Well, theatres don’t show “shorts” any longer, except for the clever Coke commercials and the 20-second pleas to turn off your cell. They show only features, movies that run something like two hours. What has happened to the short? I am glad to announce that it is alive and thriving; it’s just sort of underground. Every year filmmakers, mostly young, make short films hoping to get them exhibited at the hundreds of film festivals that have cropped up in cities around the country and the rest of the world. They have no hope of getting them shown at multiplexes.

The Academy Award  people look at many, many shorts and give Oscars for the best. Filmworks will show this year’s ten Oscar-nominated short films–five live action, five animated–on March 12. (If you want to see 30-second trailers of them, click on http://www.shortshd.com/theoscarshorts/) We do this every year; these programs are always well attended.

The fact is, the short film is so different from the feature that audiences have come to expect the offbeat and the fanciful, the beautiful and the harsh, the poetic and the allegorical. You seldom get these qualities in features. Length defeats innovation. Ho-hum arc, your formulaic Three Acts, dominate.

People who make short films are licentiously free. They often toss plot out the window. Some even discard recognizable form. You can see numerous innovative short films online. Click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMKVd6AGgfg and watch 236 Abstract which consists entirely of eerily ambiguous images. Are we looking at a satellite view of a coastline or a blob of lime jelly on a plate? Something seems to want to burst out. A butterfly? A grub? A slimy creature from a monster movie? Then we see the outlines of dark, sinister trees, then what seems like broken glass, but not trees, not glass. The electric shock music wants to explode. Then–oh, see it yourself. It’s only two minutes long.

Then see David Musial’s short film, also abstract, in fact called Abstract Film, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTxJ0Z7VlsE. This film has recognizable images. A woman stands in a field. The camera captures an extreme close-up of one eye. There are cuts-away to grave markers and crucifixes atop churches. Through time lapse, a rose blossom disintegrates. First it is fresh and virginal, then petals fall away, finally there is only a dried stub on a black stem. The woman lies in the field in a semi-fetal position. She disappears. Of course this is a film about death–in the abstract. You’ve read poems about death, seen plays about death, read novels about death, and sat through literal feature films about death. Now spend three minutes with cinematic death.

If you want lighter fare, try the short film Validation, a satiric look at the connection between parking lot-validation and real-life validation by Kurt Kuenne. Look at the entire 16 minute film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao.

All three of these films are on You Tube. You don’t have to win a contest to get your film on You Tube. The twelve-year old son of a woman I used to do coffee with has half a dozen films on You Tube. A cave man could upload a film to You Tube. There are thousands of short films on You Tube. Many worthless, some true prize winners. Truly the site has democratized access to short films.

Did you know that PBS’s Independent Lens has an annual online festival of short films? They are remarkable. You can see this year’s winners,  eleven in all–live action, animated, abstract, realistic. C Beck, the grand prize winner, is about a photographer-farmer in rural Minnesota who with Photoshop and unbounded imagination makes scrumptious out-of-doors picture art. Bulletproof Vest is about a kid growing up in a gang-invested ghetto. LA Noir offers some of the most imaginative black and white photography you’ll ever see. You could not turn C Beck into a feature, nor LA Noir. To do so would kill their spirit. There are eight other Independent Lens prize winners to watch, at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/insideindies/shortsfest/.

It didn’t used to be like this, so democratic, so easy. When I made a film and had a chance to show it to 36 people, I felt pretty cool. Validation has been viewed by over three million people. I did the short film circuit back in the seventies. Make the film, get a lab to do a print (hundreds of dollars), box it up, send it off to the Brno CSSR (Czechoslokak Socialist Republic) Film Festival, hope it gets through Czech customs. Wait six weeks to get any kind of response. Go down to the airport to walk the film back through customs, the guy opening the box, glancing at you suspiciously, looking for drugs. Maybe I’d win a prize–at Brno I took something called the “Mayor’s Award.” But usually nothing. Thank you, Comrade, for participating. Have good cinema luck in future.

