BETHEL PARK, Pa., Feb. 22 — For 20 years, it has appeared every month: one Campbell’s tomato soup can and a pocketful of change left on the plain black granite tombstone.

Claire Gibson, who has tended Andy Warhol’s grave since he died 20 years ago Thursday, said she has never figured out who is leaving the items at this Byzantine-Catholic cemetery alongside Route 88 just outside Pittsburgh. “I have my theories,” she said, “but we don’t know.”

The silk-screens, Brillo pads and boxes of crayons are occasional homage. The can and coins, however, are as consistent as the sun, Mrs. Gibson said.

A colorful man buried in this bland place, “Andy,” as people here call their native son, as opposed to the “Warhol” favored by New Yorkers, founded a genre of art that reveled in the temporary and the superficial. But the loyalty of local admiration could hardly be more enduring.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, a new documentary by Rory Kennedy, is raising hell in the nation's capital. Sparks flew at a February 12 screening of the film for Beltway bigwigs--among them Rory's uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham--when Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski--who was demoted for her role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison--said during a panel discussion that she had been "scapegoated." Karpinski then called Graham "a coward" to his face, "as cowardly as Rumsfeld, as [Lieut. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez and [Maj. Gen. Geoffrey] Miller." Her comment came in response to Graham's assertion that Karpinksi should have been court-martialed, not demoted.

The confrontation will come as no surprise to anyone who sees Ghosts when it premieres on HBO February 22. Shot between February and December 2006, the film, in which Karpinski plays a leading role, documents the now-infamous torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and raises pointed questions about who was ultimately responsible for the abuse. Through extensive interviews with nine military police and military intelligence corpsmen and five Iraqi prisoners involved in the torture, Kennedy asks: Was this a case of grunts gone wild, an "animal house on the night shift," as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger claimed? Or was it something more systemic, spurred on by post-September 11 Bush Administration policy?

I recently spent more than an hour with Kennedy in the back seat of a taxi-- caught in rush-hour Manhattan traffic--talking about her film, the soul of America and the ghosts of US foreign policy.

What was a typical day at Abu Ghraib for the Iraqi detainees you interviewed?

Well, one of the things that struck me was that this type of abuse was an everyday thing, it was occurring day in and day out. Sleep deprivation, stress positions--they were constant. Any notion that this was just "happening on the night shift," or that it was a case of a few bad apples, was immediately dispelled by the Iraqis themselves, as well as the overwhelming amount of evidence that suggested that wasn't the case.

The use of family members was also horrific--the guards would make constant threats that they would bring the detainees' children in and sexually and physically abuse them. In one case, a man was made to watch his brother being physically abused. There was also some suggestion by some of the Iraqis that they experienced sexual abuse.

Then there was what we saw in the photographs, being put in stress positions for hours and hours, with your arms handcuffed behind your back, tied up high, with underwear over your head, women watching the men take showers, laughing at them. Encouragement to sexually humiliate the prisoners was pervasive. The humiliation factor was horrendous and disturbing.

Was the abuse at Abu Ghraib worse than you'd expected?

I found that, particularly when I was interviewing the detainees, the photographs were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the extent of the abuse at Abu Ghraib that occurred in the fall of 2003. We talked to one man, one of the Iraqi detainees we interviewed, who told us a story of how his father was tortured over and over again. Later, this man became sick, and the son said he begged the Americans for medical attention. His father was getting sicker and sicker, he couldn't walk, he was feverish and getting worse. [The son] was really desperate to get help for his father. The American response was to threaten the son, and they ultimately pointed a gun at him and said, "If you ask us again we're going to kill you." And shortly after, his father died in his arms.

There are also a number of cases of people who were tortured to death by the interrogators. I think that what we saw in the photographs involves the military police who were preparing the detainees for interrogation by "softening" them up. We don't know exactly what happened in the actual interrogation rooms, but in talking to interrogators, the level of the abuse and the torture that occurred in those rooms was almost certainly much more extreme.

Unfortunately, it seems, from as much information as we can gather at this point, those types of abuses continue to occur today.

Do you think there were any heroes in this story?

There are some heroes in this story, people like [MPs and MIs] Israel Rivera, Ken Davis and Joseph Darby who stood up and said, "We're not going to take this, this is wrong," and saw it for what it was, and went against the grain. But unfortunately, people like Joseph Darby, as a result of being whistleblowers, have been isolated, and many people now are not considering them heroes.

And of course I have so much respect for the Iraqi detainees who were involved. They had fears about filming in Iraq, so we originally tried to fly them to Jordan, but when they got to the airport they were on a no-fly list and were not allowed to board. So then we got them visas and tickets to Turkey, but when they arrived they were immediately detained. By some miracle, we got them out of detention and filmed the interviews in a hotel in Istanbul.

The dignity with which they presented themselves and their stories, despite the horrific humiliation they suffered, really humbled me. The fact that they were willing even to speak to me, let alone so honestly and in such great detail, an American, given all that America has done to them, was really powerful.

Why were they afraid of being filmed in Iraq?

They were afraid of Americans, of an American retaliation.

