Tag: flagg taylor

ACF Europe #14: Dear Comrades

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So the ACF series on totalitarianism and cinema continues with our first Russian movie–the best movie of 2020, at that–Andrey Konchalovsky’s story of a young workers’ protest which turned into a Soviet massacre, indeed one so thorough that even knowledge of it, even the corpses of the murdered protesters, were suppressed. The artistic view of this evil deed opposes to ideology the private side of human life–a mother and daughter, the possibility of faith, the importance of burial. The movie is available in streaming and it’s a wonderful contribution to the recent European interest in stories about the evils of communism. @FlaggTaylor and I have talked about a lot of them, and we have some more upcoming!

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ACF Europe #13 Afterimage

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So here’s Ricochet’s own @FlaggTaylor back on the podcast to talk about Andrzej Wajda’s artistic testament, Afterimage (2016), a movie about Poland’s most famous painter, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who stood against Communist ideology in art education and was destroyed for it. Communism is gone, this art has survived, but on the other hand, there’s a new ideology canceling art and reducing it to ideology–the militant woke. So–art and tyranny, education, the souls of children.

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ACF Europe #12: A Hidden Life

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Here’s a new conversation with our own resident expert on totalitarianism (including on-screen) @FlaggTaylor, about the beautiful new Terrence Malick movie, A Hidden Life. It’s now available for streaming–the true story of Franz Jaegerstaetter, a Catholic martyr in WWII in Austria, a young man, husband, and father of three daughters, who refused to swear the oath of loyalty to Hitler, retold from the letters he exchanged with his wife during his imprisonment.

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ACF Europe #11: Mr Jones

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So I talked to @FlaggTaylor about Mr. Jones, the new Agnieszka Holland movie about Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who dared to risk his life to reveal the truth about Stalin’s murder of millions of Ukrainians, the Holodomor, only to be faced with systematic lying by liberals in Moscow and Britain, orchestrated by Pulitzer prize winner Walter Duranty, who didn’t want to believe the truth, or publish it. In many ways, liberalism is back to its ’30s form.

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ACF PoMoCon #10: The Benedict Option

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Folks, here’s a podcast for the weekend–my conversation with Rod Dreher on traditional conservatism’s new moment. We talk about his books, about Christian communities facing the Pink Police State (hat tip to our friend James Poulos) and the need to retrieve pre-modern resources for communities of faith. We also talk about what Rod has learned from Christians surviving communism (hat tip to our friend @FlaggTaylor).

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ACF Critic Series #24: Cold War

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Back to Pawel Pawlikowski: @FlaggTaylor and I have a companion piece to Ida — Cold War, a romantic tragedy, which features a couple escaping from and then returning to the Iron Curtain. Whereas Ida is about divine love, this is merely human love. In both cases, the Polish past and totalitarianism are the most important concerns of the story. A deeply affecting movie about national memory and personal memory with special attention to what art and love can and cannot do. A remarkable performance by Joanna Kulig. The beautiful black-and-white cinematography of Lukasz Zal (which earned him an Oscar nomination), as well as heartbreaking Polish folk songs.The movie won the Palme d’Or in Cannes as well as the director prize — it was nominated for three big Oscars, too.

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ACF Critic Series #21: Katyn

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Our own @FlaggTaylor and I talk about Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, his 2007 film about the terrible Soviet slaughter of the Polish officer corps–some 22,000 men — as well as its aftermath. The protagonist is the wife of one of the officers and we follow her through both the Soviet and the Nazi parts of occupied — and dismembered — Poland. We get to see various characters struggling with questions of honor and prudence as the country is being destroyed. Only memory is left to give reasons for hope for future freedom. Krzysztof Penderecki’s music is also worthy of mention.