This past year three noteworthy American films were released that have dealt directly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Kathryn Bigelow’s drama about a bomb-disposal squad in Iraq, The Hurt Locker, has led many top-ten lists for the year, including my own.  Jim Sheridan’s Brothers focuses attention on the Afghanistan front and a soldier’s homecoming, though the film raises different issues as well: Hollywood’s unfortunate habit of diluting the dramatic power of original works from other national cinemas, in this case, the far-superior 2004 Danish film from Suzanne Bier, also titled Brothers.  In comparison to this remake, critical response to The Messenger, written and directed by Oren Moverman, has been considerably more positive.  Since its premiere last year at Sundance, the indie film has picked up a slew of nominations and awards for its cast and first-time director, including the Peace Film Award and the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival.  Before discussing The Messenger in more detail, though, I want to look back to some earlier films about returning veterans.

For baby boomers, no image of the Vietnam vet is more iconic than Robert de Niro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).  Travis’s recent military service and his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps are referred to only briefly in the opening scene, but his battle jacket with its King Kong Brigade patch and his search-and-destroy Mohawk haircut are visual reminders of that military service.  His sleeplessness and increasingly aberrant behavior from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress drive the narrative forward to its bloody, film noir climax.  Without question, the war had come home.  Stallone’s Rambo films, beginning with First Blood in 1982, develop similar themes, but in a more conventional, increasingly formulaic manner.

Taxi Driver and First Blood were hardly the first to channel concern for war veterans into genre films.  For the earliest examples we can turn back to classical Hollywood’s depictions of servicemen from the First World War.   The gangster protagonist of The Roaring Twenties (1939), sympathetically played by James Cagney, turns to a career in crime because of the underemployment that awaits him after his military service to make the world safe for democracy.  In the 1930s, even musicals depicted the plight of WWI veterans.  Though most remembered for its opening number, “We’re in the Money,” the pre-Code Busby Berkeley backstage musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) climaxes with “My Forgotten Man,” a seven-minute sequence incorporating lines of men in uniform marching to battle, returning wounded, and then in tattered civilian clothes standing in bread lines––a powerful tribute to the Bonus Army march on Washington of 1932.

The massive social adjustments brought on by waves of returning veterans after the Second World War inspired large numbers of genre films, from comedies like Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride (1949) to the many postwar film noirs with returning vets as protagonists––films like The Blue Dahlia (1946), Somewhere in the Night (1946), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and my favorite, In a Lonely Place (1950).  Emotionally scarred by war, the anti-hero protagonists of these dark crime films have become cynical and brutal in the hard-boiled literary tradition of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler.  The Blue Dahlia was, in fact, scripted by Chandler, though his original concept of having a mentally-disturbed veteran be revealed as the film’s murderer was rejected by Paramount, under pressure from the Department of the Navy.

For a more uplifting drama about returning WWII veterans, none is better than The Best Years of Our Lives, though its reassurance of a brighter future does not come easily.  Arguably William Wyler’s most accomplished film, Best Years tells the story of three veterans, played by Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell (who lost both hands during the war).  Each must make difficult adjustments to civilian life: March’s character, though welcomed back by a loving family and supportive employer, drinks to deal with the sudden shift from killing to commerce.  Andrews’ character finds that his service as a bombardier in Europe had not prepared him for civilian employment; his wife, attracted more to his officer’s uniform than the man, soon leaves him.  And Homer Parrish (played by Russell), his hands amputated after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific, pushes away his fiancée, Wilma, so that he will be no burden for her.  The film ends happily with Homer and Wilma’s marriage and the promise of better times ahead for Al and Fred.  The classical Hollywood ending, though, stands in contrast to the film’s documentary-style realism created by Wyler with one of Hollywood’s most accomplished cinematographers, Gregg Toland (The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane).

For even greater dramatic realism about soldiers home from war, two late additions to the films of the American New Wave are must-sees.  Winner of five Academy Awards, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) is justly celebrated for its vividly realized portrait of an ethnic, working-class community.  Three Russian-American enlistees from Clairton, Pennsylvania––played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage––enjoy their last days before induction.  In the film’s first hour, we follow them from the steel mill foundry to a Russian Orthodox wedding and reception to their last deer hunt together––personal and cultural rituals dominating the mise-en-scène of the character-driven drama.  The chaos of Vietnam in the film’s second hour fails to measure up to the verisimilitude of the first act.  Here Cimino conveys the effects of the war on American soldiers through a troubling, even racist metaphor.  As POWs, captured in the first scene set in Vietnam, the three friends are forced to play Russian roulette as their captors gamble on their lives.  That ritualistic game is twice repeated after the three escape, symbolizing Walken’s inability to heal his psychic wounds.  Though Cimino defended his narrative choices by saying the film was not so much about the Vietnam War as it was about “friendship and courage . . . under stress,” the overwhelming sense of realism created by the film cannot undo audience expectation of authenticity for the war and the fall of Saigon.

