A filmmaker's shelf holds four books on one of the least documented chapters of twentieth-century American history: the African Americans — writers, engineers, artists, intellectuals — who traveled to or settled in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, in search of a society that promised what America denied them. Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Robert Robinson. Before these books go into storage, they deserve a post.

On the Lawn at the University of Virginia, the architecture is Jefferson's and the accessories are Stanley's. Every crossing figure carries a forty-ounce stainless-steel tumbler as if crossing an interior desert. The question that interests me is not whether this is absurd — that much is obvious — but how carrying water became central to the American identity. The origin is a single sentence, misread for eighty years. A 1945 nutritional recommendation, stripped of its qualify

A filmmaker's response to Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace — the Soviet epic restored by Criterion and available now in its full four-part, seven-hour form. On spectacle, chaos, Pierre Bezukhov, and why nothing in the history of cinema quite compares.