stakes are high, that the critic is engaged, the subject really matters. A critic needs an analytic mind but also something of a polemical style, for criticism is also a form of persuasion

–The work of criticism is a juggling act, a discourse without clear borders. The critic must play the role of what I once called a double agent, balancing text and context, a sensitive grasp of form along with a feeling for the social currents that help shape art. F. R. Leavis is usually seen as a formal critic, yet he insisted that “one cannot seriously be interested in literature and remain purely literary in interests.” In principle, nothing is alien to the critic: the writer’s biography, the history of ideas, the social history of the times, the tools of philology, the evolution of formal conventions, the parallels to the other arts, the insights gleaned from literary history but also from other disciplines. These blurred boundaries have been unconscionably abused in recent years as critics squander their authority by poaching on fields they know little about, pronouncing on subjects they know even less about. One result is that a stereotyped progressive mind-set, the well-meaning agendas of political correctness, becomes their received wisdom; open-minded scholars are unable to take their work seriously. Historians recoil from the anecdotal evidence of New Historicism, as social scientists resist ideological position-taking in social criticism. Research gives way to fashionable cant, currently some form of postmodernism and anti-essentialism, which caricatures the wisdom of the past, gives unquestioned sanction to all forms of relativism, and effectively assumes what needs to be proved.

–Despite the sins of critics borrowing from fields they haven’t mastered, I call myself a generalist, a public critic, which is simply another name for an intellectual, someone whose first love is the exchange of ideas. As an undergraduate at Columbia I learned to pillage literature for ideas, to quarry it crudely for important themes, but somehow I also imbibed a strong historical sense, what Philip Rahv called the sixth sense of the critic. Eliot noted that this historical awareness “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This sense of the present became a watchword among the New York Intellectuals. Intrigued by the ambitious reach of their work, its crossing of conventional boundaries, I became sensitive to the politics of literature, of literature as an actual intervention in the world. But it was only as a graduate student at Yale, then in the last stages of the New Criticism, and at later at Cambridge, still under the influence of Leavis, that I learned more about how literary works were put together, how they were made of language and exploited formal conventions. This brought me back to my sophomore year of high school, when I first read A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Letter and was amazed at the sheer craftsmanship of the whole but also at the architecture of sentences and paragraphs. These books seemed ingeniously tooled, shaped to endure, yet their stories were also full of arresting details, resonant symbols, and a vivid recreation of earlier times and places. They gave me intimations of both literary form and the pressure of history that I understood only years later.

–Despite the importance of craft, works of art are not so much objects as experiences. Critics are not anatomists who murder to dissect but seismologists attuned to every rumble in the terrain of art and of their own inner lives. When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, he meant that life itself, the stream of felt experience, is what gives art meaning and value. Before 1900 no one would have questioned this. But in the twentieth century we grew so concerned about the mediations of art – the conventions of realism, the techniques of modernism, the movements that congregated into different schools – that we sometimes lost sight of art’s purpose and substance. Since art reshapes life into staged experiences, this further blurs the boundaries of criticism, creating an opening from aesthetic criticism to moral and social criticism. This was the trajectory of the great Victorian critics – Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin – though it was also resisted by the successors they influenced, including Pater and Wilde, who disliked moralizing yet themselves wrote in this sweeping prophetic strain. For me the arts offer invaluable clues to the inner configurations of a culture, its intimate depths of mind and feeling. The alienating effects of industrial society created the conditions for a social criticism grounded in aesthetics, for art pointed to a potential for human fulfilment that modern life had undermined. Twentieth-century critics like Orwell, Leavis, Wilson, and Trilling were heirs to this tradition, which has few successors today.

–Despite its ambitions as a critique of ideology, postmodern relativism lays down a path of acquiescence to commerce and power rather than effective resistance. It rejects moral judgment as a form of hierarchy and elitism, though criticism has always demanded a trained sensibility, capable of doing the necessary work of discrimination. Eliot described criticism, simply but memorably, as “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste,” but “correction” rings oddly in contemporary ears, for it suggests that the few who know more or feel deeply might offer instruction to the many, and might improve society in the process. Yet taste and discrimination remain the ultimate tests of the critic, without which there can be no clarifying insight or understanding. Instead we have today the democratization of criticism represented by customer reviews of books and films on the Internet. Critical judgment increasingly resembles what we find on websites where hotels and restaurants are usefully rated by people impelled to write in or sound off. Their judgments are unedited, and we know nothing about where they come from. We must turn critics ourselves to weigh their worth. Criticism becomes a form of polling, in which we look for enlightenment from the man in the street.

