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Posted on 10/06/2025 2:15:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
His novel “1984” captured the tactics of totalitarianism back in 1949. A startling new documentary from Raoul Peck looks at Orwell’s life.
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, a year after the end of the World War II. That line appears early in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” an essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.
Peck plucked that observation about art and politics from Orwell’s essential 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he lists “four great motives for writing” — especially for writing prose and, of course, aside from earning a living — including “political purpose.” Near the end of the essay, Orwell writes that he hopes to start a new book. What soon followed was “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the seismic novel that helped turn his name into an adjective. Anchored by Orwell’s writing — and Damian Lewis’s calm, intimate voice-over — Peck charts the writer’s life in tandem with world-shattering events, focusing on when he was working on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published in 1949. Months later, Orwell was dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Bkmk
Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” is quite interesting when you realize that Orwell comes to state plainly that he was a socialist his entire life, including during the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty Four.
That makes Nineteen Eighty Four distinctly a socialist book.
Erik Blaire was the real name of George Orwell.
Eric Blair.
NYT knows all about Orwellian language
Oh, look! Promotional marketing dressed up NY Times' stuff.
War rationing didn't end in the UK until 1954... And during and after the war Orwell was essentially living in a totalitarian state. The state controlled everything during the war, and the Labour party who were part of a coalition government with the Conservatives during the war, took over the government completely in 1945.
Orwell lived in turbulent times and those times were full of government controlling the lives of individuals and using wartime propaganda to justify their measures... Just like governments used Covid to control our lives during that nonsense.
Wrong. 2 + 2 equals what the party says it is.
Gotta read this!
Good post!
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