UC Regents’ Lecturer at UCLA in the Department of Comparative Literature Alex Ross, The New Yorker writer and author of the new book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, talks about Richard Wagner’s pivotal, complex role in Hollywood movie history, showing clips from The Great Dictator, Christmas Holiday, Apocalypse Now, and The New World. Ross’s first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Copresented with the UCLA Departments of Comparative Literature and Musicology