In this context, it becomes wildly anachronistic to hold on to the Victorian notion of the critic as social or moral guide, or to the modernist charge of the critic as mediator and expositor of difficult art, or even to the more general view of the critic as an informed intellectual, someone who thinks hard about art and society, who has developed the faculty of focused attention, along with the rhetorical skills and the cast of mind to craft those perceptions into argument. This remains the mainstream of the critical tradition, and it speaks to the passions that drew me irresistibly to art and critical writing in the first place. At bottom criticism is personal, agonistic, however thoughtful and measured its tone. It is Jacob wrestling with an angel, an existential encounter in which the full being of the critic confronts the full power of the work, which invites yet also resists critical translation.

This essay will appear in Something to Declare: A Collection of Critical Credos, edited by Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen, to be published later this year by Columbia University Press.

I couldn’t have disagreed more with the viewpoint of his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in which he highlighted every irrational feature of the culture of the 1960s, creating an unrecognizable portrait of the whole era as “an attack on reason itself.” But he was at least consistent in tracing this back to modernism itself, which he saw reductively not as a breakthrough in the arts but as a pernicious outbreak of apocalyptic nihilism. “What the new sensibility did,” he wrote, “was to carry the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusion.” Culture was not Bell’s strong suit. His treatment was coarse-grained and almost embarrassingly indebted to Lionel Trilling’s more nuanced dissent from modernism and his critique of the “adversary culture,” including his notion that the sixties represented a kind of acting-out of modernist ideas. Bell too saw the new culture as “an effort by a cultural mass to adopt and act out the life-style which hitherto had been the property of a small and talented elite.” But even in the 1950s, in an essay chastising but welcoming the new Dissent magazine, he argued that “the problem of radicalism today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society.” This was in many ways prophetic. The long-range effects of the counterculture were far greater than the impact of the political left, apart from the conservative backlash that it provoked.

Bell’s own politics were nothing if not consistent. As many old friends slid towards Nixon and neoconservatism, he remained a solidly grounded Hubert Humphrey-style liberal – pragmatic, anti-utopian. He was a great believer in the power of temperament over political commitment. He was not at all surprised that some of the most rigid Stalinists of the 1930s became equally rigid anti-Communists. He observed the mellowing of Irving Howe with amazement, describing him as one of the few friends who had actually undergone a dramatic change of temperament. And in his last years he himself actually wrote for Dissent, a journal that seemed to him anachronistic in its radicalism when it first appeared. As a person Dan was a bottomless well of Jewish jokes and sayings. One of his favorites: “As the Yiddish proverb goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” He repeated this with the customary twinkle in his eye and chuckle in his voice.

He had the memory of an elephant. The course I took with him on Victorian culture, which he team-taught with Trilling and Steven Marcus, juxtaposed literary readings with social and political documents as a method of fathoming the “moral temper” of the era, a pregnant concept. With a boisterous laugh, he later loved to remind me of something I supposedly said in the seminar apropos of one of these documentary readings grounded in social fact: “I didn’t know this course was going to be about real estate.” I might have felt literary and superior enough to have said such a thing, though I had no recollection of it. But I suspected I could trust his memory better than my own.

On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous “long tail,” older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it’s all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.

Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance.

In the case of book reviewing, or critical writing of any kind, cyberspace offers a few advantages, but to my mind they are outweighed by the drawbacks. There is that vast storehouse of material that can be retrieved, such as reviews, old and new; biographical information; profiles of writers, movie directors, artists, composers; but also, for reviewers, something genuinely new, a vast grey hinterland between publishing and not publishing. The Internet is an open grid for bloggers, commentators, cranks, obsessive enthusiasts who have made cults of individual writers, but not least of all for the fabled man in the street, the consumer now empowered to talk back, to emerge from anonymity, or take cover in anonymity, to make his or her peeves and passions known.

To put it simply, the professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor’s exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated. What works for a website like Trip Advisor, which gives us unfiltered but welcome criticism of hotels and restaurants, most assuredly does not work for literary reviewing, which demands taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument. Barring this, we’re stuck with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of reviewing. Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.

