Bright Lights Film Journal :: August 2011

August 2011 | Issue 73

From the Editor

"You can't have your cinema and eat it too" - or can you?

Gary Morris

Features

Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays

Matt Brennan

"Your body is a microcosm of all existence." – Death: A Love Story

Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema

Giuliano Vivaldi

"If the silent period showed the flashes of brilliance as well as the unevenness of Barnet's talent, the next few years would see him produce two worldwide masterpieces that place him as a precursor of French Poetic Realism and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as an influence on the French New Wave through the works of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette."

Articles

Cylons, Avatars, and Barack Obama: Science Fiction and Hybridity After 9/11

Natalie Bograd

"Veering away from jingoistic portrayals of 'us' and the 'Other,' these films advocate instead a complex and globally entwined future of hybrid identities along with critical consideration of the political and cultural consequences of advanced technology."

The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and Josè Luis Guerìn

Lesley Chow

"Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life."

Eating CInema: The Frozen Dessert as Audiovisual Synaesthesia

Andrew Grossman

"But we can imagine infinite other, less stodgy flavors: a Saragossa Manuscript of Neapolitan layers within layers within layers; a Cannibal Holocaust of pure cherry surrounding a chunky mystery surprise; a Seventh Seal of precious white vanilla lost in an ominous ocean of midnight chocolate."

Darkening the Image of American Wealth and Power: Unstoppable and The Lincoln Lawyer

Joseph Natoli

"How do you get a "Headstart" program going that isn't about implanting early entrepreneurial ambitions in toddlers but one that gets a head start on that sort of brain ownership? More difficult: How do you develop a resistance to such ownership by the surround we are born into without falling into the illusions of an individual will-to-power?"

Carnivorous Lunar Activities: The Origins of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema

Alex Kirschenbaum

"I didn't mean to call you a meatloaf, Jack!"

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys: Revisiting Frank Borzage's No Greater Glory and the 1930s Boy Soldier Genre

Peter Lee

"With flags fluttering, the cast stoically stands at attention, with tears streaming down their stiff upper lips. Even with their country's destruction, the boys reflect a military mentality, still in service to their country."

Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh

D. J. M. Saunders

"Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that – literally by design – hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human."

Movies

Misery Loves Fantasy: Kim Ki-duk's Arirang (2011)

Jonathan McCalmont

"Kim decided to retreat into an interior world where he does not need to confront or take but where his time can be sucked up by shitting in fields, smoking fish, getting drunk, and singing."

Between Silence and Sound: Children of a Lesser God

Ian Murphy

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other." – Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

The Green Hornet Makes America Bossy Bottom: Who's Topping Who?

L. Andrew Cooper

"Britt looks like the top as he bends Kato over and as he barks orders at his employee, but as every physical confrontation in the film demonstrates, Kato is the stronger man in both mind and body."

Green Lantern: The Allegory of Fear & Will Unfolded

Joseph Natoli

"Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise than joining the enthusiasts of self-empowerments' call "to just wish it."

Still Hungover: Todd Phillips and Rape Culture

Terri Carney

"There is no excuse for what others have called the "bro-magnon" film The Hangover, which unapologetically and even aggressively defends the model of masculinity that poo-poos date rape as some feminazi invention to further harass those poor, horny, entitled men."

You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello: The Long Goodbye and the End of the Crime (and Competition) in American Detective Films

Allen H. Redmon

"While Altman's description of the detective and his generic milieu as it evolved by the early 1970s works up to a point, the idea that his film closes a genre fails under examination. Such a position misjudges the primary pleasure derived from the American detective film, and misinterprets the satisfaction The Long Goodbye's ending provides when set within this pleasure and these films."

Desert Solitaire: On Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010)

Jacob Mikanowski

"The sheer physical immensity of this space threatens to hijack everything else in the film, and it's a testament to Reichardt's directorial intelligence that she lets it, and that she makes it work as part of a larger project."

Space Dust: On Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Jacob Mikanowski

"Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie – Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn't believe he deserves – vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack's childhood with a world-historical weight it can't possibly bear."

Television

Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin's Moral Compass

Matt Brennan

"You want answers?"
"I want the truth!"
"You can't handle the truth!"

Concocting Character in Television: The Case of Star Trek's Annoying Old Men – and the Beautiful Young Women Who Love Them

Mervyn Nicholson

"The arrival of Kirk on the scene precipitates a kind of crisis in the equilibrium of this pair of older, controlling-male and young subordinate-woman. What happens is that the woman is somehow awakened by the arrival of the Enterprise crew – awakened sexually, but also in a much broader sense."

Short Features

Short Takes: Cinematography
"But It Did Happen" – Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia

Matthew Sewell

"Magnolia's most instructive revelation occurs obliquely and, quite literally, microscopically. The shot occurs during the climactic rain of frogs, as Claudia and her mother, panicked, cling to each other in Claudia's apartment. The camera bends away from their embrace toward one of Claudia's paintings, zooming in so that we can read the words "but it did happen" in the bottom right corner . . ." "But It Did Happen" – Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia

Stars

Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady

Meredith Hicks

"Almost everything about Greer, her graceful figure, little mannerisms, the way she walks, talks, and smiles, reminds us of the Nineties, when Papa sat at the head of the table, airing his arrogant opinions, and never dreaming that his demure little wife, resourceful as a dozen U.S. Army engineers, was twisting him around her little finger, really running him and everything else in the house."

Directors

A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux

Santiago Rubín de Celis

"For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand."

Festivals

Crafting Community: The 2011 QDoc International Film Festival

Gary Morris

"It's encouraging to see how articulate and unafraid many of the kids in Put This on the Map are in deciding who they want to be, how they want to live, and even what they want to be called: 'Very gay,' 'an ally,' 'dating an FTM,' 'not straight, gay, bi, anything.'"

Columns

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs

Gordon Thomas

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

Books

The Celluloid Closet, by Vito Russo

Reviewed by Mark Adnum

Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman

Reviewed by Joseph Aisenberg

Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, And Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman

Reviewed by Cynthia C. Scott

They Live, by Jonathan Lethem

Reviewed by Chad Trevitte

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.