Midterm elections are over and the Democratic Party has succeeded in regaining control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1994.  Now for the rest of us, the 300 million that were not elected, comes a period of anxious waiting.

With bated breath, media pundits, academicians, economists and Jon Stewart scan the horizon for signs of a shift in the political and social constitution of our nation.  Wall Street conservatives fret over fractionary dips in the Dow.  Progressive citizens thrill at Nancy Pelosi’s “New Direction for America.” And the more cynical of us - the ones that can only agree with The Onion’s November 8th headline “Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections” - are left to wonder what, if anything, will actually change on Capitol Hill in the next couple years.

However, no matter what position you occupy on the political spectrum from left to right to somewhere off the charts, now is the perfect time to revisit the words and actions our political forefathers: visionaries like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who helped to form the ideals and perspectives from which we have learned to view American politics.  In honor of midterm elections, check out our First Run Features newsletter which announces a 40 percent sale for all of our political documentaries.

The Western genre is like the hydra: the mythical beast from whose single body sprouts many different heads. From its shared John Fordian classical roots, the Western has continued to generate more variations than a Bach fugue, with each new subgenre a different take on the same basic themes, symbols and narratives of the most robust of all American genres.

And now to the growing list of Western subgenres, which includes the spaghetti Western, the Mid-Western, and Deadwood, we can now add the Eastern.

That’s right. DEFA, East Germany’s nationalized film studio, began to produce their own version of the American Western in 1965 complete with German cowboys and indians, the great open plains of Romania and Uzbekistan, and a subtle critique of Western capitalism. Clearly, these films are not your father’s episodes of Bonanza.

Gary Gidden’s write-up of our recently released DEFA Westerns box set - Westerns with a Twist - explores some of the history of this fascinating variation on the genre and includes brief reviews of the three films in the set. As he so aptly puts it, this box set, “fill[s] in a Western gap few of us knew existed.” This hydra has many heads indeed.

Father James Martin, Associate Editor for America: The National Catholic Weekly, chose two First Run Features releases - Merton and Roses In December - to be included in his list of the top ten films about holy men and women presented in his article “Saints on the Screen.”

Martin lavished generous praise on all the films for their capacity to convey the charisma and power of key influential figures in religious history. He even went so far as to write about Merton: “I’m too biased to be subjective about this short documentary about Thomas Merton…Almost twenty years ago, I happened to see this film on PBS; it started me on the road to priesthood.”

Martin’s candid explanations of the appeal of this handful of films expresses, in an off-hand and almost accidental way, the power of documentary to function as a gateway to aspects of life, history and society hitherto unknown to the viewer. Martin loves these films because of the ways in which they actively shaped his life and altered the ways he imagined himself and others.

Martin’s examination of these films also reminds us that Christianity need not remain linked to the conservative right in the contemporary political climate but that it can also be a powerful inspiration for progressive social causes, particularly those involving human rights. Roses In December, “illustrates the lasting value of liberation theology” by focusing on Jean Donovan’s battle for social justice in Nicaragua, while Merton demonstrates Thomas Merton’s unflagging effort to link his monastic pursuits with the conflicts of the social world including the Vietnam War, Civil Rights struggles, and communism.

Martin concludes his description of Merton by writing, “The best part of this film is that by the end you will want to read The Seven Storey Mountain - and who knows where that will lead you?” What more can we ask of film but that it presents us with new ideas to learn, new role models to follow, and new directions to be explored?

You can purchase Merton or Roses in December from our online store.

Finally John Turturro has landed the role for which he has been waiting for five years. In Peter Miller’s new documentary, Sacco and Vanzetti, soon to be released in theaters by First Run Features, Turturro performs the voice of Bartolomeo Vanzetti while Tony Shalhoub does the same for Nicola Sacco: the two Italian immigrant anarchists on whose lives Peter Miller’s new documentary is based.

Turturro’s name had been attached to a Sacco and Vanzetti-themed project in the past. In 2001, he signed on to play the role of the Pittsburgh attorney who repped the immigrants in a film that was developed but never made it to production. Turturro’s long-standing engagement with the subject matter suggests his awareness of the historical event’s continuing relevance to the United States and our country’s long, complicated relationship with the immigrant populations on which the it is founded.

Peter Miller’s documentary does a fine job of linking the historical moment with contemporary issues. The film’s polished facade conceals a fierce activism and a passionate intercession into current debates about immigration policy: debates that bear more than a passing resemblance to those that surrounded the Sacco and Vanzetti case nearly eighty years ago.

Watch the trailer for the film Sacco and Vanzetti and check the First Run Features website for upcoming screenings in a theater near you.

September 20th, 2006 saw Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez take to the podium in front of the U.N. General Assembly like a minister to the pulpit. He described with considerable theatrics the sulfuric smell left behind by ‘the devil himself:’ George W. Bush, but rather than brandishing the Bible while describing the unholy sins of a wayward country he instead held…a copy of Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival?

Chavez opened his address to the United Nations with these words about Chomsky’s book: “It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now…I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time I will just leave it as a recommendation.”

Chavez’s laudatory remarks about Chomsky coupled with the inordinate amount of media attention given to his speech resulted in a dramatic spike in sales for the book. Hegemony, despite its presence on bookshelves for the last three years, found its way onto the current best-seller list. The paperback version even hit number one on the Amazon.com shortly after the delivery of the speech.

While Chavez’s inflammatory comments regarding the President generated the most attention, particularly in the form of a highly vocal backlash from politicians and media pundits stateside - including leading Bush critic Nancy Pelosi who breathlessly denounced him as an ‘everyday thug’ - the whole fiasco has inadvertantly proven Chomsky’s continuing relevance to the field of contemporary politics. Chomsky’s clarity, insight and soft-spoken intelligence seem all the more remarkable surrounded by the sea of shameless name-calling and mud-slinging that characterizes the world of contemporary foreign policy.

Chomsky’s internal resolve is on display most vividly in our documentary Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, in which Chomsky goes on a book tour shortly after September 11th. It seem that the more urgent the political climate the more patient and reasoned Chomsky becomes, conquering prejudice and misunderstanding with skilled communication and quiet compassion.

Watch Hugo Chavez praise Chomsky here and buy the documentary Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times currently 40% off from our online store.