But what about bloggers, you may ask. They may not be professionals but they certainly can be devoted and persistent. Blogging has a style of its own, most commonly diaristic, spontaneous. As with online reviewing in general, it has opened the culture to a vast spectrum of writing and opinion, most of which no one will ever read. I enjoy casual blogging myself as a relief from the formal essay, with its carefully honed prose. I plan to post these very remarks in a blog, and would be gratified if they found a few readers. But it’s striking that there are twenty successful political blogs for each effective literary blog. With all due respect to Critical Mass, the valuable website of the National Book Critics Circle, there’s not a single must-read literary blog I turn to on a regular basis. The ones that I do read are linked to print magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic, or The Atlantic, or the ones actually modeled on print magazines, such as Slate and Salon or gateway sites like Arts & Letters Daily. But will the online extensions of print journals still thrive when the magazines themselves go under, as some surely will when they run out of millionaires nostalgic for the old print culture who are willing to subsidize them. What will happen to online journalism, especially investigative journalism, when it destroys the print journalism on which it feeds, or to aggregator sites when they find themselves aggregating only from other websites?

As writers of books and as reviewers ourselves, what do we expect from a book review? In the case of a movie review we’re usually content with learning what it’s about and deciding whether to see it. Because books are literature we hold book reviewing to a higher standard. We expect much more than plot summary or summary judgment. We expect it to be really written, exacting, to rise to the level of its subject, to display an understanding of the medium, a personal point of view. We would be outraged if new novels were rated with a certain number of stars, as movies commonly are. We demand incisive judgment, not mere consumer guidance. Book reviews should be a province of writing, not of marketing – or polling. Criticism is a refined art, not a popularity contest. We expect it to be done with style and intelligence.

The last thing we want to do is idealize the old middlebrow culture with its genteel book industry, its banal bookchat and boosterism, its highly stratified culture – a pyramid capped by a small cadre of little magazines and rigorous critics. But we may miss its respect for the written word, the life of the mind, the culture of the past. The Internet accelerated a democratization of culture which had long been under way, a shift toward visual media and popular music that consigned literature to the outer margins. The revolution initiated by the movie screen and the TV screen is being brought to high definition by the computer screen. Here critical writing has a small niche but will it acquire a real presence? Deployed with technical savvy, it can become a form of resistance, a rampart of personal vision within a relentlessly homogenized culture, ever in thrall to the fashions of the moment. Thanks to its open grid and easy access, the same technology that marginalizes literature and drowns out criticism leaves room for dissent, for the still, small voice that may yet find ways to be heard.

These remarks were prepared for panel on “The Next Decade in Book Culture,” with special emphasis in criticism and book reviewing, at the PEN World Voices Festival, April 27, 2011, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.

In the public mind Jackson Pollock was a tough-guy American artist, a cowboy out of Cody, Wyoming, who stretched the limits of abstract art not with brush and easel but by dripping, pouring, or flinging paint at canvases tacked to the floor of his small barn on Long Island. This image of Pollock as an “action” painter, an existentialist in jeans, was less a commentary on his art than the offshoot of Hans Namuth’s celebrated films and photographs of Pollock painting: the choreography of a man in perpetual motion, communing with the canvas as if by instinct, immersed completely in the creative moment. Pollock’s alcoholism, his difficulty in dealing with fame, and finally his death in a near-suicidal car crash in 1956 completed the picture of a tormented masculine loner wrestling with his inner demons.

The last figure we expect to meet is Pollock the family problem, the messed-up sibling. Yet this is precisely the role he plays in this fascinating collective portrait of the painter, his four older brothers, and their parents and wives during the years of his painful apprenticeship. American Letters, 1927-1947 is an enlarged version of a book first published in 2009 in France, an intricate network of letters these family members wrote to each other, full of news and chatter, often merely dutiful, at times covertly desperate. Though Jackson Pollock’s name is on the title page, the book was no doubt conceived as a tribute to his brother Charles, whose career as a painter over six decades was overshadowed by Jackson’s. Carefully edited by Charles’s second wife, Sylvia Winter Pollock, the book is illustrated by his early drawings, which show him to be a competent but conventional social realist. Perhaps pressed by Jackson’s example, he was reborn as a softly lyrical abstract painter after 1945.

