René Upshaw 23 hrs · Vidal would know. To the American People .... .... We have the worst educated Population of any first World country. And I hope that you are listening and I hope you know that your lack of Education is the joke of the World. The newly released documentary, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, about the literary figure, public intellectual and political gadfly and radical who died two years ago, has much to recommend it. The portrait is an admiring one, but it is not superficial. Its greatest merit is the presence of Vidal himself. Filmmaker Nicholas Wrathall, whose previous work includes Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants (2001), generally avoids the use of “talking heads.” We hear from Vidal’s half-sister, Nina Straight, a nephew, and several others. Some of the writer’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances are mentioned or interviewed, including Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Sting and Dick Cavett. For the most part, though, the film makes skillful use of archival footage, spanning more than six decades up to and including interviews with Vidal not long before his death, to allow the subject to speak for himself. The result is a compelling portrait, especially when it deals with the political and historical topics that were always Vidal’s main interest. The archival footage demonstrates a consistency in Vidal’s political life and thought, especially from the late 1960s onward. We see and hear him as the biting critic, the truth-telling enemy of American foreign policy from the days of Vietnam through the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, denouncing the US government as a government “of the rich, for the rich and by the rich.” https://youtube/watch?v=G12qRzAOxCg https://wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/02/vida-j02.html
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 05:05:56 +0000
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