It's shaping up to be a big year for Helvetica. The world's most widely used sans-serif font turns 50 in 2007, and to celebrate, the Museum of Modern Art has launched a year-long tribute to the ubiquitous typeface, which was the first acquired by the Museum for its permanent collection.

Meanwhile, back in March at the SXSW FIlm Festival, I managed to squeeze into a packed screening of a documentary titled simply Helvetica. The directorial debut of Gary Hustwit (he previously produced the Wilco film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), the film is essentially an academic treatise on the cultural proliferation of the world's most pervasive font. The idea of watching 8-10 international design masters debate the socioeconomic symbolism of a typeface might sound like torture. It's not, thanks in part to Helvetica's uber-cool post-rock soundtrack (featuring contributions from The Album Leaf, Sam Prekop, and current Pitchfork darlings Battles). As a design layperson, I had a little trouble telling the various European typography rock stars apart, but for graphic design geeks (like my boyfriend, who sat next to me at the screening in rapt attention), Helvetica plays like extremely tasteful porn.

This past weekend, Slate.com devoted two full features to Helvetica-mania. While Mia Fineman's essay/slideshow comes off as a cheap ploy to rack up page views whilst promoting Hustwit's film, in the other feature famous writers revealed the font in which they most like to write. Their answers ranged from anecdotal (Palatino makes Caleb Crain think of Marlboros, which in turn makes him want to smoke) to semi-delusional (typing in Courier allows Jonathan Lethem to fantasize that he's banging away not at a PC, but at "an eternal Selectric of the mind"). Courier received four additional votes. Helvetica got zero love--in fact, Anne Fadiman even prefaced her endorsement of Times Roman by announcing that her "favorite fonts are unrepentantly anti-Helvetican."

All of this hoopla seems to center on a single question: why Helvetica--or why not? What makes this font different from all other fonts, and why does it arouse so much passion in both lovers and haters? In Hustwit's film, the same qualities named as virtues by Helvetica's supporters--its simplicity, utilitarianism and modernism--are cited as fatal flaws by the font's detractors. In the world defined by the documentary, how you feel about Helvetica determines what kind of person you are. Helvetica is a European invention that has attained a sheen of Americana through its omnipresence in our popular culture--like french fries, or even cinema. As with those staples of modern life, when it comes to Helvetica one man's elegance is another man's banality.

The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.

That film is Running With Arnold, directed by former entertainment reporter Dan Cox. The doc tracks Arnold Schwarzenegger's wild ride from Austrian yokel to world-class bodybuilder--and then from action superstar to titan of Sacramento. The film is comprised of old interviews with Arnold, new interviews with Arnold's detractors, clips from Arnold's movies, and footage shot during the whirlwind recall election that first put him in office. It's an extremely entertaining piece of propaganda, one which seems content to settle for knowing laughs from the choir in lieu of offering the kind of hard analysis that might actually convert skeptics.

Cox identifies Schwarzenegger's Achilles heel early on, with a clip from an ancient archival interview in which the young bodybuilder describes his unquenchable thirst for attention. As Cox tells it, a defining moment came while Schwarzenegger was serving in the Austrian military. He went AWOL in order to enter a bodybuilding competition, and when he returned to his unit, he was promptly thrown in jail. Not for the first time, the future Governator chose physical vanity and personal stardom over national duty. No doubt this is a dubious personality trait, and an embarrassing anecdote. But like most of the revelations in Running With Arnold, it's hardly the kind of thing that will make a dent in Schwarzenegger's career.

Rory Kennedy opens her latest documentary, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, with footage of the Milgram Experiment, a 1961 behavioral study designed to ask the question, "Could the entire Holocaust really have been the work soldiers following orders?" The results demonstrated that most people will step way beyond their personal moral boundaries if directed to do so by an authority figure. In the Milgram case, subjects thought they were inflicting near-fatal electroshock treatments on unseen prisoners (in reality, they were causing no harm). Conversely, Kennedy demonstrates that the American soldiers involved in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture incidents were made to think that they were doing nothing wrong. When images of the extreme interrogation techniques leaked and the government needed a scapegoat, many of those same soldiers were then sent to prison for following orders.

