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Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner). His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005, he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007, he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.

FilmInFocus asked Perlstein to pick his five favorite films about political campaigns.

• The Earrings of Madame de

  For me the best political films are like the best politicians: they bequeath us a language to express inchoate moods we don't quite have the words ourselves to articulate. The most dazzling example? Max Ophuls' deceptively sumptuous The Earrings de Madame de (1953), in which the frivolities and petty affairs of Europe's idle rich are revealed, in the final shot, as a metaphor for the callous indifference with which they send peasants off to war.

• The Candidate

  Michael Ritchie's The Candidate (1972) is extraordinary in grasping the dilemmas faced by the 1972 Democratic nominee for president, George McGovern, better than McGovern did in real time. You're never sure whether Robert Redford wins his Senate seat in the end because he sold out, because he maintained a saving margin of idealism, because people finally saw through the demagoguery of his opponent — or just because he was so damned good looking. It's all marvelously ambiguous, just like an election in real life.

• Lumumba

  Great political films are often great because the give us foreshortened, visual means to grasp the abstract mysteries of political change. I was fascinated by the verisimilitude with which Raoul Peck was able to capture what it feels like when one political moment transforms itself into another — here, in the case of the process of independence for the nation of Congo. It certainly rung true enough for the ex-CIA hands depicted in the film, who forced HBO to bleep out his name by threat of lawsuit if they showed it.

• 1776

  A lot of it is simply sheer, brilliant, Gilbert & Sullivan-style fun, which should be enough to recommend it on its own. But I'd also be hard pressed to name a film that better captures the drama of true democratic deliberation than 1776: it renders parliamentary procedure scintillating. A musical about the thrill of dangerous ideas, it compresses the paradoxes at the heart of the American experiment.

• Punishment Park

  I've never seen a film that more convincingly projects the sheer rage Americans felt toward one another in 1970 than Peter Watkins' astonishing mockumentary Punishment Park. In it, a group of radicals are basically tortured to death after conviction by a kangaroo court of "Silent Majority" citizens in a remote desert; both sides were played by type-cast non-professional actors. It feels like a family dinner table argument over the Vietnam War breaking out into a shooting match. After a screening, representatives from 24 PBS stations across the country agreed they could never show a movie this intense on American TV.