Bright Lights Film Journal :: May 2011

May 2011 | Issue 72

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?"

More Heroic and More Damned: 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."

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

Interviews

Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek's Cutoff and HBO's Mildred Pierce

By Matthew Sorrento

"In Meek's Cutoff — about a community making decisions based on limited information, confronting their own attitudes toward the unknown — it seemed appropriate that the movie would end on a moment of unknowing, incompletion."

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

Recent Posts

Bresson (On Cinema): An Interview | watch »

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.