Documentary

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country? A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it. The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’ At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia.

It would be presumptuous to call 2023 the comeback of Arnold Schwarzenegger: he never went away. From his first starring role in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian to an illustriously memorable life and career that have included everything from the Terminator films to his term as governor of California, he has judiciously created an existence for himself as an all-American success story; a sort of Scott Fitzgerald character for the Reaganite age. Not bad, really, for a man born seventy-six years ago in a small town in Austria, the son of an unrepentant Nazi. Should you turn on Netflix, you will now be greeted by two incarnations of Der Arnold.

With a new show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York; a new documentary film from director Phil Grabsky, Hopper: An American Love Story; and a recent exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the work of one of the most popular yet seemingly inscrutable American artists of the twentieth century is receiving a great deal of renewed attention. In his paintings, Hopper’s hard-edged realism, impressionistic plays of light and passages of intensely saturated color compete for attention. What has always captured the public imagination is the relative isolation of the figures that appear in his work. Search for articles about Edward Hopper online, and many will describe his art as an exploration of loneliness.

America has an abundance of daring documentarians: Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, Alex Gibney, Laura Poitras, Morgan Neville, Matt Wolf, Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore, off the top of my head. Not a diverse list demographically, but you can tell their movies apart. Some are better than others, some (Poitras and Neville) have oily ethics, but others still have made some of the most iconic American films of this century (Spurlock’s Super Size Me is in the lexicon even if nothing else he’s done is, and say what you will about Moore and his films, his impact on American pop-political culture cannot be dismissed entirely).

The inspiration for the object of Aschenbach’s infatuation in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was acknowledged by the author some years after publication, and the subject of a biography a century later (The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair). He was a Polish boy the writer ogled from a distance in 1911 while holidaying with his wife at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice. Less is known of the teenager who played the role in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of Mann’s novel. For years the director trawled the Continent in pursuit of the right actor for the part. It was a search that had eluded the other major directors who had attempted to bring the book to the screen: John Huston, Joseph Losey, Franco Zeffirelli. Visconti finally found 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in Stockholm.

If you’ve been involved in the production of a film, you know how intoxicating it can be. The prospect of seeing your work projected in a theater is reason enough to put up with a nightmare of unrelenting stress — for some people, anyway. Others might struggle to understand how an entire town (Narrowsburg, an admittedly very small town in Upstate New York) could be so easily swindled by a cartoon mobster and a mysterious woman with a French accent who tells people she’s from South Africa or Normandy, or descended from French royalty. Then again, Richard Castellano did appear with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro in Analyze This, and Jocelyne Castaldo, well, who in America wouldn’t be charmed by such an accent?