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“... In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK. It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard ...”

“... Should​ the street be considered one of the fine arts?’ Fernand Léger asked in 1928. He was thinking of the objects displayed in Parisian shop windows. Others have been more impressed by junk, debris and things abandoned. The street as both source and inspiration is everywhere apparent in the exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery (until 1 April), Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-65, in particular the grungy byways of a Lower Manhattan not yet gentrified as SoHo or rebranded as the East Village ...”

“... For two years, beginning in January 1964 and ending in late 1966, hundreds of individuals trooped through Andy Warhol’s midtown Manhattan studio (the vast, silver-painted loft known as the Factory), there to sit before a 16mm Bolex camera and have their portraits made on film. The portraits, each of which used a single 100-foot roll of film, required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch ...”

“... The Birth of a Nation may not be the greatest movie ever made (whatever that might mean), but it is the one that has had the greatest impact on America and, indirectly, the world. Never was a movie more aptly named; and rarely have quotations marks been more superfluous than in the subtitle of Melvyn Stokes’s informative book. What did Griffith bring into the world? Imagine an unholy combination of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie as violent and sentimental as Saving Private Ryan and as tricksy as Forrest Gump, landing with the force of Titanic in the nickelodeon universe of 1915, where the typical attraction was 20 minutes long ...”

“... in the extreme, exceeding those of the posthumously celebrated ‘bad’ film-maker Ed Wood Jr. Twenty years ago, I concluded an essay entitled ‘Bad Movies’ with the thought that if Micheaux’s astonishing mistakes were deliberate aesthetic strategy, then he was surely the greatest genius cinema ever produced. Now it seems as though his intentions ...”

“... In 1931, a Nazi journal called the Dictatorship complained about the amazing popularity of Mickey Mouse: ‘Have we nothing better to do than decorate our garments with dirty animals because American commerce Jews want profit?’ That same year in Berlin, Esther Leslie reports, Walter Benjamin was also thinking about Mickey mania. After talking to some friends, including Kurt Weill, Benjamin made a few notes in praise of this insolent, lowlife, magically animated creature ...”

“... The Russians have everything in name, and nothing in reality,’ the Marquis de Custine observed in 1839, comparing the empire to a blank book with a magnificent table of contents. ‘How many distant regiments are there without men, and cities and roads which exist only in idea!’ The entire country was but a façade pasted on Europe – or, as might have been said of the Soviet period, an ideological simulation of reality ...”

“... Like Dead Elvis and Dead Marilyn, Dead Orson is very much with us. He lives on, not only in the restored ‘director’s cuts’ of his re-released movies, the posthumously completed projects and newly adapted screenplays of never-made films, but as a character in other people’s novels, plays and movies. He haunts the murderous teenagers of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder ...”

“... were the female gunslingers who populated the 1994 releases, Bad Girls, The Ballad of Little Jo, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Outlaws and The Quick and the Dead. Unforgiven, which – as Mitchell points out – culminates in a masculine resurrection that makes sure we get what we’ve paid for, both looks and feels like a Western. What it lacks is any ...”

“... To be anti-Hollywood was, in a sense, to be anti-semitic.’ So said Budd Schulberg, the son of a pioneer film producer, a successful screenwriter and author of the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (a book that was itself accused of a self-directed anti-semitism). To be anti-Hollywood has also, at various times, been a way to enlist the rhetoric of anti-semitism to express sentiments that are anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-New Deal, anti-internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or anti-American ...”

“... Futurism,​ the first organised avant-garde art movement of the 20th century, appeared in Italy in the years before the First World War. Fascism, the original self-identified totalitarian political ideology, no less brashly expressive of modern times, emerged in Italy in the years immediately following the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last days of the Second World War, was in some sense a negation of both Fascism and Futurism ...”

“... The Ephemera of 20th-century popular music have never been more monumental. CDs transform collectors into completists and completists into archivists. Why be content with the Beach Boys’ greatest hits when you can invest in a boxed set, complete with alternate takes, unreleased masters, demo tapes, and radio air checks? Long defunct record labels are catalogued and repackaged as the CD ‘revolution’ churns up all manner of forgotten material ...”

“... It’s easy not to be a Nazi when no Hitler is around,’ Hans-Jürgen Syberberg commented in his filmed interview with the aged, unashamed Führer-familiar Winifred Wagner in 1975. Eighty years after Hitler came to power in Germany, is it possible to imagine the world when the Third Reich was new? Before September 1939 and even after the Second World War began, the West was full of enablers and apologists ...”

“... like’), but a movie in which Nixon can be extracted from both the powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker and the eager publicist Sidney Falco. More productive is the notion of Nixon as an avid, solitary consumer of movies. Feeney devotes a chapter to the most famous of Nixon’s celluloid obsessions, the biopic Patton, which he screened at least three ...”

“... At the time of his death at the age of 97 in 1985, Marc Chagall was, if not the world’s best-known living artist (as much trademark as painter), certainly its best loved. The School of Paris’s last surviving master was dismissed by some as a purveyor of high-class kitsch and hailed by others as one of the 20th century’s truly popular artists, but no one denied Chagall’s power as a colourist or the distinctiveness of his iconography: the embracing lovers, joyful barnyard creatures, tumbledown villages and Jewish musicians, among other free-floating symbols ...”