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ACF Critic Series #20: Interviewing Titus

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Here’s a strange new podcast–our own @FlaggTaylor interviewed me for a change. He got me to spill the beans about the American Cinema Foundation, its past and its projects now that I run it. Also, how I learned about American cinema in post-Communist Eastern Europe, how I became a film critic, how I became a writer for American audiences, and assorted other matters about our podcasts, college lecturing, and educational ideas. Listen and share, friends!

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ACF Middlebrow #21: Brooklyn

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Flagg Taylor and I bring you a movie fit for the festive season — a beautiful piece of selective nostalgia, a story devoid of anything sordid. A girl from Ireland is sent to America in the 1950s, to make something of herself, to find herself a future — to find her path to a decent happiness. You get to see her adventures in Brooklyn and it’s a perfectly Tocquevillian story of America’s many voluntary associations. It was a success and earned three important Oscar nominations, including protagonist Saoirse Ronan’s second actress nomination — she has earned a third meanwhile. I have an introductory essay over at The Federalist and, of course, the podcast for an in-depth, loving conversation about a wonderful movie.

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ACF: Prague Spring Edition

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Friends, this edition of the podcast is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring — on the night of August 20-21, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to the hopes for reform of the Communist regime. It would take more than a generation for freedom, destroyed by invasion, to come back to Prague. On January 16, 1969, Jan Palach, a 20-year-old student, burned himself in Wenceslas Square in protest against the resurgent tyranny. Agnieszka Holland, the Oscar-nominated director of the Holocaust movie In Darkness (2011), also made Burning Bush (2013), a three-episode mini-series on Jan Palach’s self-immolation and its aftermath, one of the best works of art we have about late totalitarian government. Flagg Taylor and I talk about this movie and about the Prague Spring itself, the Charter 77 movement, and Jan Palach’s legacy up to the return of freedom to Czechoslovakia.

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ACF Middlebrow #12: Comedy & Communism

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The new Middlebrow podcast deals with comedy and communism, spurred by the recent movie The Death of Stalin, which Flagg Taylor (@FlaggTaylor) and I both wanted to succeed. Unfortunately, it is a failure. More on this on the podcast, as well as some talk about Milan Kundera, Ilf and Petrov, Solzhenitsyn and Leo Strauss, Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda, an English-translation book of whose essays Flagg has just edited, The Long Night of The Watchman. Flagg is also the co-editor, with our friend Carl Scott, of Totalitarianism on Screen, about the great movie The Lives of Others (won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture in 2006), which dealt with the secret police in Communist East Germany, and which we discussed on the podcast last year. So now we match our conversation on tragedy and communism with one on comedy. Listen, share, and give us a rating/review!

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ACF#38: Unforgiven

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Happy Fourth, everyone! After the celebrations, I recommend Unforgiven, the last Western, and the movie that first won Clint Eastwood the Oscar–two awards, Best Picture and Best Director, as well as a nomination for Best Actor. This is a very dark movie, but it is a very good movie. It is beautifully shot, but also sober. It is violent, but dignified. It’s a movie about what it takes to establish the equal human rights of all human beings, the human dignity we all sense in the fine words of the Declaration. It deals with the origin of law as we now know it in a sacred law that requires violence to put an end to violence, at least the chaotic violence of the Old West. It is also a reminder of the difference between law and order, which we tend to think of as identical or at least necessarily connected. But the movie shows order is perfectly compatible with treating some people as property, i.e., slavery.

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ACF Middlebrow #11: Never Let Me Go

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Our own Flagg Taylor joins me on the podcast this week for a discussion of Never Let Me Go, from the novel by Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Flagg assigned the novel in a class on dystopias this semester and so we talked about how Ishiguro’s story compares with other famous dystopias, what it has to say about our society, and how it dramatizes the emergence of soul in love, art, and care-giving, even in the face of a dehumanizing scientific tyranny. It’s a fine movie and I can confirm it is as beautiful on a second viewing, so well told that when once you know the big surprise, it touches your heart even more. Listen to our conversation, comment, and share, friends! As always, please subscribe to and review/rate us on iTunes.

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