Racial matter comparison in the Malcom x film and the presidency now

It’s Documentary Film Night!

What We Learn about Political Campaigns in Films (paper: 5 pages)

Choose a film to write about.  Look for your choice on the RIC library website, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Filmstruck and other sources.  If you do not subscribe to a streaming service and cannot find the film for free, you can contact me.  Here are your choices.  Should you have a suggestion that is not on this list, please contact me and we’ll see if it meets the criteria.

Please read to the end of the assignment.  There I have provided criteria for the paper and I’ll also discuss the criteria in class.  In essence, what you will be doing in this short paper is apply the course material that is relevant.  The questions will help you to get started, but you are not limited to them.  When you see something that is relevant to our class discussions or course materials, you can certainly include it in your paper.

Possible choices:

How to Win an Election: From The New York Times Op-Docs, How to Win an Election takes us deep into the world of campaigning through the eyes of Mark McKinnon, one of America’s most influential political strategists. In a candid conversation, McKinnon pulls back the curtain on storytelling strategies used in political campaigns today, many of which he used to elect President George W. Bush.  

Primary: Produced by Robert Drew, shot by Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, and edited by DA Pennebaker, Primary follows the Wisconsin primary election battle between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the 1960 Democratic Party nomination. The result is a breakthrough for documentary film. As one of the first films to utilize mobile filmmaking equipment, Primary’s verite style marked a new era in documentary filmmaking, bringing an unprecedented level of intimacy to larger-than-life subjects.

Caucus: For more than a decade, the Iowa caucus has been the starting line for Presidential candidates seeking their party’s endorsement. A.J. Schnack’s Caucus follows the eight Republican hopefuls leading up to the 2012 Iowa caucus. Capturing planned public appearances and canvassing conversations among voters, Schnack entrenches the viewer in the modern political process and the actions presidential hopefuls take to rally supporters during election season.

Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed:  Director Shola Lynch’s film takes you on a journey through Shirley Chisholm’s revolutionary 1972 campaign as the first black woman to run for President. Without the backing of the political establishment, Chisholm’s grassroots campaign inspired a generation of young voters to push the status quo.

War Room: No list of election documentaries would be complete without Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s The War Room. In the midst of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President, The War Room follows James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton campaign’s lead strategist and communications director, on the road and in the national campaign headquarters. Hegedus and Pennebaker capture the infectious energy of the young campaign staff in a film that marks a fundamental shift in how modern political campaigns are run.

Street Fight:  Before he won his seat as a senator for New Jersey, Cory Booker was a charismatic young underdog taking on the state’s political machine. In “Street Fight,” Marshall Curry documents Booker’s first (unsuccessful) 2002 bid for Newark mayor against the longtime incumbent, Sharpe James, and captures the astonishing measures James and his campaign took to win. Curry’s rousing — and sometimes infuriating — film poses important questions about identity politics and the inherent corruption of the political system. Years later, considering the fates of those involved, it also plays like an archetypal origin story.

By the People: The Election of Barack Obama: Long-shot candidates are a running theme in political documentaries — one can imagine how many films about unsuccessful campaigns are sitting in frustrated filmmakers’ storage units — but few candidates have seemed like a longer shot than Barack Obama, the young African-American senator with a funny name who took on the Clinton machine in 2008. Directors Amy Rice and Alicia Sams focus mostly on Obama’s primary battle, which gives an incomplete picture of his historic candidacy. But the moments they capture convey the passion and dedication of the candidate and of the team that made his victory possible.

A Perfect Candidate: Many voters have felt the frustration of being asked to choose “the lesser of two evils,” but few constituencies felt that burn quite like the people of Virginia in 1994. In that year’s Senate race, they were offered the choice between Charles Robb, the scandal-plagued incumbent Democrat, and Oliver North, the Republican challenger and a prominent figure in the Iran-contra scandal. As with “The War Room,” the filmmakers spend much of their time behind the scenes with key figures, if less capably. It’s a depressing film, deftly portraying the desperation of the race and the nonpartisan nature of corruption and incompetence. But it is also darkly funny, playing in spots like a nonfiction “Veep.”

Knock Down the House: A young bartender in the Bronx, a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, a grieving mother in Nevada, and a registered nurse in Missouri build a movement of insurgent candidates to challenge powerful incumbents in Congress. One of their races will become the most shocking political upsets in recent American history.

Our Brand is Crisis: This film is set during the 2002 Bolivian presidential election and explores the use of American political tactics. Candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada hired an American political consulting firm to help him get elected when he was widely undesired. Lozada ultimately wins the presidential bid and the consequences of political marketing are put under question.

Weiner:  This film is a thrilling look inside a political comeback-turned-meltdown. Anthony Weiner was a young congressman on the cusp of higher office when a sexting scandal forced a humiliating resignation. Just two years later, he ran for mayor of New York City.

Boys State:  The film is uplifting, funny, thrilling, and revealing. The teens come to Boys State with formed political ideas, but through debate, discussion, and defense of their stances, they learn a lot about what it takes to cultivate consensus and win. And their experiences provide both a microcosmic look into the political process and a hint of the way future politics might unfold, in dismal and strangely hopeful ways.

Last Party: Filmed over the last six months of the 2000 Presidential election, Phillip Seymour Hoffman starts documenting the campaign at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, but spends more time outside, in the street protests and police actions than in the orchestrated conventions. Hoffman shows an obvious distaste for money politics and the conservative right. He looks seedier and more disillusioned the campaign progresses. Eventually Hoffman seems most energized by the Ralph Nader campaign as an alternative to the nearly indistinguishable major parties.

Guidelines for writing the paper:

• Describe the film in general terms. What subjects does it cover? What issues does it raise? What do you see as the main purpose of the film?
• What are the major theme(s) of the film
• Relate the film to class discussions, readings, notes or knowledge. Does it contradict or support anything you have learned?
• What are the most important lessons you took away from the film. Can we apply what you learned to politics today?
• Does this film have the potential to transform people’s political sensibilities? That is, would viewers look at the political world from a different perspective and perhaps a more informed perspective? Why or why not?

Requirements:

• Your paper should be 5-6 pages in length.
• Your paper must be double spaced with a 10-12 pt. font and have correct formatting (word document).
• All pages must have 1-inch margins.
• Number your papers.
• Make sure you work on paragraph development. Each paragraph must have a thesis and then support.
• Provide an introduction that contains an attention-getter to pull in your reader’s interest and also a preview of your paper’s organizational structure.
• Organize your paper around particular themes—i.e. course topics or book topics or themes that you develop about politics. Don’t organize your paper according to the plot of the film.
• Your paper will be checked for plagiarism. Make sure you read about RIC plagiarism policy in your syllabus.