Bright Lights Film Journal

From the editor and writers of Bright Lights Film Journal

Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.

"I dare anyone to squeeze between two covers a more varied, useful and flat out entertaining sampling of the personalities that make the seventh art the liveliest."
— David Hudson, IFC.com

Order now at Amazon »

Matthew Sewell

Matthew Sewell teaches film and literature at Minnesota State University, Mankato

» "But It Did Happen" — Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (BLFJ 73 – August 2011)

"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 . . ."

» Dorothy's Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning (BLFJ 72 – May 2011)

"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."

» Fellini's Innovative Merging of Subject and Object in the POV in La Dolce Vita (BLFJ 71 – February 2011)

"And it insists on looking."

» James Dean's Clumsy Punch (BLFJ 70 – November 2010)

"The time-and-place for Dean's performances is always now, in the moment of its creation, and he resists any technique that obscures that fact."