For a film explicitly about healing the wounds of Vietnam, there is none better than Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978).   Talent abounds in this New Hollywood film––in addition to Ashby’s fine direction, Waldo Salt’s screenplay, Haskell Wexler’s cinematography, and, of course, superb performances from Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, and Jane Fonda.   The film is reminiscent of The Men (1950), Fred Zinnemann’s drama about paraplegic veterans of WWII.  That earlier film, also set mainly in a VA Hospital, is most noteworthy for Marlon Brando’s screen debut, a fine performance, for which he prepared in typical method fashion, and the appearance of dozens of nonprofessionals from the Birmingham VA hospital.  The rawness of Coming Home likewise comes from the freedom Ashby extended to his own method actors and the real Vietnam vets cast in minor roles.  The opening scene in particular is a standout in which these vets express their feelings about the war as Voight silently listens­­: his character, Luke Martin, does not articulate his rage, and Voight the actor remains respectful of his real counterparts in the unscripted scene.  For the film’s climax, Luke has found his voice, as he addresses a group of high school students in one of the most powerful anti-war scenes ever filmed, Voight’s dialogue improvised from contributions from the vets themselves.

The parallels between Voight’s character and Ron Kovic, the subject of Oliver Stone’s 1989 biopic, Born on the Fourth of July, is not accidental.  Based loosely on Kovic, whose memoir was published in 1976, Coming Home has the advantage of greater dramatic unity, covering months rather than the twenty years of Kovic’s life in the Stone film.  And while Tom Cruise’s performance as Kovic may be the best of his career, he is no match for Voight at the height of his in the 1970s.  But what Stone’s film does best is to explore the cultural forces that spurred his character to enlist in the Marines even before graduating from high school––especially Kovic’s complicit mother, played by Caroline Kava, who dominates her husband and instills unquestioning patriotism and religiosity into her oldest child.

For its own contribution to this distinguished group of films, The Messenger takes a refreshing approach to the subject.  Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), wounded in action in Iraq and with only months remaining in his enlistment, is assigned to an Army’s Casualty Notification team with Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a veteran of Desert Storm.  We follow them on a series of difficult meetings with the next of kin, until Will is drawn to a young widow (Samantha Morton), whose calm and compassion cracks the protective shell in which Will has encased himself.   The relationship that develops is handled as freshly and sensitively as the rest of the film––not with melodramatic clichés about two people in need.  The camaraderie that develops between Will and Tony is even more important to the film’s narrative arc.  Tony’s gruff insistence on protocol masks his disappointment about having never been tested in battle.  As hinted from the beginning, Will has seen too much action but is unable to speak of it until the film’s climactic revelation with Tony.  In demanding long takes, the two sit side-by-side as Will narrates the firefight for which he was decorated: his emotional account lays bare the survivor’s guilt that haunts him and recreates the action in our minds as powerfully as could any flashback scene.

As with the best of earlier vet films, The Messenger benefitted greatly by the contributions of actual veterans––not only the Americans who served as advisors to the film but also writer-director Moverman himself, who drew on his experiences in the Israeli Army during the 1980s.  In the film’s press book, Moverman sums up The Messenger in a way that offers fitting comment to all the films I have been discussing: it “may say a thing or two about war, but ultimately it’s about the desire to live; to let life into the darkness.”

Adaptations of classic British novels and plays abound, and the occasional break-through biopic about the authors themselves has focused attention on English writers like William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf with Shakespeare in Love (1998) and The Hours (2002).  Smaller films have dramatized the lives of Stevie Smith in Stevie (1978), D. H. Lawrence in Priest of Love (1981), T.S. Eliot in Tom and Viv (1994), Iris Murdock in Iris (2001), Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter (2006), Irish novelist James Joyce in Nora (2000), and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love (2008).

