BARBARA KINGSOLVER, novelist and author of The Poisonwood Bible.

LONE STAR
Directed by John Sayles. 1995.

Choosing just one filmmaker is easy: John Sayles. No matter whether his vehicle is a story that's hilarious, as in The Brother From Another Planet; historical, as in Matewan and Eight Men Out; tender or fierce or both, as in Passion Fish and Men With Guns--his films reliably offer a scorching assessment of who we are and what we believe in. I think it's fairly miraculous that he's spent decades now working successfully outside the ideological quagmire of Hollywood, keeping his honest edge. His course, as far as I can see, is to pull apart our most cherished myths and icons and see what they're really made of.

Choosing just one of his films is much harder, but since I have to, I'll say Lone Star. A mystery set in a Texas border town, it opens right into the heart of what it means to be an American. Race, gender, culture, all of it. Our most fundamental national experience is to raise a ruckus over the lines dividing us, while knowing in our hearts that those lines of racial and cultural purity are probably false--that we're all, at this point, related by a blended inheritance and obliged to find a way of carrying on together.

EDWARD W. SAID, literary critic and author of Orientalism and the forthcoming Out of Place: A Memoir.

FIVE EASY PIECES
Directed by Bob Rafelson. 1970.

It's always struck me as a special kind of American film for a number of reasons. There's the extraordinary loneliness of the son, played by Jack Nicholson: We see his bleak relationship with his father, who is totally silent, and with Karen Black, the woman he lives with.

The setting--to someone who didn't grow up in America--is very telling: the Texas oilfields. Humanly, they're very unappealing. But at the same time they're essential: This is the wealth of the nation. Then there's the island in the Northwest where his family lives: It's beautiful but desolate, which matches the desolation of the family. And this island had probably been populated by Indians--all of whom are now gone.

The Nicholson character is kind of a lost soul who is symbolized for me by two powerful scenes. In the beginning, he's sitting on the back of a truck--playing Bach on the piano--as it drives on the highway. And at the end, he and Karen Black are at a gas station; there's a truck parked, whose driver is getting gas. Nicholson gets into that truck, drives off and leaves her.

So there's this destructive dislocation, the rootlessness, the purposelessness: Here are all these itinerant Americans, and we don't know what they're doing or where they're going. But there's also this tremendous power. The truck is a huge eighteen-wheeler, and Nicholson himself is very compelling--gifted, funny, smart, handsome.

At the core of the film is a terrifying emptiness. I think it's a work of genius.

MIKE DAVIS, urban theorist and author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear.

KILLER OF SHEEP
Directed by Charles Burnett. 1977.

We're in a period when millions of Americans are losing their jobs, and whole industrial working-class communities are being torn inside out, and there's no reflection of that experience in popular culture or film. It's as if the Okies were being wrenched from the land but there were no Grapes of Wrath.

The film is about a blue-collar black family in South Central Los Angeles. The husband, Stan (Henry Sanders), works at a slaughterhouse; his wife is a maid. It's about the impact of the loss of his job on his family, on their relationship, on him. It begins with these terrible, repellent images of sheep being slaughtered. But by the end you realize these images represent his dignity: his job, his work, his life.

Killer of Sheep contains one of the most subtly powerful scenes that I can recall in all of American cinema. Stan gets up in the morning, runs into the bathroom, begins to shave and all of a sudden realizes: I don't have a job, I don't have to go to work today. You see his big, powerful hands fall down from the tap. Then his teenage daughter comes in, immediately turns around and comes back with a wrench to open up the faucets because he's turned the taps so tight. And you realize this happens every morning. Then it cuts to his wife on her long, tedious bus ride home, and her hands are lying loosely on the bar in front of her. And suddenly you see her eyes cloud over, and you know she must be thinking of that angry, defeated man back in the house. Then you see her hands tighten on the bar.

There are no spiked-up dramas, no gang shootings, none of the images of South Central LA that we usually see in the cinema. The film is just about how hard ordinary people have to try, and about how absolutely momentous the loss of a job, the closure of a plant, is. Every time I see this film, it just poleaxes me.

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