Eleven low-ranking soldiers have been court-martialed and sentenced for their roles in the abuse--has justice been done?

To me, given all the evidence, what happened at Abu Ghraib is absolutely indicative of a systemic policy that has been put into place and authorized by people very high up the chain of command.

And not only was the kind of abuse we saw at Abu Ghraib clearly standard operating procedure--we have a huge amount of evidence that this was standard throughout many prisons, in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo. When you have it coincidentally happening in all these prisons at the same time it indicates that you don't have a bunch of rogue soldiers bizarrely operating in the same way, making prisoners be naked, depriving them of sleep, putting them in stress positions, [but rather] operating according to procedures that have actually been authorized and that we have memos documenting.

When I was doing the interviews with the Iraqis, I remember thinking, I cannot believe that America did this to these guys, how could we have gotten to this point in our country that we would allow this to happen? I've done a number of projects that deal with human rights abuses that have taken place in the worst dictatorships you can imagine, and what I heard from these Iraqis was on par or even worse than any of that.

And the people who created these policies have almost all gotten off scot-free or been promoted.

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Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

IT is a television moment almost no one has seen in more than half a century: On the evening of June 30, 1955, an eager 29-year-old comedian emerged from behind a curtain and onto a CBS stage in Hollywood, propelled by coincidence and good timing into the starring role of his first prime-time series. Just before he stepped forward to meet his audience — each strand of his close-cropped haircut perfectly in place, his handkerchief neatly folded into his left breast pocket, his frame so thin that a round of applause could bowl him over — the untested host paused visibly, uncertain perhaps if he was about to encounter his destiny or just another dead end in his struggling career.

With similar ambivalence an announcer delivered an introduction written by the comic himself: “And here’s the young man who has to account for this half-hour — Johnny Carson!”

Less than a year later “The Johnny Carson Show,” a weekly live comedy and variety series, would be canceled, and its host would not get another crack at a national, post-dinnertime viewership for six years. Carson came to view this 39-episode series as a kind of instructive failure, an opinion he held right up until his death in January 2005.

Yet to Joanne Carson, the second of Carson’s four wives, the rare films are much more: they are documents of a nascent but remarkably poised talent, as well as a memento of Carson’s courtship of her in the early 1960s and a portent of how their relationship would ultimately break apart. And on Tuesday Shout Factory is releasing a DVD of 10 of the show’s episodes, kinescopes of which she kept after the couple’s divorce in 1972.

“This is a part of him that nobody knows about but everyone will appreciate,” Ms. Carson, a slender, sprightly woman of 75, said over tea at her home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. “The American public saw Johnny as a good and decent man, a little boy from the Midwest who never completely grew up, and I want them to know they were right.”

William Wilberforce is not a household name, particularly in America in the 21 st century.

Unless you are a student of British history or are aware of Ohio’s Wilberforce University, the first private black college in the United States, you aren’t likely to be familiar with the British member of Parliament who led a 30-year struggle to abolish slavery and the slave trade.

That might change in the coming months with the nationwide release of the movie Amazing Grace. (The film was to have been shown Friday, a week ahead of the official release, at Wilberforce University.)

Starring Ioan Gruffudd in the title role, the film is directed by Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter, The World Is Not Enough, 49 Up) and features an esteemed cast — including Albert Finney, Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell, Ciaran Hinds and African singer Youssou N’Dour — as real-life characters taken from the history books.

How far the film’s distributors will have to go to build an audience for Amazing Grace can be seen by the fact that even Gruffudd, who grew up in Wales, admitted in a recent phone interview that "I was sort of ignorant that Wilberforce was the reason why the Slave Trade Act came into fruition. I was educated myself by reading the script and going on to play the part."

But, added the actor — who is probably best-known to American audiences for his starring role as Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, in Fantastic Four and as Horatio Hornblower in a series of imported TV movies — "I’m sure (the film) will be educating a whole new generation of people toward this subject."

That subject is the effort by British abolitionists from the late 1780s through the first decades of the 19 th century to persuade the British public — or at least the male property holders who were the only ones allowed to vote — to end slavery in the British Empire. For tactical reasons, they decided to first attack the slave trade and then take on the issue of slavery.

Wilberforce, the son of a wealthy merchant, was already known as a brilliant orator and deeply pious man when radical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (Sewell), a former African slave named Oloudah Equiano (N’Dour) and others approached him about joining their cause and leading the fight in the House of Commons. According to the movie, Wilberforce was encouraged in this endeavor by his good friend, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberbatch), and his minister, John Newton (Finney), a former captain of a slave ship who had renounced slavery and entered the ministry. It was Newton who wrote the famous hymn Amazing Grace, which is featured in the film....

The artistic giants of the 20th century -- the Andy Warhols, Jackson Pollocks and Pablo Picassos of the art world -- were known more for their modernist and abstract impulses than their depiction of religious themes.

But does that tell the whole story of art in the 20th century?

That's the question animating an exhibit of 20th century art, "Biblical Art in a Secular Century: Selections, 1896-1993," at New York's Museum of Biblical Art.

