New Bright Lights Film Journal

Image from My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Wai Ka-Fai with Johnny To, 2002).

Read The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011) By Lesley Chow

Film Studies For Free heard, via David Hudson, of a brand new, and excellent, issue of online Bright Lights Film Journal. Just feast your eyes on the below, directly-linked-to contents.

As an old advertising campaign used to say, "I never knew there was so much in it..." Except that FSFF always did know this about BLFJ, a truly brilliant repository of incredibly lively, scrupulously edited, and highly informative online film writing....

From the Editor

• America’s New Secret Weapon:
  Bright Lights!
• Gary Morris

ARTICLES

• Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources ,By JD Markel. In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid

• The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity, By Andrew Grossman “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges

• Culture and the Individual Talent? Three Filmmakers on Male Mid-Life Crisis, By John Engle“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

• Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex, By Marilyn Papayanis “How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” — Rachel P. Maines

• The Film Criticism of Alexis De Tocqueville: Or, When Heroes Yearn as Clouds Drift, By Andrew Grossman “These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”

• Helping Humanity: We All Get Stressed Out, By D. J. M. Saunders But have you stopped behaving strangely?

• Short Takes: Mise-en-Scène: Dorothy’s Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning By Matthew Sewell “George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”

• A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), By John Hall “Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”

• Sirk or Brecht? Or Both?: Determining the Guiding Influence in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, By Peter Tyson “Is Fassbinder a Sirkian who, despite distancing techniques and irony, achieves audience identification and emotional catharsis? Or is he a hard-nosed Brechtian who distances us clinically from his characters so that we can calmly criticise their shortcomings?”

• Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption, By Prakash Kona “During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)

EXPLOITATION

• Strangers with Candy: The Highway Safety Foundation and The Child Molester (1964), By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas “The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”

MOVIES

• Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty, By Jacob Mikanowski “When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”

• (God)Father and Son: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather, By Joseph Aisenberg “There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”

• Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003), By Ian Murphy “Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”

• Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems, By Norman Ball “How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”

TELEVISION

• “You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer, By Alan Vanneman Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo

STARS

• Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster, By Jake Hinkson “Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”

• Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author, By Penelope Andrew “The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband

• The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers, By Christopher Sandford “Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”

DIRECTORS

• The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes, By Rob Smart “These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”

• Between Heaven and Hell: Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground, By Joanne De Simone “Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”

• Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai, By Michael Ward “Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”

FILM FESTIVALS

• The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011), By Lesley Chow, “This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”

• A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival (2011), By Megan Ratner “Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”

• Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010) By Tijana Mamula, Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism

COLUMNS

• Bright Sights: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within By Gordon Thomas An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

INTERVIEW

• Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce By Matthew Sorrento “Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”

BOOKS

• Swedish Sensationfilms, Daniel Ekeroth, reviewed by Erich Kuersten

• Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle, reviewed by C. J. Kutner

• Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival, by Justin Vicari, reviewed by Robert von Dassanowsky

• Back to the Future, by Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, reviewed by Leah Anderst