J. Hoberman

Busby Berkeley: Going Through the Roof

David Thompson

Busby Berkeley, Kenneth Anger

Documentary profile of legendary dance choreographer Busby Berkeley.

Waiting for Ishtar

John Mitchell, Jonathan Crombie

John Mitchell, Jonathan Crombie

A conversation about guilty pleasures turns into one man's quest to find others on a library waiting list, while simultaneously examining the fate of the famous Hollywood bomb Ishtar (1987).

Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream

Stuart Samuels, Simcha Jacobovici

R. H. Thomson, Neal Gabler

This film discusses the effect on how major American films in Hollywood were influenced by the Eastern European Jewish culture that most of the major movie moguls who controlled the studios shared. Through clips of various films, the filmmakers illustrate the dominant themes like that of the outsider, the outspoken American patriotism, and rooting for the underdog in society.

Fail Safe and Cold War

J. Hoberman, Frieda Altman

Film critic J. Hoberman discusses the best-selling 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler on which "Fail-Safe" is based, along with the pervasiveness of nuclear paranoia in films of the sixties.

Mission to Mongo

J. Hoberman

First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.