The English Romantics have been represented in this filmography too, though with a surprisingly small number of films, given the significance of these writers to British letters and the scandal-filled lives lead by some.  Perhaps only fans of classic horror will recall the first appearance on screen of Lord Byron and the Shelleys––Percy and Mary­­––in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935).  In the frame story to this sequel, the elegant Mary (played by Elsa Lanchester, who also has the more memorable role as the monster’s bride), continues her tale for the well-mannered Byron and husband Shelley. (Of course, the story this “Mary Shelley” narrates is not the one known to readers of the novel but rather an Americanized version of Peggy Webling’s 1927 play, adapted from the original.)

Ken Russell, well-known for his lack of cinematic restraint, returned to this scene in his 1986 film, Gothic, now set with some historical accuracy in 1816 at Lord Byron’s Swiss villa––with Gabriel Byrne as Byron, Natasha Richardson as Mary Godwin, and Julian Sands as Shelley.  Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire, join the three for a night of personal confessions, drug-induced hallucinations, and an orgy of sexual couplings––which, we are encouraged to infer, inspired both Mary’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre.”

Until recently the most accomplished of the Romantic biopics has been Pandaemonium (2000), directed by Julien Temple (better known for concert documentaries like the 2006 Glastonbury), about the friendship between first-generation Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.  Filling out the cast of characters are William’s sister, Dorothy; his wife, Mary; Coleridge’s wife, Sara Fricker; Robert Southey, poet laureate before Wordsworth; Tom Poole, Coleridge’s tradesman supporter; and even a brief appearance by Lord Byron.  For demanding historians, the absence of Sara Hutchinson and Annette Vallon may be a problem, but to include them would have over-burdened an already complex story of friendship, betrayal, political intrigue and, most importantly, creativity.  The film’s sympathies quite clearly lie with Coleridge, whose mental anguish and laudanum addiction, are much easier to dramatize than Wordsworth’s reserve.  But, for me, the scenes set near Nether Stowey in Somerset depicting the inspiration for “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” along with the interior imaginings of their compositions are the high points of the film––nothing stuffy here, just pure cinema.

Now I come to the most recent and best known of the Romantic biopics­­––and the one that may have the most similarities to Bright Star––Julian Jarrold’s 2007 portrait of a young Jane Austen, Becoming Jane.  Like the Keats biopic, this one too is based on a recently published biography that sets up the romance between twenty-year-old Jane and Tom Lefroy, played by Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy respectively.  The course of that relationship as well as the unhappy end to her sister’s engagement inspires the great novels to follow: appropriately enough, we see and hear the young writer compose the opening lines of First Impressions (what would become Pride and Prejudice) and read from the published text of the work in the final scene.  Denied her own marital happiness, Jane says of the works to come, “My characters will have, after a little bit of trouble, all that they desire.”

In like manner, John Keats––belittled by contemporary critics for his class origins and dogged by poverty, illness, and death––found little happiness.  His anguish for what he called his “posthumous life­” was only intensified by the belief that he had been given too little time to secure his place among the great English poets.  Succeeding generations, of course, have proven him wrong.  Of the romance that may have inspired his great odes, the historical Fanny was mute, Keats having burned her letters and Fanny having kept the youthful engagement a secret from her husband and children until shortly before her death four decades later.  Still, as several reviewers have noted, the story of Bright Star is more Brawne’s than Keats’s; and for that focus, acknowledges Campion in the film’s press book, she “needed to invent the story between the facts.”  That, of course, is what most screenwriters do with the biographical evidence available to them, but the results are not always as luminous as they are in films like Pandaemonium and Bright Star––to borrow Coleridge’s description for the creative imagination, these “miracle[s] of rare device.”

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Palestinian cinema lacks the sturdy history of, say, Iran’s, whose film industry dates back to the very start of the 20^th century. The first known Palestinian film is a 45-minute silent documentary whose title seems to be in doubt, by Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan. It traces the visit of Arabian King Ibn Saud to Palestine in 1935. Sirhan followed this film with The Realized Dreams, about the plight of Palestinian orphans. In 1945 Sirhan established a production studio in Jaffa which made several feature films, among them Holiday Eve and Storm at Home. Sirhan’s studio was abandoned in 1948 when bombs fell on Jaffa.