The eldest of the five brothers, whose parents’ chronic failures and frequent relocations preceded the Depression, Charles came from California to New York in 1926 to study art with Thomas Hart Benton. With Charles’s encouragement, brothers with similar ambitions soon followed, including eighteen-year-old Jackson in 1930 and Sanford (Sande) in 1934. They were quickly integrated into Benton’s family – a substitute for their own, even more so after the death of their father in 1933. With major mural commissions, especially at the New School in New York, Benton was then at the height of his fame as a populist and regionalist in the American grain. Jackson gradually replaced Charles as his favorite, despite the younger man’s lack of technical skill. Even as a troublesome high school student, kicked out as a “rotten rebel from Russia,” Jackson had vaguely wanted to become an artist and had a surprisingly clear grasp of the challenge before him. Drawn to the Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Gabriel Orozco, he found it difficult to do any realistic drawing, though he soon would imitate Benton’s fluid, swirling manner and Picasso’s signature images.

All through the 1930s he was troubled, searching, incommunicative. When drunk he could be violent and self-destructive, a burden and enigma to those around him, yet his helplessness and shy, sullen charm inspired others to take care of him. But this is a story less of one artist’s coming of age than of an exceptional family, starting with nothing, improvising to make its way in lean economic times. Since some of them were always at opposite ends of the country, or crisscrossing it in cheap jalopies, they were writing to each other simply to keep up. Along with details of their lives and (more sparingly) their feelings, the book is dotted with snapshots of Depression America. In April 1934 one brother in California, Marvin Jay, writes to Charles in New York:

We are eating regularly and shall continue to manage by some means.

Frank [another brother] has ten days labor with the power company, obtained by our district Councilman. One of us should get on with the PWA [Public Works Administration].

The County pays our rent, public utilities and some foods.

I bought a milk goat this week and will get some chickens and rabbits when I earn a few more dollars. With milk, eggs and meat from our backyard ranch we can mange until something can be done about this rotten situation.

This is not exactly destitution but it is strenuously poor, close to the edge, a marginal life dependent on public welfare and New Deal programs. Six weeks later, Charles and Jackson buy a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars and set out to visit their mother for the first time since their father’s death. (On returning to New York they would sell it for twice the cost.) Like so many other Americans they were taking to the road, not looking for work but to see how their fellow citizens were faring. Their elaborate itinerary, which took them through scenes of intense labor conflict such as Harlan County, Kentucky, and steel towns near Pittsburgh and Birmingham, indicates how politically engaged Charles had become. The ten letters he wrote to his first wife, Elizabeth, are really reports from the field to a keenly intelligent woman even more of an activist than he was. In the dry, hot landscape of Texas he is appalled by the grim condition of poverty-stricken blacks and Mexicans. “Even though this is beautiful country for these people [it] is indescribably barren and harsh.”

As the book progresses we watch Jackson’s brothers, all political innocents at first, become inexorably radicalized, only to fall into confusion at the lack of democracy in the Party, at Stalin’s purge trials and his anti-Trotsky campaign, and finally during the contorted aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin pact, which demanded adjustments no thoughtful person could manage. For the three who became artists, Charles, Sande, and Jackson, their hopes and fears as well as their politics centered on the unprecedented arts funding set in motion by the New Deal, especially the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program of the Works Progress Administration. As American Letters brings home, the WPA may not have produced seminal art but did a remarkable job of keeping penniless artists from starving – at a time when the art market and private patronage effectively did not exist. The FAP also covered the walls of innumerable public works erected by New Deal agencies. Jackson went on the mural project and Sande on the easel project almost as soon as they began in 1935. Though Jackson was terminated several times for behaving badly or not showing up, they essentially remained with it until the political right finally killed the program in 1943. By then, fortunately for Jackson, Peggy Guggenheim and her adventurous new gallery, Art of This Century, were waiting in the wings.

If Charles and Elizabeth are at the heart of the first half of the book, then the self-effacing Sande is the unassuming hero of its later pages. By the mid-1930s, the irascible Benton, disaffected with both the art scene and the political left, abandons New York and returns to the Midwest. Shocked that Benton has not taken him along as his assistant, Charles leaves town as well, first to Washington to take up a government job, then to Michigan to create a weekly paper for the United Auto Workers, serving as an editor and political cartoonist. The perpetual problem of Jack is left to Sande, newly arrived in the city, soon to be married to his childhood sweetheart.

