Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)

The temptation for many filmmakers is to console too soon, or to console in the wrong ways; to encounter those who give us some fresh and necessarily unpretty version of “how it is” can be a tremendous relief.

I dropped that apple, and, lo, it was putrid and full of worms. Then he spoke the truth: we didn’t have death. We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal hea

Yet one of art’s most compelling features is how it showcases the disjuncts between the time of composition, the time of dissemination, and the time of consideration—disjuncts that can summon us to humility and wonder. Such temporal amplitude understandably falls out of favor in politically polarized times, in which the pressure to make clear “whic