Netscape sat down with Kennedy last month at the Sundance Film Festival. It was the morning after President Bush's State of the Union speech, and the director, a member of America's most famous left-leaning political family, discussed not only her film but the War on Terror, military history, governmental transparency, and why she thinks the majority of Americans "are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore." Ghosts of Abu Ghraib premieres Thursday, February 22 on HBO.


The film uses the Milgram Experiment as a structuring metaphor. Did you begin the project with that in mind?

I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of ordinary people who commit extraordinary acts of evil. We were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then, like so many other people, I was horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib, and continued to be haunted by them years after. I found myself asking: Who were these people and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths? What was their childhood like? And so I then went back to HBO, where I had been developing the film on genocide, and I said, "How would you feel if we were to change direction and look at Abu Ghraib as our example?'" They were excited about that, and I was then able to get access to a number of the soldiers involved in the abuse--and ultimately to the detainees.

When I talked to these people and asked the question, "Why did you do this?'", they all said the same thing: "I did it because I was told to do it." So Ghosts of Abu Ghraib became much more of an investigative film, and less of a psychological film.

Early on in Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, Donald Rumsfeld announces that the U.S. Army is about to engage in "the first war of the 21st century." There's an unmistakable note of pride in this statement, which dates from the eve of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. And that archival clip is a fitting place for Ferguson to begin his argument, which takes the former Defense Secretary to task for his arrogance, stubbornness, and general refusal to admit mistakes.

Ferguson built the film, his first (the Brookings Institute fellow received guidance from co-producer Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame) out of 200+ hours of interviews with diplomats, scholars, former Bush administration officials and U.S. soldiers. The filmmaking team also ventured into war-torn central Baghdad, at great personal risk--this is the first film I've seen in which members of a security detail are given on-screen credits in advance of the editor and cinematographer. Ferguson's goal: to meticulously examine the first year of the conflict, pinpointing the key mistakes that continue to hamper the war effort today. The resulting film, though clinical in its treatment of the facts, paints a damning portrait of the Bush Administration's insistence on staying the course. Netscape News sat down with Ferguson and Gibney at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where No End in Sight premiered to standing ovations and was ultimately awarded a Special Prize by the Festival's Documentary Jury.

Netscape: I personally have a knee-jerk reaction against charges that key members of the Bush Administration are "stupid" or "evil." What's a more reasonable way of explaining why these guys made so many bad decisions?

Charles Ferguson: I think it's much more about blindness, and perhaps also arrogance. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent, accomplished people. But they seem to have been very narrow-minded, unwilling to listen, and also, in a number of cases, dangerously arrogant.

Alex Gibney: I also think this administration has had an obsession with executive power. I mean that in both the literal sense--in terms of the chief executive, the President--but also in terms of other executives, such as Jerry Bremer, in whom they invested a tremendous amount of power. This is something that goes back into deep history. Ever since Nixon's resignation, I think both Rumsfeld and Cheney have been obsessed with that idea. And that's fed into this larger sense of arrogance, of a kind of willful blindness, because they're determined to retain the prerogatives of the executive, the ability to do what they want to do, no matter what anybody else says.

There are a number of title cards in the film, referencing Bush administration officials who wouldn't speak to you on camera. What do you think is behind that shared reticence, given that Rumsfeld, Bush, etc, seem so confident in their deeds and ideas when they speak to the press?

Ferguson: Well, they're confident when they speak to the press. They're not, in general, nearly as enthusiastic or confident about accepting critical questions from the press when they can't be controlled. And that, unfortunately, has been the experience of not just myself in making this film, but of many journalists who have tried to explore what happened.

