Salon.com > Documentaries http://www.salon.com Wed, 03 Jul 2013 01:14:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pick of the week: The mind-blowing black punk band from 1974 http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13339336 We already know about the economic and political history of Detroit as the home of the most iconic American industry, the site of the most extreme urban decay in the country and ground zero for 21st-century DIY urban homesteading. We also know about the Motor City’s unique importance in American pop-culture history as the birthplace of Motown, a breeding ground for house and techno music, and the town that produced Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, Eminem and Kid Rock. (OK, never mind about Kid Rock.) Last year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” told the strange but true story of Rodriguez, the Detroit-born Latino singer-songwriter who became a huge star in South Africa without even knowing it. Given all that discord, ferment, chrome and vitality, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that three African-American brothers in Detroit created punk rock before it actually existed. Next you’re gonna tell me that sex, marijuana and the movies were invented in Detroit too.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/feed/ 11 “How to Make Money Selling Drugs”: The war America keeps on losing http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/#comments Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13336804 Despite its slick packaging and overtly facetious premise, director Matthew Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier’s faux-educational documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs” packs a wallop. While imparting lessons about the economic realities of the drug trade – a thriving, booming and ever-diversifying realm of entrepreneurial capitalism, in spite of the massively expensive attempt to shut it down – Cooke’s film reminds us that America’s destructive global misadventures of the last 20 years have a corollary that’s every bit as bad right here at home.

If anything, the “war on drugs” has been even worse and even stupider than the “war on terror,” although they’ve become so intimately interconnected in moral, technological and philosophical terms that it’s not like we get to choose. America’s police departments have been increasingly transformed into thousands of high-tech paramilitary squads, just as our overseas military operations have become ever more defined by special-forces ops and targeted assassinations. Seeing cops in middle-size heartland communities driving armored personnel carriers would almost be comical, if it didn’t so often lead to incompetent and illegal home invasions in which the wrong people are arrested, injured or killed. (Wrong-address police break-ins happen several times a week in the United States, according to an attorney seen in the film.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/feed/ 44 Are environmentalists rethinking nuclear power? http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/#comments Sat, 22 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13333866 Faced with the near-term catastrophe of climate change and the planet-poisoning effects of fossil fuels, is the environmental movement changing its tune on nuclear energy? It’s not a new question, and let’s be clear that the short answer is still no – or mostly no. You can’t find one major environmental organization, from activist groups like Greenpeace to mainstream conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy or the National Audubon Society, that has come out publicly in favor of nuclear power.

But there is also a longer and more complicated answer to the question, which is that many people who have long been skeptical about the safety, economic feasibility and ultimate morality of nuclear power are now somewhat willing to consider the argument that, at least in the medium term, we can’t do without it. This is partly also an argument about whether you think the continued development of human society can be separated from the health of the planet as a whole, and about whether people in the developing world have an inherent right to enjoy the energy-guzzling standard of living most of us in the global North take for granted.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/22/are_environmentalists_rethinking_nuclear_power/feed/ 112 Pick of the week: Fighting the world’s worst homophobia http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/#comments Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13325926 If the moving, shocking and ultimately inspiring documentary “Call Me Kuchu” is about the struggle for gay rights in the African nation of Uganda, where a combination of evangelical Christianity and anti-Western resentment has produced a uniquely toxic climate of institutional homophobia and public hate speech, it’s also about something much larger than that. This urgent eyewitness account of an activist struggle amid extremely dangerous conditions has all the heroes, villains, twists and turns of a political thriller. It’s a tale of hatred, hope and enormous courage, and a lesson in the contradictions of post-colonial Africa. It’s a story about the way we live now, in our suddenly interconnected world, and one that dares to imagine how we might live in the future. It’s a love story and a story of martyrdom, both of them heartbreaking. I’ll be surprised if any other movie this year affects me as much.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/feed/ 7 Is Alex Gibney’s WikiLeaks film “state agitprop”? http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/#comments Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13322925 Last week the author and longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, a leading figure in left-wing journalism, published a movie review as his weekly column for Truthdig. It’s not his usual beat, but this was no usual review. Hedges issued a thoroughgoing takedown of Alex Gibney’s documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” describing it as a work of “agitprop for the security and surveillance state,” designed to marginalize both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and accused U.S. Army leaker Bradley Manning by depicting them as criminals. Especially in the current climate of heightened awareness around issues of surveillance and secrecy, this was clearly an attempt to kill the movie. And the review marked the public coming-out party, at least on this side of the Atlantic, of a campaign of vilification against Gibney and “We Steal Secrets” that began when the film premiered last January at Sundance and has scarcely abated since.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/is_alex_gibneys_wikileaks_film_state_agitprop/feed/ 102 Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — and a soiled presidency http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/#comments Sun, 09 Jun 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13320549 This is what it’s come to for Barack Obama: Reality has sunk in for many Americans, who at last understand that the guy we elected on the naive expectation that he would undo the excesses of the Bush-Cheney national security state has instead made them much worse. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to escape this legacy now. He is the drone president, the assassination president, the domestic-surveillance president, whose entire administration has a professionalized passion for secrecy that makes the low-rent paranoids of the Nixon White House look like Keystone Kops. I did not suspect that I would ever again find an occasion to quote a Sarah Palin gag line, but hey: How is that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