In the 1960s the PLO produced most Palestinian films with funding from Fatah and other organizations. More than 60 Palestinian films, mainly documentaries, were made during the sixties and seventies. A Palestinian film festival was founded in Baghdad in 1973. London-educated Mustafu Abu Ali was Palestine’s leading filmmaker in the 1980s. Although he directed over 30 films, only one escapes obscurity, The Return to Haifa, which some film historians call the first Palestinian film ever made–they probably mean the first Palestinian theatrical film. Return to Haifa is an adaptation of a novel by one of the most revered Palestinian novelists, Ghassan Kanafani, a Marxist who wrote fiercely about the expulsion of half a million Palestinians to make room for arriving Jews.

This pushing around of Palestinian people, called the Naqba (disaster), disrupted and suppressed local filmmaking. Palestinian cinema, like all national cinemas, depended on a stable assemblage of technicians and artists, as well as professional apparatus for financing and promotion, which the Naqba made nearly impossible. Shortly after this tumultuous period, Sirhan helped produce the first Jordanian feature, The Struggle in Jarash, (1957), while another Palestinian, Abdallah Ka´wash, directed the second Jordanian feature film, My Homeland, My Love, in 1964. The melancholy titles are mirrors on the times.

Meanwhile, Palestinian films, though few in number, needed protection–namely an archive. The PLO accomplished this in 1982. Sadly, when the PLO had to vacate Beirut, the archive, which had been stored in a hospital, “disappeared.”

The U.S. had to wait until 1996 to see a Palestinian film. This was Chronicle of a Disappearance, put together by Elia Suleiman, an Israeli Arab film director and actor. It’s about Suleiman’s return to the West Bank after years of exile. It utilizes Suleiman’s family and nonprofessional actors and crew. It attracted world-wide attention, and won awards at the Venice Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Sketches of contemporary Palestinian film directors, brought over from Wikipedia  without quotations marks and ellipses for ease of reading:

Michel Khleifi (1950- ) is a Palestinian film writer, director and producer. He emigrated from Israel in 1970 and now resides in Belgium. He has directed and produced several documentary and feature films and received several prestigious awards including the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Shell at San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1987 for his film Wedding in Galilee.

Rashid Masharawi, (also: “Rashid Mashrawi”) was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family of refugees from Jaffa. He grew up in the Shati refugee camp. Masharawi lives and works in Ramallah, where he founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Center in 1996 with the aim of promoting local film productions. He also sponsors a mobile cinema, which allows him to screen films in Palestinian refugee camps. Other projects include the annual Kids Film Festival and workshops on film production and directing.

Filmworks has shown one film by a Palestinian, Paradise Now, about two Palestinian youths who decide to become suicide bombers. This film was written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad who was born in Nazareth in 1961.

Writing this piece has been a sad undertaking. Every country, every political unit, has hundreds of aspiring filmmakers. Even in prosperous countries like the U.S., they face obstacle heaped upon obstacle. Imagine what life is like for a young filmmaker growing up in the occupied territories burdened by poverty, oppression, and bigotry. Imagine what it’s like to pour your soul into a feature film which goes un-reviewed, which doesn’t even merit a single-sentence plot summary from the imperious imdb.com. Fortunately, the film Amreeka has jumped over these ominous hurdles and has made its way to many viewers around the world.

Of course, advertising is considered pop culture. It’s pop culture about pop culture. The experts in Filmworks’s November film Art & Copy tell you as much. Advertising is also a kind of trickster’s art. George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, and a dozen other (mostly retired) ad executives tell us what fun they had back in the 1960s selling stuff with minimal slogans: “Think small,” “Where’s the beef?” and “Just do it.” The whole film is like this, the birth of the cool in advertising artwork and copy.

Some experts you might read posit a thing called “folk culture.” These are grass-roots phenoms, sprouting up from the people–Paul Bunyan tales, chain-gang refrains, nursery rhymes, even Woody Guthrie. They are supposed to be “authentic,” pre-media and pre-industrialization. Most have been stamped out or appropriated, like pirate lore or those pre pop-culture tales of the 1940s and 50s such as Bambi and Aladdin. Then the movie studios exploit these classic tales. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was produced by Disney for $300,000 and made that back in one week of distribution.

