Eyes on the Prize, a critically acclaimed documentary dealing with the American Civil Rights Movement, is one of the best documentaries ever made in the U.S. and certainly the best to date on the civil rights movement. The 14 part series was recently re-released in 2006 as a 7 volume DVD set after being out distribution since the early 2000s. It is an indispensable part of any academic library’s film collection.

Eyes on the Price was created and produced by Henry Hampton (1940-1998) and Blackside Inc., the independent film and television company he created in 1968. During his life Hampton, one of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, and Blackside produced over 60 films and media projects documenting the complex issues of race and poverty affecting Americans. Hampton wanted to show a different side of the movement "A hundred civil rights stories had been told, but it was always black people being saved by whites. In 'Eyes,' we brought our people up in history."

The series uses historical footage and contemporary interviews of people struggling for and against the movement to tell the story of the major events of the American Civil Rights struggles from 1954-1985 and of individual acts of courage of ordinary people who played an extraordinary role in the birth of one of the most powerful social justice movements in history.

The Los Angles Times called it “an exhaustive documentary that shouldn’t be missed”. The Oakland Tribune said, "The series brings back all the mixed emotions of that time, the fear, the hope, the anger, the defiance, the courage, the strength, the sorrow, the pain... The series teaches about the power of courage, the strength of determination, and the way fear strips away the power and the dignity of those who fail to fight it. These are vital lessons..." January 21, 1987. Eyes on the Prize went on to win 23 awards, including two Emmy’s, the Edward R. Murrow Brotherhood Award for Best National Documentary, the International Documentary Association’s Distinguished Documentary Award and the top DuPont-Columbia award for excellence in broadcast journalism. It is an invaluable record of the cultural, civil, judicial and social events of the era.

As usual, PBS has an excellent collection of supplementary materials on its website such as links to primary sources, profiles of individuals and groups, timelines, study guides for teachers, a transcript of each volume and more on the PBS website at: PBS.org

-Chela Lucas

Simply and without fanfare, this is one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature and you've probably never heard of it. Following the fate of members of one extended family and their friends against the backdrop of the Battle of Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman's novel takes on the burden of understanding not only his times but human nature as well. As a Soviet war correspondent, Grossman covered the siege of Stalingrad. He knew his setting down to the brick dust and his descriptions make his readers viscerally feel the cold, the hunger and the danger. If Life and Fate was simply an account of day-to-day existence during the prolonged siege and the eventual counterattack that changed the course of the war it would still be worthwhile reading for the clarity, insight, humor and compassion of Grossman's prose.

However, Stalingrad is only the center of a series of venues that allow Grossman to expand his vision and address the big questions of his time and, perhaps, of all human history. The book follows the lives, and sometimes the deaths, of Ukrainian Jews on their way to the death camps, Soviet officers imprisoned after being overrun by the German advance, Soviet political prisoners, and the petty and seemingly unremarkable concerns of residents of Moscow. Through these individual but connected stories Grossman relates the simple dilemmas of ordinary people to the massive forces of history and ideology.

Thus in a few chapters this novel covers territory now familiar to us through other works such as Darkness at Noon, 1984, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Only here Grossman shows us nuances and consequences that the others missed. The interrogation of an old Bolshevik, a prisoner in a German camp, by an SS officer is a masterful exercise in both psychological and political writing. Even physics becomes political under Stalin and we learn about the larger costs of small things. In this, the underlying idea that our choices come with consequences, and that in dire times the consequences are often dire, Life and Fate rises to the ranks of the great works of its or any other time.

Life and Fate is also a riveting narrative, a remarkable accomplishment considering the book's 880 plus pages. It does what few other novels have done, take in the sweep of the large forces of history and make it personal. A Tale of Two Cities, Doctor Zhivago and War and Peace come most readily to mind by way of comparison. Yet it is the political critique of life under Stalin and comparisons with Hitler's Germany that garner the most attention. This is certainly what brought it to the attention of Stalin's secret police who, when Grossman attempted to publish his novel in 1960, suppressed it so thoroughly that it did not make it to the West until the 1980s. It is currently enjoying renewed interest with the release of a paperback NYRB Classics edition. Devastating and yet hopeful, a sprawling narrative and also a thoughtful critique, personal and still universal, Life and Fate is not to be missed.

-- Lee Jaffe, University Library

I approached the second season of HBO’s ROME with some trepidation. How could an encore compare with Julius Caesar’s ascension to Imperator and subsequent betrayal and assassination in the remarkable first season? I needn’t have worried. The strength of ROME is much deeper than Ciarán Hine’s indomitable Julius Caesar. The excellent ensemble cast and equally adept writers return and deliver an engaging story.

ROME’s story is driven from the bottom up. Two mostly fictional characters, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo (Caesar mentions the real men by name in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico – the only rank and file soldiers so honored – but little else is known of their lives) are the twin pillars that support the narrative. In the first season, Vorenus is humorless, honor-bound, and taciturn. Pullo is rash and impulsive; the very embodiment of his contemporary Horace’s admonition ‘Carpe Diem.’ His character is particularly engaging. I cannot imagine a cold-blooded murderer with whom I’d rather have a beer (though I wouldn’t try to cheat him at dice). Pullo’s poor decisions often land him in mortal peril and Vorenus just as often bails him out. As the second season opens, it is Vorenus who is in crisis and Pullo who steps into the role of caretaker. This sets up a recurring theme in the second season: the world has been turned on its head.