There are numerous ways of understanding this disheartening turn of events. Maybe the secret note that George W. Bush left in the top drawer of the Resolute desk on Jan. 20, 2009, contained a “Manchurian Candidate”-style code word that switched on the programming! Or maybe, somewhat more plausibly, the entire secret apparatus of American counterterrorism at home and abroad has become an independent and self-replicating organism, a Hydra-headed monster that can’t be killed. The president himself indirectly took that tack on Friday, when he tackled questions about the surveillance revelations for the first time, during a supposedly unrelated press conference.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/09/obamas_dirty_wars_and_a_soiled_presidency/feed/ 130 Morton Downey Jr.: The man who broke talk TV http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/#comments Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:58:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13317243 I can't find the source of this quotation, but someone reviewed Alain de Botton's late-'90s self-help bestseller "How Proust Can Change Your Life" by observing that any book about Proust had to face the test of whether you wouldn't be better off just reading Proust instead. By that standard, the new documentary "Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie" is golden. Watching a movie about the late trash-TV pioneer turns out to be fascinating, even when his story is told as messily as it is here. Whereas watching Downey himself -- an unleashed teenage American right-wing id, in the body of a chain-smoking middle-aged man -- was so acutely and perversely painful it surely violated several provisions of the Geneva Convention.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/morton_downey_jr_the_man_who_broke_talk_tv/feed/ 63 “Plimpton!” doc tells tale of literary heavyweight http://www.salon.com/2013/05/28/plimpton_doc_tells_tale_of_literary_heavyweight_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/28/plimpton_doc_tells_tale_of_literary_heavyweight_partner/#comments Tue, 28 May 2013 20:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13311124 Los
Angeles Review of BooksWritten, produced and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself opened in New York on May 22, 2013; it will open in Los Angeles on June 7.

SOMETHING SPECIAL was brewing in the East Coast literary world after World War II. Long before, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells had documented the shift of national culture from Boston to New York. The intervening 60 or so years had seen another major shift. As the model of the movie star became the decisive influence in literature as in so many fields, a lot more bells and whistles were added to the idea of the American writer. It wasn’t enough any longer merely to achieve; you had to be seen to achieve. Whether it was the ostentatious physical risks of Hemingway the bullfighter and white hunter, or the guttered candle of Fitzgerald in Hollywood, this new American writer not only had to write, but to be, preferably in a flamboyant, self-dramatizing configuration of talent and nerve. The degree of failure or success was somewhat less important than making an unforgettable impression. As Jack Kerouac wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones […] [who] burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” — and he was not alone.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/28/plimpton_doc_tells_tale_of_literary_heavyweight_partner/feed/ 1 “Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302687 CANNES, France – According to “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s also here this year with the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives”), the legendary unmade mid-‘70s film version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” by Chilean-born mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky actually exists – and he’s seen it. OK, even Refn hasn’t seen a version of it that can be projected on a screen or played on a high-def monitor, the version that was supposed to star David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalì. That doesn’t exist. But Refn says he spent a long evening in Jodorowsky’s Paris apartment while the latter went through the storyboards for “Dune” with him page by page, talking through every shot and every line of dialogue. “I am the only spectator who has ever seen this movie,” Refn concludes. “And I have to tell you: It was awesome.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/feed/ 39 Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become like “those he despises” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302064 So Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and many other political and social documentaries, has made a fascinating film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that has already pissed off a lot of people on the left – and is about to piss off a bunch more. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” portrays the Australian hacker-hero Assange as a flawed and complicated figure. As British journalist Nick Davies puts it in the film, the same extraordinary personality who created WikiLeaks is also the one who destroyed it. On one hand, Assange has led the fight for freedom of information in the asymmetrical conflict between the world’s citizens and fearsome Goliaths like the CIA and the Pentagon. On the other, he has allowed his alarming personal failings and his persecution complex to become much too large a part of the story, and has succumbed to what one source in the film calls “noble cause corruption.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/feed/ 78 Pick of the week: Sarah Polley’s family secrets http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13294108 Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art. This documentary about Polley’s own surprising family secrets -- which includes some sneaky fictional or imaginative elements -- might sound at first like a personal indulgence but becomes something much larger and subtler: A gripping investigation of the ultimately unknowable past, a meditation on how and whether we can actually know anything, and an act of profound love and generosity. That generosity extends not just to the members of Polley’s WASPy Canadian family – although you certainly feel that – but also to the audience. I left the theater thinking not just about Polley’s family secrets but my own, for which of us truly knows where we came from, or what unrecoverable stories of love and heartbreak lie in our prehistory?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/feed/ 6 “Unclaimed” charts search for forgotten Vietman vet http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13284752 UPDATE: The identity of the main claiming to be Robertson has been revealed to be Dang Tan Ngoc, a Vietnamese citizen who has also impersonated other Vietnam vets.

