Bright Lights Film Journal :: August 2010

August 2010 | Issue 69

From the Editor

"Read this"

Gary Morris

Articles

Sex and the City: The Way We Were, the Way We Fucked: Carrie and Her Crew Party Like It's 1999!

By Alan Vanneman

They can never really knock you off your feet as long as you're wearing Blahniks

A Cinema of Satyagraha? A Client-Centered Approach to Film Spectatorship

By Andrew Grossman

"In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we've become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing."

Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive

By Imogen Sara Smith

"While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives."

The New Lurid: Cinema's Rape Disavowal Fantasy

By Erich Kuersten

"They rapin' everybody out here." — Antoine Dodson

You Can't Go Home Again: Mad Men and the American Memory

By Matthew Brennan

"In Mad Men, as in modern American politics, the past is a pre-lapsarian paradise to which it is imperative to return, and the fantasy is of those exiled from history itself."

Black and White Orpheus: An Audio Visual Species

By D. J. M. Saunders

That still finds musicians easier to rob

"It Seems Familiar but I Can't Quite Remember": Amnesia and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942)

By Alison McKee

"Whose stories do these films really tell?"

Spade Work: Four Autobiographies and an Elegy: My Winnipeg; Of Time and the City; Hommage; Gloria!; and (nostalgia)

By Jacob Mikanowski

"Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they're more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig."

Perverse Pianists: How They Do It

By Lesley Chow

"Aldridge's shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema."

Things Fall Apart: On The Wild Bunch and Contemporary Westerns

By Matthew Brennan

"There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight."

The Mysteries of Adaptation: Michael Chabon's Novels Onscreen

By Dorian Fox

Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much

What Is Cult Cinema? A Checklist

By Dan Bentley-Baker

Will the real cult film please stand up?

Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC

By Ron Capshaw

"Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously."

Movies

Out of His Head: Vikram Jayanti's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector

By Robert Ecksel

"I'm dealing in rock 'n' roll. I'm, like, I'm not a bona fide human being." — Phil Spector

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds": Avatar's Psychedelic Fantasy

By Joseph Natoli

"What entertains us may be shaping us."

A Few Steps Shy of a Masterpiece: Fred and Cyd Apply Themselves in The Bandwagon

By Alan Vanneman

"She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman."

"The Story of a Guy Who Wants to Kill a Guy Who Wants to Die": Claude Chabrol's Bellamy

By Ian Johnston

"The good news from Bellamy is that Depardieu gives one of his best performances in years."

All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the Forest

By Jacob Mikanowski

"Today's Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad."

The Pervert's Guide to The Birds: Of Hitchcock, Žižek, the Maternal Superego, and Critical Confusion

By Jonathan Simmons

"It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences."

Atom Egoyan's Chloe: Sex Cinema High and Low

By David L. Pike

"It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it."

Class Dismissed: Laurent Cantet and François Bégaudeau's The Class (2008)

By Brian Grady

"While a teen's emotional landscape can indeed defy reason, the filmmakers insist that a teenager's need to attack supersedes any moral dilemma, even if their behavior results in the expulsion of one of their peers."

The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell's The Devils

By Ron Capshaw

"How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?"

Hitchcock's Shadow: On Johan Grimonprez's Double Take

By Jacob Mikanowski

"The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself."

"Let's Call It a Draw": M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender

By Scott Thill

"Most of the major speaking roles are indeed pwned by people without color, to put it indelicately. But the rest are thankfully brought to life by a rainbow coalition of talent."

Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa's Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze

By Brian Libby

"Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower."

Multiple Senses: Tom Ford's A Single Man

By Vlad Dima

"Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience."

"Umberto D." by André Bazin

Translated by Bert Cardullo

Excerpted from an article titled "The Faith That Sustains: Cannes 1952," published in Cahiers du cinéma #13 (June 1952), pp. 13-16.

Interviews

The Accidental Action Heroine: Pam Grier Talks about Black Hollywood, Jack Hill, Blaxploitation, and Being an Underemployed Icon

By Steve Ryfle

"Yes, I've been there, and I can draw on that."

Back to the Futuristic: An Interview with Bill Warren

By Steve Ryfle

In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium

Family Remains: An Interview with Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler on Documenting Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine

By Matthew Sorrento

"Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn't an easy lifestyle."

Stars

Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master

By Frank Bren

"The man's a genius!" — Jerry Lewis

Directors

Frank Tashlin: The Animated Auteur

By Philip Leers

"Tashlin's tenure at Warner Bros. did not provide him with a 'cartoon aesthetic' that could be applied, ready-made, to his features; rather, it allowed him to develop a feature filmmaking aesthetic through cartoons."

Columns

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Institute Benjamenta, There's Always Tomorrow, Valley of the Bees, Everlasting Moments, Chicago, The Unpolished

By Gordon Thomas

An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

Festivals

History, Herstory, Our Story: The 2010 QDoc International Film Festival in Portland, Oregon

By Gary Morris

"She had a lot of action inside!"

The Sound of Silence: The 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

By Kristen Anderson Wagner

"Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses."

Love, or Something Close to It: Four Films from the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival

By Cleo Caoulidis

"There is always some madness in love; but, there is always some reason in madness." - Nietzsche

Books

Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel . . . The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images' Laura Wagner, 2001-2010, by Laura Wagner

Reviewed by Gary Morris

"Wagner's takedowns are thorough and unforgiving, as they should be."

Errol Flynn: The True Adventures of a Real-Life Rogue, by Lincoln Hurst

Reviewed by Ron Capshaw

"Plagued by bad health (he suffered a heart attack at the age of 33), he nevertheless was able to create the impression of animal vitality."

Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, by Jack Stevenson

Reviewed by Gary Morris

Do we believe in Swedish sin? Yes, we do. Also, American.

Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, 4th edition, edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio

Reviewed by Matthew Sorrento

"The Encyclopedia, especially in its new revised edition, reflects the vertiginous feeling of noir itself."