Sande’s worries about Jack, his constant fear that they will be thrown off the Project, and his growing vexation with left-wing politics and right-wing witch hunts, including McCarthyite investigations and loyalty oaths, add a plaintive note to the enforced optimism of his letters. He conceals the seriousness of Jack’s erratic behavior and drinking problem from his mother and brothers and bemoans his inability to find a role beyond that of Jack’s “wet nurse.” He expresses guilt for not sending more support to their mother or bringing her to live with them, a matter on which the other brothers seem cavalier. (If Jack, her favorite, feels any such responsibility, it doesn’t come through.) “It is beyond me how I can be so damn negligible and still live with myself,” Sande writes to Charles. At first one imagines he means “negligent,” but it may also be that he feels “negligible,” a mere shadow of the larger figures who surround him.

As a painter Sande deems himself a failure. “I feel that I have been called upon and found wanting.” His kid brother is anything but a success but his iron determination, his sense of vocation, is unmistakable, the one constant in his life. It would be some time before Jack’s violent inner conflicts would find an effective outlet in his work. In a rare moment of candor Sande describes Jack’s mental illness to Charles in 1937, though he sees no choice but to go on. “I would be fearful of the results if he were left alone with no one to keep him in check.” In his warmhearted letters he is always gilding the lily. Jack has a breakdown and is hospitalized in 1938 but Sande only reveals this to Charles, not very accurately, in an anguished 1941 letter. He and his wife decamp for Connecticut when a young painter, Lee Krasner, arrives on the scene and moves in. There’s no way to know whether Sande’s fierce protectiveness saved Jack’s life or prolonged his turmoil and dependency. Lee proved even more selfless, giving up even her own painting for long periods, but she provided him with the kind of happiness and validation, outside the hothouse of the city, that helped him break through in his work. They were married in 1945.

Sande’s discretions and partial disclosures underline the limits of these letters, which can be read alongside the major Pollock biographies that fill in the gaps. Michael Leja’s astute introduction also sketches out much of what’s missing from the letters. Yet it would be hard to match the book as an account of this unusual family in its own varied voices, grounded in the larger struggles of the Depression, the shifting, sometimes dumbfounding politics of the Communist left, the travails of an indispensable government arts program, and the terrific dilemmas of one driven artist who would take, it seemed, forever to find his way. Jackson Pollock’s voice is the quietest here, whispery, almost inarticulate, yet so many of his family’s problems circle around his. His triumphs would come later but would never fully put his demons to rest.

For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, spectators would still be captured by its recreation of a spontaneous mutiny on one of the czar’s naval vessels. It provided not only a thrilling account of a collective uprising but a virtual textbook in how film editing could excite sympathy, fear, and revolutionary anger. The film’s purpose was no less propagandistic than Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi productions of the 1930s, especially Triumph of the Will, but its themes were humane: not exalting the irrational cult of a supreme leader but dramatizing the oppressive violence of Russia’s old regime; the basic, universal longing for human dignity; and a bright but brief springtime of freedom and solidarity. For Eisenstein, working at the dawn of the Stalinist era, that liberation seemed to have been realized, although we came to know how soon it would be cut off. In the light of history, we cannot look at Potemkin with innocent eyes, yet its hopes and illusions seem as timely as the latest uprisings in the Arab world.

The release of a new version by Kino Lorber, with the sequence of shots, the Russian intertitles, and the original score all restored, offers an occasion to reconsider not only the movie itself but the issue of politics and film, especially revolutionary politics. Eisenstein was essentially a formalist, but he believed that film, as a revolutionary medium, could forward political revolution as well, for its techniques could incite popular feeling and bring it to a high pitch. No one could have agreed with him more than, say, Joseph Goebbels. For most of us, on the other hand, film and revolution make for an incendiary mix. It seems axiomatic that a political film ought to be complex and thoughtful, not simply rousing. But the avant-garde of the 1920s, especially in France, Germany, and Russia, set out to smash the conventions of depth in traditional narrative. For the new art cinema, stories with realistic settings, unfolding moral themes, and highly individualized characters belonged to the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. To Eisenstein it was collective action that counted, not personal heroism or individual responsibility. Casting nonprofessional actors for Potemkin, he was drawn to physical types whose appearance expressed their social role, not performers who could give full play to complex motives.

