November 2008 | Issue 62
Editorial
Articles
"Alexei must be condemned to the pointless, loveless, and finally false freedom of a spinning limbo, as unfinished and unfinishable as the best Bakhtinian polyphony."
by John Calendo
"Mother . . . my mother . . . um, what's the phrase? She isn't quite herself today." — Anthony Perkins, making a colossal understatement in Psycho
"Farber's writing is the pure antithesis of academic — ornately sophisticated with a vernacular punch, stuffed with contradictory statements and astounding paradoxes."
"Suddenly my senses are all incredibly acute . . . I'm different, more alive, stronger . . ."
Metropolis, Ezra Pound, Mammon and the Law of Too-Large Numbers
by Norman C. Ball
"The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters" — Antonio Gramsci
by Thomas R. Britt
"All feature reactive heroes hurtling toward death as a means of reconciling the ruptures between them and their objects of desire."
Movies
"Paris at night in black-and-white with Miles on the soundtrack? It's a perfect fit."
Pascal . . . Kierkegaard . . . Nietzsche . . . Zemeckis?
Two golden-age musicals get the deluxe treatment
"Think, for Pete's sake. What have you got now?"
by Stephane Dunn
"Wife, get a real life for yourself. Career woman, the career isn't everything. Hussy, men still marry ladies. Lesbian, explore your 'male' issues . . ."
"Burn After Reading holds the notable distinction of being the only screwball comedy to leave all of its characters either moderately satisfied or dead."
by Matt Brennan
See the incredible vanishing American
"It is an opportunity to film people and events that could be recalled at any time to affirm, lament, or challenge a moment in time in this troubled region."
Actors
"Like Hollywood's new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals."
"It's not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I've always hidden it in my personal life." — Dana Andrews
"She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of impersonations." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Crazy Sunday," 1932
Directors
"When I make movies, nothing is limited."
Columns
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The Italian, Traffic in Souls, Privilege, Wings, The Ascent, Tropical Malady, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, J'Accuse
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Festivals
"The surprise musical number can represent a facile avoidance of complexity, a moment of true strangeness, or a way of harmonizing existing, underlying themes."
Feisty orthodox Jewish dykes, globe-trotting ladyboys, fascistic Armani queens — you know, the gang
Seeing queer lives from the U.S. and Canada to South Africa and Iran
Books
by Irina Leimbacher
Recent Posts

Bresson gets interrogated by cruel French interviewers, or does he?The YouTube copyright police removed John Cromwell's 1932 feature The Silver Cord from our "petit theatre," but we're back with Robert Bresson, in a fascinating interview for French television in which the interrogators seem as much like Bresson "models" as Mouchette, Fontaine, or that "Francis the Talking Mule" of art cinema, poor Balthasar. Some have called the interviewers "cruel," but is Bresson in fact playing them? Would that surprise us?

Watch on Youtube »

Gordon Thomas, and other BL staff, check out the eye- popping pleasures of Blu-Ray.

» Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
» The General (Keaton)
» Sunrise (Murnau)
» 8-1/2 (Fellini)
» Playtime (Tati)
» Winstanley (Brownlow & Mollo)
» Permissive (Shonteff)
» Lola Montes (Ophuls)
» My Childhood, My Ain Folk ... (Bill Douglas)
» In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
» Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
» Repulsion (Polanski)
» Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
» Everlasting Moments (Troell)

BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

» 30 Rock
» Batman: The Animated Series
» Broadway Theatre Archive
» Charlie’s Angels
» Cowboy Bebop
» Death of a Salesman
» Dollhouse
» Freaks and Geeks
» Have Gun Will Travel
» Mad Men
» Magnum P.I.
» Monk
» Pamela Anderson Roast
» Renegade
» Sex and the City

I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

» Creative Commons
"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

» The Ivy Compton-Burnett home page
A Bright Lights side project created by George Brown devoted to the greatest novelist of the 20th century. There, we said it.

» Raw Vision
The leading online site (and print publication) devoted to those zany untrained artists who channel personality quirks, neuroses, idées fixes, and downright craziness into Art.

» Siklink.com
An endlessly fascinating clearinghouse for "the greatest hand-picked collection of bizarre, strange and unusual websites on the internet today." Highlights include the enchanting "Prison Bitch Name Generator" and "Life Gem" – how to "turn your deceased loved one into a diamond."

» Clark Ashton Smith
The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

» Classic Arcade Games
Miss Asteroids? Centipede? Frogger? Miss that you missed them? Here's your chance to enjoy the state of the art circa 1980s.

» Jack Vance
Wikipedia's gateway to our favorite writer in and of science fiction and fantasy. A national treasure.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation
"EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." Go EFF!

» The Canonical List of Weird Band Names: The Peculiar and the Profane
Another Bright Lights side project from the inimitable George Brown. You probably know the Meat Puppets but how about Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders?

» James Purdy
A good introduction to a criminally neglected postwar literary master. Be 21 or be gone for his gorgeous, harrowing works, kids.

» The Radical Ant Farm
This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

» Spectro-Pop
Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

» The Left Business Observer
Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

» Jane Bowles
Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

» WFMU
The best online radio station for our money. A deep archive and no-music-turned-away policy will keep you rollin' and tumblin' till the apocalypse.

» Henry Green
Must we create a detailed tribute page to this extraordinary British novelist championed by Auden, Updike, and Terry Southern? Or will you do it? Start with Concluding (1948).

» Women of Surrealism
They weren't all "muses" and maids – these women equaled or surpassed their more celebrated male counterparts in vision and technique.

» Ronald Firbank
He called the president of Haiti "a perfect dear" and was known to eat a single pea at dinner. Oh, and he ranks with Joyce and Woolf (see Edmund Wilson) as a groundbreaking literary modernist.

» Essential Vermeer
Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.

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