Titus Techera

Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation.

Posts by Titus Techera

Thinking and Drinking with Plato

My favorite back-to-school reading this year has been Alex Priou’s Musings on Plato’s Symposium. I hurry to add that I’ve long been out of school, but I did pick up the habit of reading there, and what’s more American than lifelong learning? Continue Reading...

Going My Way: An Enduring True Fairy Tale

Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and cheer up the nation, indeed remind people of the spirit of Christmas and thus try to fit Christianity into the new entertainment that dominated the American imagination. Continue Reading...

Golda: The Right Leader at the Right Time

On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,500 people and taking hostages, committing, filming, and publicizing on social media acts of terror that the citizens of democracies are simply unprepared to watch or understand. Continue Reading...

Tom Wolfe and the Strangeness of America

Conservatism doesn’t really produce or nurture writers nowadays. The notable exception in the past couple of generations is Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018. Wolfe was universally beloved. He sold millions of copies of his various writings. Continue Reading...

The Firemen’s Ball: When Comedy Made Ideology Cringe

Miloš Forman was an incredibly famous director in the 1980s, when his Amadeus (1984) won eight Oscars out of 11 nominations, and Ragtime (1981) also received eight nominations, period pieces about music’s potential for social transformation, overcoming prejudices or conventions, and making a new world. Continue Reading...

Oppenheimer and the Last Great America

The last major director we have is Christopher Nolan. As you watch his movies, you think about what it means for there to be masters of the art: people who seem to know the tools of the art so well that they are in complete control of what they’re doing, yet when you see their work, you can hardly tell how they did it. Continue Reading...