In the wake of Caesar’s assassination, the Optimate conspirators are on the ascendant and Brutus and his Senate cohort are poised to assume power. Mark Antony, Caesar’s blunt instrument, is sharp enough to recognize the tenuousness of his position and prepares to flee with his lover (and Caesar’s niece) Atia and her family. With one foot out of the city, they stop to fetch Caesar’s widow Calpurnia. Against Antony’s judgment, they tarry long enough to read the dictator’s will. To everyone’s great shock, Caesar’s will reveals that he has adopted his great-nephew Octavian and left him the vast majority of his estate. The unusually astute young Octavian is first to see the tactical advantage of the will. The Optimates cannot maintain a hold on power without controlling Ceasar’s great wealth. They can only invalidate the will and expropriate his property by justifying the assassination as a legal tyrannicide. However, one cannot selectively invalidate the acts of a tyrant; it is all or nothing. So in order to gain access to Caesar’s wealth, the conspirators would have to give up their own positions of power into which Caesar had appointed them and subject themselves to the will of the people. As more contemporary history reminds us, highly placed conspirators and practitioners of skullduggery are loathe to risk their positions of privilege on anything as pedestrian as a fair election.

I digress. The contending parties agree to a status quo ante. Caesar’s will is valid. The Optimates and the Julians maintain their positions of privilege and all parties vie for position from which to best exact revenge upon the others. Here I had some concern. A major conflict was emerging between Antony and Octavian. As executor of Caesar’s estate, Antony was content to enrich himself and ignore young Octavian’s protestations for greater control over his money. However, it was difficult to take young Max Pirkis’ Octavian seriously. James Purefoy’s Antony had half a foot of height and a two to one weight advantage on the boy. One could hardly see them as adversaries. The one physical confrontation between the two actors was handled well but as Octavian retreated to regroup, I was convinced that the dramatic tension of this conflict was unsustainable.

Exit Max Pirkis and enter Simon Woods as Octavian. Some time has passed between episodes. The writers would have you think a year or two had passed. The physical difference between the two actors who play Octavian would suggest eight to ten years. It is a shock but it is good for the story. This Octavian is a suitable foil for Antony. Still cerebral to Antony’s primal, he is at least as cruel and even more shocking for the cold calculation of his violence.

Octavian and Antony fall in and out of conflict. Poor Marcus Lepidus, completely out of his depth as the third member of the ruling triumvirate, tries to find advantage between the squabbles of the primary antagonists. Meanwhile, Atia of the Julii and Servilia and the Junii escalate their first season feud. While women were not holders of office in the late Roman Republic, these women wielded great power over their families and by extension Rome. Cicero, wizened elder statesman, plays Octavian and Antony off one another and plays both of them off of Brutus in exile. Cicero ends up holding the short straw but his final scene is a treat. Both well written and beautifully filmed, it is a suitable tribute to one of Rome’s great orators and statesmen.

Octavian and Antony come to one final conflict and as astute readers of history, we know the outcome in advance. Octavian triumphant, remade as Augustus Caesar, leading Rome through the death throws of Republic and into Empire.

But I said this story was about Vorenus and Pullo and it is. These inseparables, these brothers, are indeed separated and more than once. Vorenus’ family, used as a lever to expose Caesar in season one, is broken. Broken by those nobles enumerated above and broken without regret. It is quite clear the ruling class is incapable of conceiving regret as a possible reaction to using ordinary people thus. And herein lies the seeds of Rome’s decline. Through Vorenus and Pullo we see the grand struggle writ small. These men are subject to the same weaknesses as their betters. Attacks of hubris, lust for power, moral compromises, conflict, and rapprochement all exert their toll. Unlike their noble counterparts, these men manage to retain an essential goodness or at least a hope for goodness that binds us to them and makes us care about what happens to them, By extension we care about what happens to Rome.

-Greg Careaga

This is a guilty pleasure movie. It is part cop-buddy comedy, part British garden party murder mystery, part quirky village ensemble comedy, and – in measured doses – part Tarantinoesque goreapolooza. It is, on the whole, an exquisite send-up of all these genres.

Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) plays our hero Nicholas Angel, wunderkind of the Metropolitan Police Service. As punishment for violating the Service’s culture of mediocrity, he is promoted to Sergeant and sent to Sandford. At first glance, one is hard pressed to think of a village that is less in need of a stalwart defender of Her Majesty’s peace than is Sandford. Still, Angel approaches his duty with trademark gusto and manages to get off on the wrong foot with the local pub owner even before his first day of work and herein we find our first comedic tension. Will Angel conform to Sandford or will Sandford conform to Angel?

I shall not further spoil the plot. Suffice it to say that as Angel digs beneath Sandford’s bucolic veneer, we the viewers are treated to a delightful assortment of eccentric personalities. Nick Frost (Pegg's Shaun of the Dead collaborator) displays a knack for physical comedy as Angel’s nebbish sidekick Danny. Jim Broadbent does a good turn as the ineffectual but apparently benign Inspector. Timothy Dalton offers up a delightfully hammy performance as prime suspect in a series of suspicious events. The rest of the cast performs admirably.

The early pace of the film is relaxed and comfortable. At about mid-point, things change. One might suspect that the projectionist replaced reels one and two of “A Fish Called Wanda” with reel three of “Halloween” and reel four of “Lethal Weapon.” Against odds, these transitions work well and the film ties up its disparate themes into a very satisfying whole. Just be sure to buckle yourself in for the ride. You’ll know when.

If gore, gristle, and bits of gray matter splattered across the camera lens are not your thing, you may wish to give Hot Fuzz a pass. If, however, you can appreciate the judicious application of exagerated violence used to great comic effect, then you may find much to relish here. Ah, the reporter… the masonry… sublime.

-Greg Careaga