Eisenstein was a painterly director; later in his career he sketched out every shot in advance. No one who ever saw Potemkin is likely to forget its stark images, beginning with the geometrical patterns of the hammocks in which the sailors sleep; the maggoty meat that provokes them to rise up; the weasel-faced ship doctor who examines it with pince-nez and pronounces it fit to eat; the tarpaulin thrown over the rebellious men, dehumanizing them into a rustling mass to be gunned down. Above all there were the graphic shots cunningly edited to give maximum impact to the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps, images of helplessness, panic, or outrage so piercing they have become shorthand for cinema itself.

The dynamic rhythm of the Odessa sequence became justly famous. In the crowd along the shore celebrating the insurrection, peaceably enjoying their own taste of freedom, we see the faces that will serve as leitmotifs of the carnage: elderly middle-class women, a mother with her son, another with a baby pram, a legless man propelled on his arms. Charging into this mass of humanity come the marching troops of the czar, a phalanx of faceless men inexorably descending the stairs, firing as they move. As their victims flee down the steps, others turn upward in shock and disbelief, pleading with soldiers not to fire; each of them, in separate strokes, is blasted in turn. Most haunting is the rolling baby carriage as it begins its interminable descent, with a hair-raising suspense that Alfred Hitchcock must have envied. Eisenstein took liberties with history—there was no massacre on the Odessa Steps—and an even greater liberty with time and space. The stairway was actually not very long, but in the subjective time created by hypnotic editing the massacre seems to go on forever. No film ever did more to pillory the repressions of a despotic regime.

Here matters grow complicated. Was Eisenstein using his genius to attack one tyranny by putting this gift at the service of another? In his short life—he died at fifty in 1948—he himself would periodically run afoul of the Stalinist regime, which suppressed his last film, the sumptuous second part of Ivan the Terrible. In its own time Potemkin was considered so dangerous it was butchered or banned in many countries, one reason it needed to be restored. Thanks to Eisenstein’s daring experiments in montage, the film was more effective in bringing about a revolution in the formal syntax of cinema than in inciting political upheaval, yet even that technical legacy was strongly challenged. By the late 1930s, directors like Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, abetted by gifted cinematographers working with faster film stock, were substituting long takes and deep-focus photography for Eisenstein’s reliance on editing, freeing up the action within the frame. Potemkin’s most enduring influence was less on film technique or politics than on political cinema, especially films made in the turbulence of the 1960s. Those were the films I wanted to see again after revisiting Potemkin.

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The film most often compared to Potemkin is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which reenacts the first phase of an uprising led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against French colonial dominance in the years between 1954 and 1957. Even more than Potemkin, which sometimes feels staged, it has the historical immediacy of a newsreel, complete with nonprofessional actors, documentary titles, and voiceovers intoning the proclamations of both sides. Like Eisenstein, Pontecorvo is superb at handling the mass movement of crowds. The Battle of Algiers is more about the shifting tides of collective feeling than about the characters’ own lives. But we come to recognize each of the FLN leaders as they plot strategy, execute heinous acts of terrorism against both soldiers and civilians, and gradually get picked off by the French, who respond by using torture to interrogate suspects, enabling them to decapitate the movement.

Political films are often so topical they date rapidly, but this investigation of terrorism, especially as the tactic of an Islamic insurgency, feels as if it were made yesterday. It was famously screened at the Pentagon in 2003 at the outset of the Iraq War as a primer in urban guerrilla warfare. Conversely, the Black Panthers had used it as a training film. Though the film has a reputation of cheerleading the uprising and was made with the support of the Algerian government, it gives a full airing to the dilemmas of the French and the rationale for their brutal counterinsurgency. In the most piercing sequence, we see three Muslim women westernizing their appearance, smuggling bombs through French checkpoints, and planting them among French civilians in cafés and at an Air France ticket office. Observing the scene through their eyes, we see close-ups of carefree young people, traveling businessmen, and a baby licking an ice cream cone, just seconds before they are blown up. Inevitably, this reminds us of the fearsome cost of terrorism in innocent lives. It transforms The Battle of Algiers from a gutwrenching documentary-style film to a masterpiece, astonishing in its immediacy yet surprisingly thoughtful and measured.

