DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
10.09.–12.10.2014

The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument

The New York Review of Books, founded in 1964 by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, has strong claims to being the major intellectual journal in the English­-speaking world. For fifty years it has commented in its own unique way on the important issues of the day: feminism, counterculture, the fall of communism, climate change, the “war on terror”, the collapse of the banking system, and so on; all of these have been covered in depth by the very best writers in the field. The magazine’s stance effortlessly straddles the gap between journalism and academia. Barbara Epstein died in 2006, and for some years the whole burden of the editing the paper has fallen on the shoulders of Bob Silvers, a spry 84-year-old. Evidently, he enjoys his work, keeping a trained eye on everything from commissioning all the articles and book reviews to reading the finished proofs. (The journal is famous for never having misprints.) Silvers' taste and sensibility is indelibly stamped on the enterprise, and yet, in the tradition of all the finest editors, he knows that the way to get the best out of his contributors is treat them with respect, and grant them their necessary artistic freedom. Movie­maker Martin Scorsese is a long­time admirer of the magazine, and has even written for it. For the purposes of this documentary he visited the NYRB offices together with his co-­director David Tedeschi and interviewed an assortment of the journal’s major writers. All of them wax eloquent about the pleasures and privileges of writing for Silvers. The archives have also been raided to good effect in order to uncover fascinating footage of past controversies of the day. Here for example are Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal battling it out over feminism; or Vaclav Havel eloquently defending freedom of speech in Eastern Europe at the time when it was still dangerous to do so. It is marvellous to have a record of this distinguished institution, and doubly marvellous that it has been done by Scorsese, who brings to the occasion his customary shooting skills, consisting of panache, good humour and enthusiasm.