Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation.
Posts by Titus Techera
November 23, 2022
Barry Levinson was one of the most successful directors in America around 1990, when he made
Avalon, an immigrant Thanksgiving movie trying to sum up the transformation of the American family in the 20th century.
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November 17, 2022
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece for Acton on Elizabeth Holmes, the con artist behind Theranos, the fake tech startup promising a revolution in blood tests and, thus, the beginning of a solution to the problem of healthcare costs.
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November 08, 2022
I recently wrote about what has come of Disney, whose new
Pinocchio seems to be all about getting rid of morality as we have understood it. Instead of learning that actions have consequences and how to behave with a view to growing up, children are supposed to be flattered until they get into trouble, and then further flattered by being told that the rest of the world is causing their problems.
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October 31, 2022
Halloween has somehow become a celebration of America becoming American, a New World unlike the Old World, a place where horror is a literary or cinematic genre rather than a memory—the dimly recollected past stretching back millennia through seemingly endless suffering, man’s inhumanity to man, older than civilization.
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October 20, 2022
If there’s anything close to national mythology in America nowadays, it’s Marvel. This may be depressing, but we should nevertheless face the fact and make the best of it. Before that, it was
Star Wars, which is still an incredibly profitable business, even as it is failing.
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October 11, 2022
American parents used to trust Disney to charm their kids with beautiful fairy tales. Most such tales were European in origin, but Disney Americanized them, made them more democratic, less bloody minded, and ultimately hopeful.
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September 28, 2022
Jean-Luc Godard died on September 13, 2022, and the news in the world of cinema and culture was received as confirmation that cinema itself was dead. Godard had a remarkable influence on cinema in the ’60s, but his fame went beyond that.
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September 13, 2022
When Bill Rivers put a copy of his debut novel,
Last Summer Boys, in my hand earlier this summer, he didn’t tell me it came with blurbs from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, for whom he had been a speechwriter, and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.
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August 24, 2022
This year, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the major film attraction in Eastern Europe, there was a memento of the Prague Spring: a newly restored version of the 1969 movie
The Joke, directed by Jaromil Jireš and adapted by him and Milan Kundera from the latter’s eponymous debut novel.
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July 26, 2022
The best comedian America has produced in the post–Cold War era is Dave Chappelle, and if you listen to his new Netflix show,
What’s in a Name: Speech at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, he’ll tell you that himself.
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