The film’s complications are enhanced by the arrival of the French Army as personified by Colonel Mathieu, based on General Jacques Massu, a decorated soldier who later led a military revolt against the Fourth Republic, which brought Charles de Gaulle to power. (The first volume of his memoirs was called The True Battle of Algiers.) Cold and calculating, the very epitome of the professional warrior, Mathieu brilliantly articulates a noholds-barred strategy that actually defeats the Muslim rebellion. The story ends as it began, with the last FLN leader cornered in his secret hideout, which the French have discovered through gruesome acts of torture. As a prologue we see their tortured informant, gaunt and terrified, looking like a hollowedout survivor of a concentration camp.

The French engage in retaliatory acts of terrorism against civilians, blowing up homes under cover of night. They smash a general strike and use it as an opportunity to clamp down violently on the Muslim quarter. When these methods, especially the torture, come to light, they shift public opinion in France, eroding the political will to continue the war. We learn at the end that the insurgency would flare again spontaneously after two years of calm, just as the FLN leaders had predicted. Two years afterward, de Gaulle would grant the Algerians independence, enraging many who brought him to power. Like the Vietnamese with their Tet Offensive a decade later, the Algerians had lost the battle but won the war.

The near-balance of sympathy in Pontecorvo’s film is all the more unexpected because, like Potemkin, it is essentially an official production, sponsored by the Algerian government, reenacted in the streets with hundreds of Algerians as extras, and based on a story by a surviving FLN leader who more or less plays himself. Another FLN figure, who dies under mysterious circumstances in a French prison, even says that it’s only after the revolution that the problems begin, a shrewd comment on revolutionary struggles that comes across as inspired hindsight yet also a cautionary reminder.

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Most political films are essentially histories of the present, focused on the recent past as it inflames the politics of the moment. Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966) takes place in 1965, but its arc reaches back almost thirty years to the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Yves Montand plays an exiled Spanish communist in France who also works underground to overthrow the Franco regime at home. As he is returning to France, the party leaders in exile have called a general strike, putting the Spanish authorities on high alert. Montand knows that militants are being rounded up, that the strike will prove futile and self-destructive. He remains a committed revolutionary but has grown tired, middleaged, for he has been confronting everyday realities, as the leadership has not. Dwelling in abstractions, they see Franco’s Spain as a country on the brink of revolution. For him, on the ground, life has become more complicated. “No one would like what I have to say about Spain,” he says.

Alain Resnais was not really a political filmmaker. He was concerned above all about memory and fantasy, as in his masterpiece Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963). But in 1966, as it turned out, France itself, not Spain, was only two years away from a huge uprising by students and workers, including a general strike. This might seem like an unfortunate juncture to make a movie about a worn-out revolutionary, depleted or disillusioned, a movie developing the theme that “the war is over.” But here Resnais and his screenwriter, Jorge Semprún—who based the story on his own experience in exile and in the Spanish underground—add a brilliant stroke that anticipates the coming conflict. In a scene more sharply focused, more politically savvy than anything in Godardian talkfests like La Chinoise, Montand stumbles on a cell of young radicals, impatient with old-line chieftains and their methods, who are bent on planting bombs rather than organizing strikes. To the aging exiles of the party’s Central Committee, Montand’s misgivings about ordering a general strike are “completely subjective”; he has “lost all political perspective.” For the young firebrands, caught up in their Leninist or Maoist rhetoric, the party’s “peaceful methods” are “objectively” bourgeois and reformist. Only acts of terror can ignite the coming upheaval. They are as disconnected from reality as the party’s leadership. He must remind them that quoting Lenin is not the same as acting politically: “Lenin is not a prayer wheel.”

La guerre est finie has touches of a thriller plot. There is little suspense or melodrama, but Montand’s whole life is a fabric of lies and inventions. Constantly on the alert against exposure, he makes himself up as he goes along. His Swedish mistress in Paris rarely sees him though she longs to join him, and when he is at risk she finally does. But La guerre est finie is far more reflective and, frankly, more intelligent than most political films. As a portrait of a professional revolutionary it evokes the contradictions between his protean calling and his reduced private life, his assumed identities and the “real” identity he barely preserves, his idealistic goals and his hard-earned skepticism.

