Pop Culture Archives

Reduction and Occupation: The Special Field Orders of General William T. Sherman, May-November 1864 (Atlanta History Center) The words from Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman flow across the page in a steady hand. The writing, in graceful penmanship, is clear, and the message is harsh."If the people raise a howl against the barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking," Sherman wrote to one of his generals two days after Atlanta surrendered on Sept. 2, 1864, and weeks before the city's destruction."If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war." That declaration is among the 52 handwritten documents from Sherman, including field orders and other correspondence, on display at the Atlanta History Center through Sept. 5.

Overlord (Movie) “Overlord,” a prize-winning entry in the 1975 Berlin Film Festival, is only now receiving an American theatrical release. Whatever the reasons for the delay, the film, directed by Stuart Cooper and produced with the cooperation of the Imperial War Museum in Britain, deserves to join the pantheon of essential World War II combat movies. Unlike most Hollywood war movies, it has “action” sequences almost entirely drawn from archival documentaries — German as well as British — which contribute not only to the picture’s realism but also to its dreamlike, almost surreal atmosphere.

Our Nation’s Twentieth President: An exhibition to commemorate the 125th Anniversary of the Assassination of James A. Garfield (Exhibit/National Museum of Health and Medicine) On July 2, 1881, just one hundred days after his inauguration, Garfield entered the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. to board a train bound for Williamstown, Ma., when Charles Guiteau fired two shots at the President. One bullet grazed the President’s right arm. The second bullet entered Garfield’s lower right back. Although mortally wounded, Garfield would linger for 80 days before succumbing to complications from the wound. Despite the best efforts of a team of notable physicians, President Garfield died on September 19, 1881.

Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (Documentary) Great political movements often leave fractured families in their wakes, and in Thomas Allen Harris's"Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela," the exhumation of the writer and director's own family history is undertaken almost as an act of contrition. Prompted by the funeral of his stepfather, Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, known as Lee, one of the first wave of anti-apartheid exiles from South Africa in 1960, the American-born Mr. Harris tries to reconnect with a man he never really knew. The results are a fascinating glimpse not just of the early campaigns of the African National Congress, but also of the way childhood memories can obscure larger truths.

How Art Made the World (PBS) Nigel Spivey knows no boundaries. This hunky Cambridge professor scales mountains, hurtles into caves, treks across deserts and submits to shock treatment for the eyes in the first few episodes of"How Art Made the World," a pleasantly entertaining five-part documentary series about the origins of art and its influence on society. Jointly produced by the BBC and KCET, a PBS station in Los Angeles, the first part was shown June 26. Dr. Spivey is a specialist in Greek and Etruscan sculpture and the author of several excellent books on the subject; one of them even won a British award. He makes for an agreeable travel companion, speaking slowly, clearly and with a merciful minimum of art jargon. He also seems to know when to get out of the camera frame and let the exquisite artwork do the talking.

National Archives Experience (National Archives) In 2004 archival storage space was transformed to help create what is now called the National Archives Experience, which includes a permanent 9,000-square-foot exhibition —"The Public Vaults" — about the impact of those founding documents. Here, awe is less the point than amazement. Exhibits touch on immigration and space exploration, Oval Office audiotapes and Congressional hearings. The archives provide the substance, but now original documents defer to facsimiles, touch screens, television broadcasts and interactive displays.

Searching for Shakespeare (Exhibit/Yale Center for British Art) Since Shakespeare's time (1564-1616) eight portraits have seemed to be genuine likenesses, but today only three of them stand up, and even those are not indisputable. They are the focus of a fascinating show,"Searching for Shakespeare," that opens today at the Yale Center for British Art, its only appearance in the United States. It brings the portraits together for the first time in this country, along with a wonderful variety of materials from Shakespeare's life, including the handwritten will that famously left his"second-best bed" to his wife, Anne Hathaway.

Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery (Exhibit/N-Y Historical Society) Slavery, it could be argued, didn't really end in the United States until civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960's. That was a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Or the"Emancipation Approximation," as the artist Kara Walker calls it in a series of hallucinatory silkscreen prints that turn the Old South into a compassless moral state, in which slave and master alike are adrift. Ms. Walker's witty, poetic, wicked images are among the high points of"Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery," the second of three exhibitions organized by the New-York Historical Society on American slavery. The first, last year's"Slavery in New York," was archival in nature, made up of relics from the past."Legacies" is very much of the present, with some of the art made for the occasion.

'In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer'(Play/New York City) The easy way to look at Heinar Kipphardt's"In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" is in terms of present-day politics."There are people who are willing to protect freedom until there is nothing left of it," the title character says to an unfriendly lawyer. Comments like that are highly satisfying for theatergoers who, like Oppenheimer, reside happily on the left side of politics. But the play, now at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, looks at even broader issues. This is a courtroom drama without a court. The 12 men in suits and ties who appear onstage portray Oppenheimer, his lawyers, opposing counsel, witnesses and members of a committee appointed by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 to determine whether Oppenheimer, the physicist considered the father of the atomic bomb, should continue to have top-security clearance.

Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery (Exhibit/New-York Historical Society) New York City's first museum, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) presents Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery, bringing together the works of distinguished artists, including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, Whitfield Lovell, Mel Edwards, Lorenzo Pace, Betye Saar, Marc Latamie, Willie Birch, Ellen Driscoll, Eli Kince and a host of other critically acclaimed contemporary artists in a reflection on how America's history of racially based slavery has shaped our society. The exhibition, which will include 41 works by 32 distinguished artists, will be on view June 16, 2006, though January 7, 2007.

Virginians Desolate, Virginians Free (Documentary/National Park Service) A film depicting the divergent experiences of slaves and the white population in Fredericksburg during the Civil War is set to premiere this weekend."Virginians Desolate, Virginians Free," a 30-minute movie made by the National Park Service and filmed entirely in Fredericksburg, largely relies on letters and diaries of people who lived in the city during the war. The premiere will be held tomorrow at 8 p.m. at Fredericksburg Baptist Church on Princess Anne Street."The default history of Fredericksburg is the experience of the white population. Literally half the population here had a very different experience and view," said the script's writer, John Hennessy, who is chief historian for Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park.

Red Was The Midnight: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (Exhibit/Atlanta Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site) In the heart of the New South near the turn of the 20th century, more than 10,000 people stormed through the city's downtown - the beginning of a four-day melee that left dozens of black residents and two whites dead. It became known as the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, putting U.S. racial tensions on an international stage. A century later, historians are working to educate"the city too busy to hate" about this dark chapter from its past that many living here today have never heard of.

Gulag: oviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom (Exhibit/Ellis Island) An American-made shovel, two translucent toothbrushes, the Russian word for" comedy" — sometimes it is in the small things that large truths are found. For in a compact exhibition at Ellis Island devoted to Soviet-era prison camps —"Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom" — how much can possibly be shown to reflect the experiences of 18 million human beings who were imprisoned in these camps over the bloody course of the 20th century? Before considering its failings, though, begin, as this exhibition does, with the camps themselves. In the first part of the show, amid the photographs of laborers, the diagrams of living quarters, the pock-marked map showing the archipelago of camps, there are the relics. The shovel, for example, was provided by the United States to help the Soviet Union during World War II, but it was, like many other supplies, routed to the camps, where the glories of manual labor had been celebrated in the propaganda clips shown here on television monitors. Shovels like this one, found not far from where the prehistoric salamanders were devoured, were luxuries.