Related to pop culture but distinct from it, I am told, is mass culture. Mass culture is deliberately manufactured. Advertisers create mass culture. One of the ad execs interviewed in Art & Copy came up with the deliriously energized iPod dancer, in silhouette, her hair flying like she’d stuck her finger in a hot socket. The ad offers only this art and copy: the apple logo and the “word” iPod. The ad gets to you; you become pop cultured, going around with an ear bud pressed into your skull.

Critics of mass and pop culture see them as capitalist brain-washing. Bernard Rosenberg feels pop culture has crowded out important journalism and opinion writing, which, presumably, is real culture, not pop culture. He writes, “The popular press decreased the amount of news or information and replaced it with entertainment or titillation that reinforces … fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia, and aggression.” All you have to do to confirm this is to look at the contemporary, dumbed-down Los Angeles Times. Most of the time, the front page is about movies, sports, and rap stars, and little else. What happened to the L.A. Times which pulled down so many Pulitizers under Otis Chandler? Zonked by pop culture.

I was frankly amazed at all the pop culture web sites you can Google. If you go to popculturemadness.com you can learn that Sharona Fleming is guest staring in the last two episodes of USA’s Monk and that the fling between “Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel May Not Be Over…” (Popculturemadness solemnly announces its “mission” as “to help Americans consume responsibly to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice.”

Meanwhile Elizabeth Millar of pop.greenwood.com steers pop culture junkies in the direction of the latest zombie film: “I can’t tell you how excited I am for a new zombie flick, and it’s right in time for Halloween! Zombieland is being described as an American post-apocalyptic, zombie comedy—bring it on!”

Most of us are EZ on pop culture or don’t think about it much. Or we are like fish in water that don’t know anything at all about water–we are forever submerged in it. After Jane Austin gets PBSed, a “novelization” of the PBS drama comes out, followed by a comic strip or Elizabeth Bennet’s Underarm Spray. We’re scarcely aware we are consuming junk-food Jane, and we are totally underwater. Glub, glub.

I like to think of the silent-era Keystone Kops flicks as political comedy. Mack Sennett surely must have thought of his kops as stand-in mayors, councilmen, and senators, which Everymen like Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin always eluded or humiliated. The kops were inept, clumsy, and three steps behind. The working-class audience for movies in the nineteen teens probably mistrusted government more than we do today. They cheered at the sight of kop kars rolling over into the mud or plowing into haystacks.

Just a few years into the sound era, Paramount released Duck Soup, starring “The Four Marx Brothers,” as they were called then. This krazy komedy posited a make-believe kingdom, Freedonia, which is broke. A wealthy Mrs. Teasdale donates a lot of money to get it back on its feet, but only if Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) leads the country. You just know that with a name like that the whole enterprise will end in disaster. Surely the film was a back-door slap (to mix metaphors) at all the money Roosevelt was spending to get the nation back on its feet, and is probably relevant today for the same reason.

In 1940 Chaplin came out with his The Great Dictator, a prescient satire of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. In the film Hitler is called Adenoid Hynkel. This was Chaplin’s first talking film and his greatest box office success. Hynkel wants to rule the world. Step one: round up all the Jews and put them in concentration camps. The film came out before Americans entered the war when probably only a minority of Americans knew anything about the Third Reich.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) directed by the Czech Milos Foreman is a microcosm of tyranny. Nurse Rached (Louise Fletcher) runs a psycho ward with an iron hand and a sadistic turn of mind. R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is actually the only sane person in the place. He fights back and engineers an escape. This film has many hilarious moments, but the end is not funny as two of the inmates McMurphy had grown close to die. Foreman, Nicholson, and Fletcher won Oscars for this film.

Sydney Pollack’s 1982 film “Tootsie” is about gender politics. Actor Dustin Hoffman goes drag in order to get a TV role, and learns what women endure from the likes of sexist Dabney Coleman.

“Brazil” certainly is the most surreal and visually-compelling political comedy ever made. It’s actually a horror movie based on what ought to be a harmless administrative mistake committed by milktoast Jonathan Pryce that gets him placed on a list of enemies of the state. It’s the kind of thing which today results in innocent Muslims getting put on terrorist watch lists and facing endless harassment. The American expatriate Terry Gilliam directed this 1984ish film.