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Some of this mixture of courage and experience carries over into Montand’s role as a liberal parliamentary figure who is assassinated in Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the last major political film of the 1960s, set in an unnamed country but dealing with the events leading up to the Greek military takeover in 1967. The script, again by Jorge Semprún, based on a novel by a Greek exile, centers on the murder of deputy Gregorios Lambrakis a few years earlier and the elaborate cover-up by the authorities, all haphazardly brought to light by a prying photojournalist on the trail of a story and a determined magistrate trusted by the authorities. The film could not be made in Greece thanks to the 1967 coup, so it was shot in Algeria in French, with government support, and a script linked to both The Battle of Algiers and La guerre est finie. Costa-Gavras, like Semprún, had long lived in France, and Z was the first of his gripping thrillers on contemporary political hot spots, from Greece and Czechoslovakia to Pinochet’s Chile and the Uruguay of the Tupamaro guerrillas.

Like many on the left in the 1960s, I was caught up with protests against the brutal Greek junta and even published a letter in the Times criticizing the imprisonment (and threatened execution) of Andreas Papandreou, an economist and heir to a political dynasty, who went into exile and later became Greece’s first socialist prime minister. When Z came out it seemed a miraculous combination of political art and popular entertainment, a trip for the mind as well as a blow to the gut. I was surprised to discover on seeing it again that, unlike The Battle of Algiers and La Guerre est finie, it has not aged well. Costa-Gavras is a deft, kinetic director with a gift for grabbing the audience by the throat, but his films, which go off like fireworks, are closer to agitprop than to art. Like his American disciple Oliver Stone, he relies too heavily on turning headlines into melodrama, which comes through clearly in later films like Missing and State of Siege, dealing with vicious regimes and CIA machinations in Latin America.

Much of the action in Z simply defies belief, even when closely based on events that actually occurred. Montand’s role is little more than a cameo, for he dies early and his assassination is staged so awkwardly that it looks, well, staged. His personality, his politics, and his troubled relations with his wife are barely sketched in; their marriage feels like a thin replay of Montand’s affair with Ingrid Thulin in La guerre est finie. The planning and the coverup, clumsily devised to make the killing look accidental, are probably the most effective features of the movie. But the officials implicated at every level, and even the assassins themselves, are like comically malevolent opera buffa figures, not so much evil as ridiculous.

The film improves in the second half as suspense gives way to clumsy comedy. The journalist, sneaking around with his camera, and the investigating magistrate, hiding behind his dark glasses, expose the plot almost inadvertently, out of an ornery persistence, as if stumbling into heroism. One of the witnesses, also targeted for elimination, is a stubborn simpleton who holds court in his hospital bed. When the plotters are interrogated they stand on their dignity with a ludicrous pomposity familiar from the mocking pages of Latin American fiction. In the end we realize that Z’s real kinship is not with meditative thrillers like La guerre est finie but with the absurdist political spectacles of the early 1960s like The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps the Greek colonels’ regime was as outlandish as the far-fetched plots of those movies, so that only black humor could do justice to it. In any case, we had come a long way from the autocracy of the czar and the burning grievances that set off the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, which turned Eisenstein into the first serious political filmmaker.

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Potemkin showed that political films can be exceptionally effective on the attack, deploying stories and images as a critical weapon. But its powerful celebration of a popular uprising pointed toward the dangerous simplifications of committed filmmaking. The Battle of Algiers, though its sympathies were clear, paid heed to the limits of sheer propaganda by insisting on the complexity of the Algerian War and the predicaments and motives of both sides. La guerre est finie took this further by allowing us more distance from the action, playing off the rhetoric of radical activism against the actual conditions of political action, including the fatigue of revolutionaries themselves, to say nothing of the masses they hope to arouse. Z, like La guerre, reveals the drawbacks of the standard documentary approach to politics, which prizes immediacy over subtlety, collective thinking over misgivings and doubts. These films also remind us of the pitfalls of historical reenactment, which can lead to the fatuities of the History Channel and the simplifications of pseudo-biography. These recreations offer nothing that genuine documentaries cannot do better.

Filmmakers will always be drawn to politics because of its inherent drama but also because the stakes are so high: the fate of whole societies, to say nothing of the most fundamental values, often hangs in the balance. But to make sense of this they need to resist the alluring conventions of thrillers, documentary imitations, and you-are-there newsreels, which offer a sure-fire channel to a popular audience. They would be wise to treat political issues not solely as advocates and agitators, exploiting the sensational, but as thoughtful witnesses, exciting or inciting the audience while also expanding its horizons.