Harrell Fletcher' s Vietnam Photographs at White Columns (Exhibit) A year ago, the artist Harrell Fletcher saw the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, a memorial to what the Vietnamese call the American War. He was so struck by it that he went back with a digital camera to photograph on the sly everything there. This meant mostly magazine and newspaper photographs, and snapshots of Agent Orange victims, captioned. He shot the photographs and the captions separately, at an angle, to cut down on reflections, and in such a way that his pictures make clear that he was there, standing in the museum, taking photographs of photographs that are themselves copies. They look a little like the pictures you find on eBay. His bootlegged museum, partly reassembled, has been traveling the United States. It is at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., through Friday. Its run at White Columns, the Manhattan art gallery, ends Saturday. It is an ingenious little show; heartbreaking, too. It would be a pity to miss.

Permanent Exhibition on German History (Exhibit/Berlin) The globe Adolf Hitler gazed upon while contemplating world domination is in remarkably good condition but for one blemish _ the bullet hole directly through Berlin, inflicted by a Soviet soldier after the Nazi dictator's defeat in 1945. The oversized orb is just one highlight of the more than 8,000 artifacts in the German Historical Museum's new permanent display on the country's 2,000-year history, which seeks to help Germans rediscover their identity. With World War II and the Nazi genocide still in living memory, many Germans have shunned the study of their own past. Museum director Hans Ottomeyer hopes the exhibit can contribute to changing that.

Egypt's Sunken Treasure (Exhibit/Berlin) It's a good thing that the Martin Gropius Building has such high ceilings. It'll need them. The exhibit at the Berlin museum includes 15-ton statues sculpted from rose-colored granite that have spent millennia on the ocean floor.

The pieces that will be on display in the exhibit entitled"Egypt's Sunken Treasure," opening to the public on May 13, but ceremoniously unveiled by German President Horst Köhler and visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, were flown directly to Germany on board a"Beluga" cargo plane provided by Airbus. The aircraft's unusual cargo also includes astronomic calendars, jewels, gold coins, penises made of lead and the spout of a baby's bottle. The statue of Hapi, more than five meters (16.4 feet) tall, is considered the largest freestanding sculpture of an Egyptian god in existence.

Lewis and Clark Exhibit (Exhibit/Smithsonian) An exhibition honoring the famed explorers Lewis and Clark opens Friday, completing a tour that crossed from coast to coast, like the men it celebrates. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, an effort that brought them to the Pacific Coast. The exhibit commemorating their quest completes its journey at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Group Dynamics: Family Portraits and Scenes of Everyday Life (Exhibit/NY Historical Society) The haunting quality of the new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society is not really due to the power of the 90 artworks themselves. Some are of only minor importance; others — a few daguerreotypes — are even anonymous in both subject and creator. But the exhibition haunts beyond the sum of its individual parts. Each of these paintings and photographs is a portrait drawn from the society's collection; most are of families gathered for self-commemoration. And walking past them, you feel partly a voyeur, glimpsing private lives behind the publicly displayed faces, and partly an object of similar scrutiny by arrays of imposing, disdainful, charming, alluring and gentle eyes.

I Remember 1948 (Documentary) The narrative documentary, I Remember 1948, explores the lives of four, Al-Nakba (The Palestinian Catastrophe) survivors. After living in the Palestinian Diaspora for 58 years, they share the intimate details of their lives at the time Zionist terror gangs invaded their villages and expelled Palestinian families for more land. From 1947-49 an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled Palestine. It is the side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict told from the Palestinian, historical perspective. Director Fadia Kisrwani Abboud interviews the survivors, who expose some of their most painful, life memories of what happened to them as boys, girls and young adults. After the UN General Assembly passed a UN Partition Plan in 1947, UN Resolution 181, they divided Palestine for the creation of the State of Israel. Israeli gangs destroyed Arab villages with bombs, canon fire, mortar shells, tanks, and flaming garbage cans of gasoline that set the villages on fire.

The Lost City (Movie) Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie"The Lost City." He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they're ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba – a grotesque and unforgivable blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.

Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.

The History Boys (Play) The seats in the Broadhurst Theater are no softer or wider than the ones in most Broadway houses, where the penalty for playgoing is almost always fanny fatigue. Yet for the entire, substantial length of the"The History Boys," the madly enjoyable play by Alan Bennett that opened last night, you somehow feel nestled in a plump armchair that has been custom made for your body — a perch that you are reluctant to leave, even after more than two and a half hours of sitting.