Filmmaker Michael Jorgensen has charted a remarkable journey with Vietnam vet Tom Faunce in the documentary "Unclaimed," which aims to reconnect a U.S. Vietnam war vet, reported dead in 1968, with his American family.

The man, whom Faunce believes to be Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, remembers only that his helicopter was shot down in Laos in 1968 and that he had a wife and children in Alabama. Though presumed dead by Americans, the man says that he survived a year of torture in Vietnam and then married the nurse who cared for him.

From the Toronto Star:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/feed/ 4 Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274179 Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/feed/ 1 Pick of the week: Lost in Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinth http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13253996 It’s entirely possible that no movie in the history of the medium has attracted the same combination of film-school erudition, amateur scholarship and fanboy and/or fangirl intensity as Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” At first glance that might seem baffling: Although Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel was an eagerly anticipated film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, with a big-name director attached, it got middling reviews (or worse) on its 1980 release, and wasn’t a major hit. But give the Kubrick cultists and conspiracy-theory decoders full credit; over the years they have transformed “The Shining” from flop to classic, and it’s now widely understood as an enigmatic and literally labyrinthine masterwork that contains multitudes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/feed/ 51 Pick of the week: Dick Cheney has no regrets http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13229670 There are so many jaw-dropping moments in “The World According to Dick Cheney” that I’m sure to forget several of them. One comes right at the beginning, when interviewer and co-director R.J. Cutler asks the most “consequential” vice president in American history – that’s Cheney’s word – a series of softball questions to get him warmed up. Cheney looks undeniably older and thinner after his recent heart transplant (talk about jokes that write themselves!), and he does deliver a few minuscule nuggets of warm-and-fuzzy: Happiness is fly-fishing on the Snake River, and misery is the loss of a family member. In case you’ve been wondering, his favorite food is spaghetti. Then Cutler asks Cheney about his biggest flaw. It’s a standard Barbara Walters-style question, for which every skilled politician has a faux-humble answer at the ready.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/feed/ 43 Read our salon on fracking http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13216894 The growing tension between environmental concerns and business interests intensified this weekend amid reports that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was ready to approve a plan to allow hydraulic fracturing (aka "hydrofracking" or "fracking") in parts of his state, until a last-minute intervention from Robert Kennedy Jr. put the plan on delay as it undergoes further study. As politicians at all levels (including the president) will be deciding whether to embrace the controversial method of shale gas drilling in coming months, we asked two experts with divergent views to discuss the issue with us -- and you.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/feed/ 29 “The Jeffrey Dahmer Files”: That nice young man in Apt. 213 http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13199085 Milwaukee in the early 1990s was a fairly typical middle-size, Middle American city, which is to say it was struggling with relatively high rates of crime, widespread urban blight and all the effects of the collapsing industrial economy, including crack and unemployment. When burly, mustachioed homicide detective Pat Kennedy showed up at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street – in a working-class, largely African-American neighborhood -- on the night of July 22, 1991, he felt pretty sure he was a tough cop ready for whatever he might find: a drug deal gone wrong, a domestic dispute turned deadly or some other variation on the familiar themes of urban violence.