“Thank You for Smoking” (Jason Reitman, 2005) manages to stay funny but darkly funny. It’s about a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and his manipulation of public opinion about smoking. Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a vice president of the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a front group. The film is dated, but there are plenty of front groups that come to mind today that are just as devious: The “Clean Oil” Institute, to name one [quotes added].

“Election,” directed by Alexander Payne in 1999, is about small-time high school politics. It’s no more civil than national politics. The story centers on a willful, stop-at-nothing girl Tracy (Reese Witherspoon) running for student body president. She makes Swiftboating look like an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn.

Yes, I should have said something about “Dr. Strangelove” and “Wag the Dog,” arguably the best-known and probably the best-made political comedy movies. But you already know about them. I just wanted to remind you that politics is everywhere and comes in all flavors.

Actual happenings. Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) is based on actual events: the assassinations of 11 Israeli athletes by the Black September group during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. Prime Minister Golda Meir okays a secret operation to hunt down and kill all involved. The best known political film based on actual events is Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), from the book by investigators Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, played by Dustin Hoffmann and Robert Redford. This film, as the whole world now knows, has to do with Watergate shenanigans.

Far less well known is the Argentine film The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985), which is set in the era of the Desaparecidos or “The Disappeared” (1976-83) during which thousands of leftist Argentine dissidents, male and female, vanished without a trace during a brutal military coup. The story centers on a high school history professor’s struggles to learn the truth about her adopted daughter. Alicia is probably a fictional character, but her conflict comes off as agonizingly real. No political thriller delivers so much personal anguish.

Real events, fictional characters. Here is a pair of political thrillers which place obviously made-up characters against real political backdrops. In the Line of Fire, directed by Wolfgang Petersen in 1993, is a character study of a man who might have saved the life of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 if he had just been a few steps closer to the limousine. Clint Eastwood plays the secret service agent who gets a chance to redeem himself decades later. In Mississippi Burning, director Alan Parker and his writer Chris Gerolmo posit a pair of fictional F.B.I. agents, played by Willem Defoe and Gene Hackman, who go into Mississippi to investigate the murder of three civil rights workers (undoubtedly James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner), and run into conflict, from each other and from local police.

Outright fabrications. One of the most entertaining political thrillers is Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) in which Will Smith runs, runs, runs–because some bad feds are trying to kill him. This film is nearly start-to-finish chase; Scott figures out some ingenuous twists of plot, like the monitoring of Smith’s whereabouts from a satellite. In all, the film exploits popular paranoia about government wrongdoing. You can say the same thing about The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 thriller by John Frankenheimer which portrayed commies as super-Pavlovian monsters. North Koreans brainwash a U.S. war hero to assassinate a well-known U.S. political figure. It’s pretty far fetched but the dream sequences, visual equivalents of screwed-up minds, are still intriguing.

Movie script writers often go for outright murder to goose their stories. Pakula’s Parallax View (1974) is based on a big, bad Blackwater-style corporation rubbing out reporters who near the truth about the assassination of a U.S. Senator. Ditto for The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles 2005). A questionable medication has killed many Africans on whom the drug was “tested.” The evil pharmaceutical company has already rubbed out an intrepid reporter (Rachel Weisz) looking into the matter and plans also to take out her husband, played by Ralph Fiennes.

Z is a fictional retelling of a for-real political assassination in Greece in the early 1960s. Fortunately for director Costa-Gavras the facts were cinematic: The assassination of the left-wing deputy is not sudden or simple. Instead, it’s strung out and dramatized in the best of thriller traditions–by utilizing the device of the chase, car overtaking a man on the street. Ah, the chase! How would thrillers thrill without them?

The oldest film in my survey is relevant to contemporary ecology conditions. It’s The Plow that Broke the Plains, directed by Pare Lorentz in 1936. It’s a documentary about the misuse of land that led to Dust Bowl conditions and impoverished many Midwesterners.

The most famous Depression-era film about poverty is, of course, The Grapes of Wrath, which concludes with Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) giving an impassioned monologue about how he’ll “be there for the people.” This 1940 John Ford movie, with its Hollywood optimism, blurs author John Steinbeck’s original vision. The book ends not with rhetoric; instead Rosasharn lends her milk-filled breasts to her starving family members, a remarkable turn of plot which suggests both desperation and solidarity.

