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Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue 23 | December 1998
from the editor
Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Bright Lights Salutes Homo- and Heterosexuality!
This issue started out as a tribute to homosexuality in the movies — queer monsters, 1930s sissies, Pink Flamingos, gay painter Francis Bacon as rendered by John Maybury, a San Francisco transvestite/transsexual film festival, and, yes, the obligatory gay dwarf (Lorenz Hart in Alan Vanneman's piece on Words and Music). Of course, like the world, Bright Lights is never entirely homosexual (a tragedy for both the world and us), and we've balanced the scales with articles on Frank Capra, the wonderful early silent studio Thanhouser, Truffaut's Jules and Jim, the Soviet-Cuban "poetic documentary" I Am Cuba, the gorgeously embalmed Russian classic Mother and Son, a pair of worthy but little-noticed art films (Bad Manners and Unmade Beds), and a slew of book reviews. We want you to have your cake and eat it too, which is possible, as the great English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett wisely pointed out, if you have two cakes. Consider this issue of Bright Lights your two cakes.
And, oh yes, your inspired, otherwise unmarketable manuscripts are always welcome, no matter where you fall on the bumpy map of gender.
— Gary Morris
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Let our spokessissy
guide you to the archives.
features
Queer Horror: Decoding Universal's Monsters — What do horror and homosexuality have in common anyway?
The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema — The cinema sissy is now as rare as rain in the Gobi — but it wasn't always so.
Words and Music: An Unsung Masterpiece? — How can an MGM musical with Judy Garland, a young Perry Como, and a pre-Depends™ June Allyson be obscure?
Jules and Jim: An Amorous Cyclone — The true story behind Truffaut's lovely, ultimately lethal triangle.
homo corner
Primal Gross-Out: Pink Flamingos Restored — Who dreamed Waters's trash classic would get the glamorous overhaul it deserves?
Devoutly Elusive: Love Is the Devil — A clever filmmaker, faced with an uncooperative estate, made the whole movie look like a Francis Bacon painting.
festival
Cultural Makeovers: San Francisco's Tranny Fest 1998 — Wrestling with the limits of the body — and breaking them
video reviews
Thanhouser Classics, volumes 1–3 — Early Jeanne Eagels, the "Thanhouser Kid" (and "Kidlet"), and other long-lost pleasures from the dawn of cinema
The Poetry of Revolution: I Am Cuba! — The early '60s political epic shows that art and agitprop can happily coexist.
Frank Capra's American Dream — The eminent director believed more in his cinematic heroes than in himself.
recent repertory
Bad Manners — Poor etiquette is the least of these out-of-control academics' problems.
Mother and Son — Death is a dream in this moody metaphoric look at an old woman's — and Russia's — last days.
Unmade Beds — Four of New York's bitter singles trawl the personal ads — with grim results.
Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness, by Marshall Fine
That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, by Henry T. Sampson
The Vampire Gallery, by J. Gordon Melton
VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever, 1999, edited by Martin Connors and Jim Craddock