The Notorious Bettie Page (Documentary) If you order a DVD called “Bettie Page: Bondage Queen,” Amazon will make some reasonable, though nonetheless startling, guesses about other items you might enjoy. (So one quickly discovers.) But the online retailer’s algorithms aren’t quite finely tuned enough to account for the fascination that Bettie Page exercises. Whether posing in calender-girl mode, or wielding a whip in the somewhat paradoxical role of a cheerful dominatrix, she returns the viewer’s gaze in a way that challenges one’s stereotypes about the sexually repressive 1950s. She also represents, in my opinion, a definitive refutation of the American media’s inexplicable erotic valorization of the blonde.

"Sir, No Sir" (Documentary) One of the most memorable chapters of the Vietnam War has also long been one of the least revisited: the antiwar movement inside the military. Called the G.I. Movement, this resistance manifested itself in countless ways: in organized protests, in desertions and in the coffeehouses that sprang up across the country near military bases. In the early 1970's the documentary filmmaker David Zeiger worked in one such coffeehouse, the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Tex., not far from Fort Hood. Named for a helicopter shock absorber, the Oleo Strut was where off-duty soldiers went to decompress and to check out the latest issue of one of the many underground military publications, like The Fatigue Press, that gave powerful voice to their dissent. In his smart, timely documentary about the G.I. Movement,"Sir! No Sir!," Mr. Zeiger takes a look at how the movement changed and occasionally even rocked the military from the ground troops on up.

The Persians (Play/Wash DC) The King of Persia enters, to face his shellshocked nation. He's thrown away an empire on a military misadventure in Greece --"rashly emptied a continent of men into the maw of death," as Aeschylus puts it -- and now he must acknowledge the fullness of his folly. Director Ethan McSweeny cuts a stunning path to this turning point of"The Persians." At the back of the Shakespeare Theatre Company's stage, Erin Gann's Xerxes, the callow king, materializes. As he begins to walk forward, a fine spray of scarlet sand rains down on him.

CSA: The Confederate States of America (Film/counterfactual history) One hundred forty-one years ago today, General Robert E. Lee issued"General Orders No. 9," instructing all Confederate troops to"return to their homes." On the previous day, April 9, 1865, he had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War. But what if the roles had been reversed? What if it had been Lee accepting Grant's surrender? Certainly, we'd be living in a very different America today -- or would we?

Frost: Life and Culture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway(Exhibit/Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.) This exhibit of striking photography and startling scholarship comes as Sami (Saami) activists are asserting their right to political autonomy and filing legal claims to large tracts of territory based on indigeneity. The Smithsonian archeologist Noel Broadbent is “helping the Sami people assert their unique identity” with a digging program called “Search for a Past.” His efforts are concretized by a helpful wall map of a purported thirteenth-century “Sami homeland … called Sampi or Samiland, which once occupied most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland,” and which some Sami activists would like to reclaim. The photos capture a timeless landscape of reindeer husbandry. In one, a lasso catches the sunlight against a gray sky in the instant before it drops around the neck of a reindeer calf; in another, a herd of reindeer is dramatically backlit against a brilliant patch of orange sunset, dwarfed by a sea of white snow and white cloud.

Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (Exhibit/Metropolitan Museum of Art ) CAN a queen be a king, too? Consider the case of Hatshepsut, an Egyptian ruler of the 15th century B.C. The eldest daughter of Thutmose I and his principal queen, she married her younger half-brother, Thutmose II. His untimely death left her regent for Thutmose III, his son by another wife. At some point, she decided to govern jointly with the boy and took on the title of king. Later, she assumed the supreme title of pharaoh and ruled Egypt in that powerfully masculine role until her death.

