`Arguing the World' Shows Intellectual Side of Activism

Joseph Dorman is the director of Arguing the World, a documentary tracing the lives of four of the New York Intellectuals: Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. The film begins with Marxism in the '30s and closes with Neo-Conservatism in the present day. The Crimson spoke to Dorman after the premiere screening of his film at Brookline's Coolidge Corner Theatre:

The Harvard Crimson: Is Arguing the World your first theatrical release?

Joseph Dorman: Yeah, I've done public affairs, and I worked at public television in New York for a few years doing some documentaries and doing histories of developing countries for a number of years.

THC: I'm curious about how you work on a documentary like this. Did you do a lot of research before contacting the men?

JD: I was reading and reading and reading and reading, and you get to the point where everything you know comes from what you read about them you get to the point when, kind of like when you're writing a paper, all of a sudden you realize you're in home territory and you absorb the history in a whole new way that makes it your own.

THC: Why was documentary a better medium than writing a book?

JD: There's that intense research phase where you're just sort of devouring and devouring. The research is always done with the sense that you will hopefully one day be able to make a film. But you know people say you can't do thoughts on film, but I think you can. A book can capture a lot of things that a film can't, but what a film can capture is the men themselves and their personalities and how their personalities interact with their ideas. That's why this is great for film--they're amazing talkers and they express themselves, and they're thinking through things even as they're talking.

THC: Do you have an opinion on the effectiveness of intellectuals versus more radical activists?

JD: I'm someone who obviously believes that intellectual activity can in fact change things. One definite way to chart this is something like the Public Interest, [a magazine] where Kristol and Bell critique the Great Society and '60s liberalism, and it was enormously influential in creating some of the policy that ultimately took place in Washington. Through their efforts, people started to look at social problems, which sort of trickles up to the people who are the policy elites, and what happened with the Republican revolution on the right and the New Democrats with Bill Clinton on the left can be directly traced in one way or another to what was going on in the Public Interest.

THC: Did you ever feel overextended by having to work with all four men? Was there any portion of the story you would might want to make a whole additional movie about?

JD: When you go through this, you fall in love with different events at different times. When we were cutting the film, we were constantly moving back and forth working on each section, and with any section you think it's the most interesting section. It's like having kids, where you're constantly fascinated by something new. But I always felt, really, that what would give the film a power was the sweep of dealing with 60 years of history.

THC: Was it hard not to develop favorites as you worked on the film?

JD: It wasn't. I think at any one moment as an argument goes on you're saying, "Oh God, that's a great point that he makes!" and then that "that's a great point that he makes!," and at any one moment you're seeing things differently.

THC: Did you find it difficult to identify with Kristol [the Neo-Conservative]?

JD: Kristol makes the point that a lot of liberals still hold onto Great Society ideas about social change, that if we just add this program or that program things are going to get better. That view of Kristol's forced me to rethink my own liberalism. That's what I think a person of the left gains from reading a conservative carefully; I mean if you read Robert Nozick, a Harvard professor, I think he's a Libertarian or at least a man of the right--to read someone like that or to talk to [William F.] Buckley is to learn that there are aspects of the conservative message that are interesting, moral decay and so forth, although I don't necessarily agree with where they pinpoint it.

THC: How did you feel making a movie about men who themselves, some would argue, are not connected to what's really going on in the world.

JD: I feel like what distinguished the group was an interest in the real world. As intellectuals, what really distinguishes them is that they really wanted to do things relevant to real world situations--they weren't arguing fine points of arcana. My feeling is that intellectual argument is an inherently interesting thing, not only an important thing; there's drama there. People in New York have said to me that we were selling out crowds around the block, and people were surprised. People said this is a political film, that political films do not draw well. Now we'll see what happens in Boston.

Someone overheard someone in the crowd saying "I think maybe content is making a comeback," and that's something I really liked a lot. It's because there are so few people thoughtfully addressing an issue, and these four men are not pundits--they're men who think in long paragraphs and very long and complicated ways, and my experience in New York was that a lot of people were hungry for that.

THC: Were you yourself surprised that there was such a response?

JD: Two things [that] you always think: you always think when you're making it that if you make it right, people will come; and I think that you've got to go into something like this with that inner confidence that people are going to come. On the other hand, I really was surprised, and it was enormously gratifying to the filmmaker to think that you had something that you wanted to see on film, and to think that's why you do it, because it's dear to your own hearts.

THC: It's also exciting to imagine what people might think about it a hundred years from now.

D: Yeah, it's exciting to think that it's going to be preserved.