The show features artists whose work was often expressly religious in theme -- such as Marc Chagall and Ben-Zion -- as well as such artists as Andy Warhol whose work is rarely linked to religion.

Curator Patricia C. Pongracz said she hopes the exhibit helps counter the "broadly held notion" that 20th century artists had little or no interest in biblical or religious themes. It's a "rediscovery," she said, "a more nuanced approach to the 20th century."

KAMPALA, Uganda, Feb. 17 — This year, the Oscar buzz has made it all the way to Kampala.

On Saturday, none other than Forest Whitaker, a leading contender for best actor, parted a crowd of paparazzi in front of a chic hotel here in Uganda’s capital, and then strutted down a stretch of genuine red carpet for the official opening of “The Last King of Scotland.”

Official being the key word. Because the movie, about the blood-soaked reign of Uganda’s mercurial dictator, Idi Amin, actually arrived a few weeks ago, via shrink-wrapped, bootlegged DVDs shipped in from China. Already, it has created quite a stir in Kampala’s tin-roofed video halls.

Ugandans, struck by Mr. Whitaker’s likeness to Amin, are moved by the scenes of an era they would like to forget. Above all else, they are proud that one of this past year’s surprise Hollywood hits was about their country and filmed in their country. Now, nearly five months after its release in the United States, it has finally landed here, and landed in style.

Despite the tangible presence of reminders of the Third Reich all over Berlin ˜ from the bullet-scarred buildings near the Reichstag to the converted Wehrmacht communications headquarters in which my daughter's school is located ˜ its tragic history is, at the same time, oddly invisible. Depictions of Adolf Hitler and Nazi symbols are mostly outlawed in Germany, and it remains something of a taboo to mention him in day-to-day conversation. So, it has been a bit of a shock in recent days to see posters plastered on subway walls advertising Mein Fuhrer, a new film about the German dictator. Even more jarring, the film is supposed to be a comedy. Hitler has been the subject of gags in the Anglophone world for some time, in films such as The Producers, but not in Germany. Mein Fuhrer, The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler portrays him as a bumbling dictator in the last days of the war, forced to hire a fictional Jewish actor from a concentration camp to teach him how to make an uplifting speech that he hopes will rally Germany.

Even before the film opened in Berlin this week, it had sparked a huge debate in the German commentariat. Critics attacked it for making light of Germany's past. They questioned the idea of humanizing Hitler, even as a pathetic loser, and of treating the Holocaust in a comedy. Rolf Hochhuth, 75, the prominent German dramatist who , coincidentally, is now staging his own play about Hitler, condemned the movie for "tampering with history." Even the film's lead actor, the popular comedian Helge Schneider, admitted he now regrets doing the film. Adjustments in the editing suite focused the film too much on the portrayal of Hitler as a weakling, which he said he finds "profane." Many Germans appear to agree. In one poll conducted before its release, 56% said they disapproved of Germany making a comedy about the dictator, while only 30% said they thought it a good thing to do. "I come from a Holocaust family," Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said in one interview. "It makes me feel queasy if someone is making fun of Hitler and the Holocaust."

The film's director Dani Levy, who is Jewish, said he had fully expected a "tsunami of controversy." But he said he was also tired of seeing Hitler depicted only in grainy documentaries whose visual language, he argued, has become "routine."...

“Nixon: A Presidency Revealed” is the title of a documentary appearing on the History Channel tonight, and it immediately invites the question: What, really, is left to be revealed? Was John Dean secretly a woman? Were H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman actually receiving their orders from Pluto? Was it because of some previously unknown affiliation with strange fashion cultists that Spiro T. Agnew wore ties with polka dots the size of half-dollars? And, in the absence of such disclosures, what conceivable transgressions committed by the Nixon White House would surprise us even now?

Scholarship of the Nixon years, beginning with “The Time of Illusion,” Jonathan Schell’s brilliant 1975 account of the 37th presidency, has hardly suffered from insufficient attention, but this latest History Channel effort is no less gripping for its reliance on the well-known details of Nixonian pathology. Richard M. Nixon was, in the most superficial terms, a celebrity gone wild, who has provided the American public with mesmerizing television ever since the famous “Checkers” speech of his vice presidential candidacy in 1952, cunningly orchestrated to preserve his precarious place on the Eisenhower ticket in the midst of financial scandal.

“Nixon: A Presidency Revealed” retains the same perverse pleasure of an “E! True Hollywood Story,” on, say, Ryan O’Neal, one you may feel inclined to watch even if you happen to be well versed in all of his misbehaviors.

Such a comparison is not meant to suggest that “Nixon: A Presidency Revealed” lacks thoughtfulness or sobriety, because it is steeped in both.

Staff at Paris's Louvre museum have gone on strike, demanding a bonus for the stress of looking after the Mona Lisa and other popular masterpieces.

Access to the museum was made free for visitors after strikers blocked access to ticket desks, reports say.

The Musee d'Orsay was also shut after attendants there stopped work.

Attendants are demanding a bonus they say other categories of staff have been offered, and because they suffer more stress being on the floor.

"The stress is clearly linked to the number of visitors", one Louvre attendant, who did not want to be named, told the AFP news agency.