Films

Singin' in the Rain

Directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

The first film David screened in his course, "to show students that there was politics and portrayals of authority even in a Hollywood musical—students relished learning that."

1952

Happy Mother’s Day / The Fischer Quintuplets

Directors Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra

Two versions of the same event of the birth of quintuplets in South Dakota, to show "what can be done with editing and the art of omission"

1963

Sherlock Jr.

Director Buster Keaton

"Another one of Buster Keaton’s comic masterpieces—this one about the movies, their relationship to reality and their abiding allure."

1924

Strike

Director Sergei Eisenstein

"Aside from great filmmaking, it’s a polemic—the kind of film students don’t get to see often—and in a film style very different from Hollywood’s"

1925

Triumph of the Will

Director Leni Riefenstahl

"Students had heard about but rarely encountered propaganda—Triumph of the Will gives them the powerful, troubling experience in full."

1935

The Sorrow and the Pity

Director Marcel Ophuls

David screened Marcel Ophuls' incomparable documentary about Nazi-occupied France as his course sequel to Triumph of the Will. "I liked the idea of having students watch an absorbing four hour and twenty minute film on guilt, bravery, reactions to authority and different ways of portraying the people you interview. After the screening, students would return to class, saying—‘We can’t get out of the library. It closed at midnight.’"

1969

Casablanca

Director Michael Curtiz

"The film makes you identify with the cynical but not too cynical Rick through his climactic, romantic sacrifice for the anti-fascist cause, all the while with memorable quotes like 'I'm shocked! Shocked to find that there's gambling going on in here!'"

1939

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Director Frank Capra

"The film has all these clichés but is redeemed by the performance of Jimmy Stewart, its ambivalence about the press and its tribute to American values."

1939

The Manchurian Candidate

Director John Frankenheimer

"For a Hollywood movie, it’s totally unsentimental...Look at the last two words of the film...and it's filled with brilliant visual conceits like the scene of Angela Lansbury overseeing the TV screens off-camera, creating what you’re seeing."

1962

The Candidate

Director Michael Ritchie

"A self-evident film to show in a Politics and the Media course, with a brilliant Robert Redford and an impeccable supporting cast"

1972

A Certain Kind of Death

Directors Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh

"I told students they would understand this documentary better after graduation when they go out into the working world, where bureaucracy is pervasive--even after death."

2023

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

Director Kirby Dick

"A shocking, unconventional documentary that challenges authority, moral complacency and the idea of who a hero is."

1997

The Blood of the Beasts

Director Georges Franju

"I showed it at the end of the course because it was the most difficult to watch for its aesthetic beauty on an atrocious subject. A football player said ‘I can take it’ and fled the class when the killing of animals begins. This unforgettable documentary recapitulates issues of authority, the fascist ethos—'I was just doing a job'-and fusion of politics and media."

1949