Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian/critic, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, and coauthor of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
Ken Burns sat down with Jacobin to discuss his new documentary, Benjamin Franklin, and how the founding father’s spirit of humanitarianism and progress led him to establish America’s first abolitionist society two years before the Declaration of Independence.
Alex Gibney’s The Forever Prisoner reveals the brutal truth behind the nearly two-decade imprisonment of Guantanamo Bay inmate Abu Zubaydah — and the powerful men at the top of the American government responsible for his torture. We spoke with Gibney about it.
Sam Pollard sat down with Jacobin to discuss his new documentary on black tennis legend Arthur Ashe — the man who broke down the racial barrier in “the sport of kings.”
Oliver Stone sat down with Jacobin to discuss JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, his new documentary that exhaustively makes the case that the national security state, including the CIA and FBI, killed John F. Kennedy — not a lone shooter.
The new Showtime documentary Attica covers the 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility. Award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson talks to Jacobin about the revolt and the state massacre that slaughtered prisoners and ended a movement for human dignity.
The new four-part PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, codirected by Ken Burns, examines the life of the legendary boxer and antiwar radical. Burns talks to Jacobin about how a kid from Kentucky named Cassius Clay became “the spirit of the 20th century.”
The legendary actor Ed Asner, who died at 91 this week, was an unflagging supporter of socialist causes. And he paid a price for his leftism, taking a stand against Ronald Reagan’s bloody Central America interventions and losing a show over it.
From fighting alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War to backing revolutionaries in Cuba, documentarian Ken Burns shows us the radical side of writer Ernest Hemingway in the new PBS docuseries Hemingway. Burns talks to Jacobin about Hemingway’s forgotten left-wing politics and why the writer still matters.
We talk to legendary director Oliver Stone about his career, Fidel Castro, Edward Snowden, Vietnam War movies, and why he takes the side of the oppressed in his work.
Barbara Kopple won Oscars for her gripping documentaries, like Harlan County, USA, on the struggles of the labor movement. She sat down with Jacobin to discuss that and her more recent work, as well.
A day before she quoted Marx at the Oscars, Jacobin briefly chatted with American Factory co-director Julia Reichert about her democratic socialism and long history on the Left.