In the Italian neorealist classic Umberto D., directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1952, a poor pensioner tries to raise the money for a woman who is being evicted because she can’t pay her rent. His travails and his difficulty reflect the sorry state of Italian post-war poverty, unaddressed by a government in disarray.

Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) is about a woman who takes advantage of widowhood to strike off and take a stab at fulfilling a dream of being a professional singer. She is too poor to do anything like hire an agent or a manager, so she takes marginal gigs in bars where she remains “undiscovered.”

In Gas, Food, Lodging, directed by Allison Anders in 1992, two teenage daughters of a struggling waitress in a restaurant out in the middle of the New Mexico desert understandably want out, but they have little resources for doing so. The desert is a metaphor for isolation; the trailer park they live in is clamp-down bad sociology.

Movement is always a potent metaphor for attempts to escape poverty. In Angela’s Ashes, directed by Alan Parker in 1999, an immigrant family living in Brooklyn tries to gain a toehold in the American economy. When they fail at that, they return to Ireland, only to find conditions even worse.

The most recent film on my list of films of deprivation is 2008’s Sleepwalking, starring Charlize Theron and directed by William Maher. It’s about a ne’er-do-well guy who loses his hard, manual-labor job — a loud echo of the current recession — and directs his energy at helping a bitter teenage girl who is without adult guidance. The guy is clumsy and ineffectual but he does manage to leave the girl in good hands, and thus feels fulfilled for once in his life.

Maybe Tom Joad was right: You can’t keep the people down.

Folk films may end upbeat, but not win-the-lottery upbeat. Or, the endings may be bittersweet — a little bit of happiness and a little bit of sadness. Above all, the ending, whether upbeat or a downer, is believable — not Hollywood believable but Fresno believable.

The preeminent folk film is Marty, the 1955 piece of realism directed by Delbert Mann and starring Ernest Borgnine, a butcher, and Betsy Blair, a schoolteacher. Both are plain-looking by Hollywood standards, but that is the point of the film: how ordinary people fall in love and find each other despite the disapproval of Marty’s (Borgnine’s) loveless and hypocritical friends. Unadorned as it was, lacking in big stars, Marty still won four Academy Awards and the Palme d’Or award at Cannes.

Some directors are naturally drawn to folk films. Kelly Reichardt has made at least two so far, Old Joy and the recent Wendy and Lucy. These films feel like slices of life.

Old Joy, released in 2006, is about two 30-something men, once close friends, who have taken different paths in life. Mark abandoned the bohemian life to settle down and start a family. Kurt still plays the hippie. He shows up at Mark’s place and talks him into going camping with him in the Cascades. But they are distant in a way neither can explain. Time is the culprit.

Wendy and Lucy, released in 2008, is one of the shortest feature films ever made. It runs only 75 minutes and tells the understated story of a young woman, Wendy, on the road, bound, she says, for the canneries of Alaska. But she runs into misfortune in Oregon. Her car breaks downs irretrievably and her dog disappears. She thus becomes eerily vulnerable. You have to read into this film: why she left Indiana in the first place, how she will fare riding the rails, etc.

Two international films that invariably make Top 10 best-ever lists of critics worldwide are The Bicycle Thief and Pather Panchali. Both are folk films. The former, released in 1948, tells the simple story of a man in poverty-stricken, post-war Italy whose bicycle has been stolen. If he can’t find it, he can’t go to work, and his family will starve. The latter, from India and released in 1955, tells an equally unadorned story about surviving the elements and human stupidity in Bengal, and a boy growing up amid it all.

Through the years, Filmworks has shown a few folk films. Half Nelson, about a drug addicted history teacher in Brooklyn; Frozen River, about two poor women who think they can make a few bucks smuggling undocumented immigrants through Canada into the U.S.; and Killer of Sheep, set in the African-American community of Watts, Calif., about the workaday desperation of poor folk.

Two Lovers, too, is about working-class people and familiar if difficult life choices. Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Leonard, the main character, isn’t heroic working in his parents’ dry-cleaning establishment. But he’s all too human. Then two women come into his life. The results are believable.