What Kennedy walked into was a case that no one, anywhere, would have expected. Hardened police officers, as Kennedy and building resident Pamela Bass remember it, were disheveled and vomiting; the handcuffed suspect – a white man, unexpectedly – was howling like an animal. A foul stench filled the air, a combination of putrefying flesh and industrial chemicals. One of the ashen-faced uniformed cops inside Apartment 213 told Kennedy to look in the refrigerator. As everyone who’s ever read the gruesome details of the Jeffrey Dahmer case knows, there was a severed human head in a cardboard container inside that fridge, along with a few other dismembered body parts – and those were only the first of many gruesome discoveries in that apartment. Kennedy also noticed an open box of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the back of the fridge, and remembered that his own mother used to do the same thing. On the inside of the door, he recalls, “There were condiments: mustard, ketchup, A-1 Sauce, that kind of thing.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/feed/ 0 Pick of the week: Is the golden age of short films upon us? http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13187558 We’re living in a golden age of short films – or at least we should be. Whatever device you’re using to read this article constitutes a node in the greatest distribution network for electronic media ever imagined or devised, one that theoretically reaches most people on the planet. As anybody who’s ever filled an idle minute with a YouTube video of someone else’s cat knows, a widely shared clip can pile up hundreds of thousands of views literally overnight. But unlimited access to an overwhelming torrent of unedited and unfiltered images is one thing, and careful, artful curation is quite another.

There’s a reason why short-film programs at film festivals are usually packed, and the annual showcase for Oscar-nominated shorts has become ever more popular, even in a world where all of us could spend our remaining lifetimes, several times over, watching allegedly entertaining Internet videos at no cost. (At no financial cost, that is; I do not speak of the cost to your soul or your sanity.) As unreliable as the Academy Awards may be at every possible level, it’s a relief to encounter the 2013 Oscar-nominated shorts and reflect that a group of people who know quite a bit about the art and craft of filmmaking has decided that these are good examples.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/feed/ 0 Is a two-state solution still possible — or is Israel toast? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13186518 Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh got his start making TV commercials for Ariel Sharon, the war hero who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, when he suffered a devastating stroke that has left him in a “persistent vegetative state” ever since. (Just last week, however, Sharon underwent a high-tech FMRI exam that revealed “significant” brain activity, suggesting that he may be aware of his surroundings.) That’s important background for Moreh’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Gatekeepers” in various ways.

For one thing, Moreh gained access to six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secretive internal security service – who had never before given public interviews – largely because of his political connections. Those men had all worked with Sharon and respected him. For another, understanding the political evolution of Ariel Sharon sheds some light on Moreh, whom I met a few days ago in New York, and also on the surprising pragmatism and moral complexity reflected in his interviews with the Shin Bet leaders.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/feed/ 27 Is Werner Herzog a libertarian? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/is_werner_herzog_a_libertarian/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/is_werner_herzog_a_libertarian/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13182027 Even by the standards of Werner Herzog’s peculiar and peripatetic career — which stretches from the adventurous works of New German Cinema in the 1970s through a remarkable series of documentaries to acting roles in “The Simpsons” and “Jack Reacher” — “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” is an odd production. For one thing, Herzog didn’t “make” the film, in the normal sense of that word, although what you’ll see on the screen is very much infused with his sensibility. A contradiction? You bet.

None of the remarkable footage of an isolated Siberian village or the hunters who make their living in the almost impenetrable wilderness that surrounds it was actually shot or directed by Herzog, who has likely never been within several thousand miles of the place. Through a friend in Los Angeles, he came upon four hour-long movies about a group of men who keep the Siberian traditions of hunting and trapping alive in one of the remotest regions of the planet, almost completely cut off from modern society and technology. He contacted Dmitry Vasyukov, the Russian filmmaker who had indeed spent a year in the Taiga – the dense and literally trackless forest of the Siberian interior – and convinced him to allow Herzog to construct a 90-minute “international version,” with a new musical score and English voiceover narration in Herzog’s inimitable Teutonic-philosopher mode.

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