Michelangelo's Drawings (Exhibit/British Museum) The British Museum's acclaimed new show of Michelangelo drawings is an invitation to voyeurism, albeit not, as may be supposed, because of the Florentine master's undisguised worship of the naked male body. Rather, it is because Michelangelo never intended his drawings to be seen by eyes other than his own or those of his family and pupils.

Hatshepsut, the king and queen (Exhibit/Met’s Department of Egyptian Art) The show presents almost three hundred objects—statues and reliefs, sarcophagi and architectural fragments, paintings and manuscripts, vessels and implements, jewelry and amulets—in spotlighted splendor, but it is both less opulent and a lot more interesting than the usual “Treasures of So-and-So” archeological exhibition. (People who rate these affairs by carat count may be mollified by the sumptuous loot from a tomb of three of Thutmose III’s wives.) The curators stick to their subject of the early New Kingdom, which began, circa 1550 B.C., when Ahmose I reunited Egypt after a spell of foreign domination in the north. Hatshepsut became regent upon the death of her husband and half brother, Thutmose II, in about 1479 B.C., and made herself king about six years later.

Queen of the Mountain (Documentary) Tess Goell was the kind of American heroine that seemed to exist only in 1930's movies, played by Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell. They were women bravely striding into what was largely believed to be a man's world — flying planes, battling city hall, working in formerly all-male offices or newsrooms. Goell strode into archaeology, a divorced, hearing-impaired Jewish woman amid Muslims in southern Turkey. Her story,"Queen of the Mountain," a one-hour documentary directed by Martha Goell Lubell, a niece, has the feel of an affectionate family portrait, but that is not a complaint. The film is a strong, rich narrative with visuals to match.

October 17, 1961(Film/Museum of Modern Art NYC) This sincere if plodding French drama recreates the state-sanctioned police riot that left scores (casualty estimates vary wildly) of Algerians dead in Paris streets, not long before the end of the Algerian War of Independence. Directed by an industry veteran who has worked with the likes of Godard and Truffaut, though you wouldn't know it, the film braids together two oppositional forces: the French police and bureaucrats who turned the demonstration into a blood bath, and the Algerians who found themselves on the unexpectedly violent front lines. In an attempt to place the story in historical context, Mr. Tasma employs a relentlessly evenhanded approach — he carefully weighs the scales with good and bad guys from both sides — that drains his film of dramatic tension even as it wends toward the inevitably depressing climax.

Gandhi Opera (London) The English National Opera (ENO) has released its plans to stage an opera based on the life of iconic Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi as part of its 2006-07 season. The production will be performed in Sanskrit, a departure for the ENO who have traditionally produced works in English, as a means of making opera more accessible. Satyagraha, named after Gandhi’s tactic of passive resistance, tells of the Mahatma’s life in South Africa, where he fought for the civil rights of the Indian population and made the transition from young lawyer to legendary activist. Philip Glass originally composed the opera in the 1980s but as yet it has never been staged in Britain.

The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment (Exhibit/American Philosophical Society) You would not expect to find someone sharing star billing with Benjamin Franklin in this city, especially during the 300th anniversary of his birth. But while everywhere else in town Franklin is being lionized as the printer, scientist and statesman, an exhibition at the American Philosophical Society, which he founded, pairs him with an unlikely contemporary, Ekaterina Dashkova, a Russian princess whom few Americans have ever heard of.

Joyeux Noël (Film/NYT Review)"Joyeux Noël," a glossy French antiwar movie with melted snowflakes in its eyes, tells the true story of an improvised Christmas truce during the first year of World War I. The visually sweeping film, written and directed by Christian Carion, is the kind of feel-good, feel-sad movie with a message that invites you to bask in the glow of communal bonhomie, as enemy soldiers lay down their arms, stagger out of their trenches and sing carols together on a frigid Christmas Eve. If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does"Joyeux Noël," an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth? Maybe it's because the kind of wars being fought in the 21st century involve religious, ideological and economic differences that go much deeper and feel more resistant to resolution than the European territorial disputes and power struggles that precipitated World War I.