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Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue 18 | March 1997
dark hollywood
Intimations of Lifelessness: Sirk's Ironic Tearjerker — Annie is the self-sacrificing mother dear to tearjerkers but to little purpose. Sara Jane wants something that even Mildred Pierce's money couldn't buy: white skin.
“A Certain Slant”: A Brief History of Hollywood Yellowface — The history of blackface has been well documented in American film criticism; the history of yellowface has received much less critical attention, and considerably less public censure.
Blaxploitation: A Sketch — These films trumpet their topicality, with an outrageous gallery of hunky pimps and pushers, knockout whores, and corrupt cops snorting, shooting, and screwing everything in sight.
Afro Promo — Curator Jenni Olson looks at the history of marginalized groups through one of the most ephemeral cultural forms, the movie trailer. Her latest compilation of coming attractions focuses on blacks in mainstream and low-budget Hollywood films from 1946 to 1976.
poisonalities
Bette Davis: A Talent for Hysteria — Millions of moviegoers responded to the challenge of her headstrong, neurotic heroines who, like Frankenstein's monster, were made of mismatched parts and bolts of electricity. Her cluster of quirks attracted as they repelled.
cinema hong kong
Patrick Leung's Beyond Hypothermia and Tsui Hark's The Blade
classics revisted
Vertigo: Was Hitchcock's Masterpiece a Private Joke? — Vertigo possesses a strange symmetry that raises the question of whether Hitchcock had ulterior, perhaps mischievous, motives to his direction.
Combat Autopsy — Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — Set in the years 1938 to 1943, Finzi-Continis is an autumnal work in two senses — the subject is the last golden flash of freedom before one of history's major tragedies, and it represents de Sica's final great work.
a recent neglected gem
"The Same Paranoid Space": Two Deaths — Nicholas Roeg drags us into a nightmare of sophisticated sadomasochism — for which we're grateful.
books
Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema: From 1930s cautionary tales about syphilis to 1970s porno chic