An estimated 30,000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison by Saddam Hussein, their bodies buried in shallow mass graves, and in most cases, all record of their existence erased. Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam granted amnesty to all living persons incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. He then used the vacated prison cells to incinerate reams of documents recording the misdeeds that had taken place at the prison.

in Rory Kennedy's documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, both baby-faced grunts and seasoned intelligence professionals describe feeling "haunted" on the grounds of the prison. There were wild dogs digging up corpses, DayGlo portraits of Saddam still adorning the walls, and the pervasive funk of sweat and human feces exacerbated by the 130-degree heat. It was, in short, a climate that sapped soldiers of the ability to exercise rational morality. It's Kennedy's thesis that this climate turned soldiers into the perfect vessels for a defense policy that was willfully defiant of the Geneva Conventions, thus making the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal possible.

Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival on the morning after Bush's State of the Union address, Kennedy (the daughter of RFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy) says she came to the project almost by accident. "I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of people who commit extraordinary acts of evil, and we were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then I, like so many other people, was really horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib. I saw them and found myself asking very similar questions: Who were these people, and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths?" When the director asked the soldiers themselves why they had participated in the abuse, they all gave her the same answer: "I did it because I was told to do it.'"

Early one morning in 2005, a dying man was unceremoniously dropped off at a hospital in Enumclaw, WA, a small town 45 miles outside of Seattle. Hours later, the man, who was carrying no identification, died from internal bleeding caused by a perforated colon. Security camera footage of the car that dropped the man at the hospital led authorities to a horse farm. There they found "buckets full" of video tapes documenting men having sex with horses. The farm was apparently a meeting spot for an online community of zoophiles (they call themselves "zoos"), who would gather to drink daiquiris, watch science fiction films, and engage in sexual intercourse with Arabian stallions. The regular visitors to the farm knew one another by their online screen names. The dead man's name was Mr. Hands.

The incident became a major media event in the Pacific Northwest, and videos confiscated from the farm eventually made their way online. Since there is no law against bestiality in Washington, none of the men who operated and frequented the ranch were charged with a crime. They did, however, come in for their share of public humiliation. Now those men are telling their side of the story, in Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor's Sundance Documentary Competition entry, Zoo.

Devor incorporates audio interviews with regular visitors to the ranch, as well as reenactments of (non-sexual) events, many featuring the actual participants. "We had no interest in regurgitating what was already out there," Devor told Netscape News, referring to the tabloid TV and Internet exposure. "It was difficult. Just getting [the participants] to talk openly was a challenge because we were 'The Media'. And 'The Media' was bad for a lot of people involved. Some of them would have preferred to have seen a hard-line, 60 Minutes sort of documentary expose. But that's not what we do as filmmakers."

It's rare for a film festival to spotlight major political figures. But earlier today, former Bush Administration officials appeared on a panel alongside filmmakers Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney to discuss their Sundance Documentary Competition entry, No End in Sight. First-time director Ferguson described the picture, which premiered here in Park City on Monday to standing ovations from both festival attendees and press, as pointedly non-partisan. Instead he aimed at creating a cohesive historical record of the mistakes made in the first year after the Iraq invasion. "I don't want it to be seen as having an ideological bent," Ferguson explained. He added: "I wanted it to be a simple accounting of what occurred. Because what happened was so stunning.... I thought that we would all be best served by showing what happened."

The panel, moderated by journalist David D'Arcy, brought together five interview subjects from No End, including U.S. Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton; former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was kidnapped in Kuwait during the first Iraq war and was placed in charge of a Baghdad for a short time after the 2003 invasion; and Omar Fekeiki, the former office manager of the Washington Post Baghdad bureau. Two former Administration officials participated via satellite: Lawrence Wilkerson (who was Colin Powell's chief of staff) and Jay Garner (who was head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq).

D'Arcy led the panel through a discussion of some of the major points made by the film, including the Administration's refusal to stop the looting that erupted immediately after the fall of Baghdad. "I was in the push to Baghdad," recalled Lieutenant Moulton. "There's this mistaken perception that the Marines in Baghdad couldn't have done something to stop the looting. In truth, we were told not to. We certainly had enough troops to stop the looting right there in Baghdad."

"While the American officials in Baghdad were trying to figure out what to do," said Fekeiki, "we were deceived by what they were telling the press, that everything was planned perfectly. People were building their hopes high, because they all thought we would be liberated, and that we would start rebuilding the country in six to eight months."