[dailymotion id=x698zh&related=1]The dance team in Segundo de Chomón’s Danses cosmopolites à transformation (1902) are standard figures of so-called Trick films of that epoch. Indelicate to say it like this, but they’re essentially mannequins, capable of some mobility, upon whom the filmmaker cast merely the latest optical construct his overheated imagination had wrought. In those lawless ... read more »

Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign started on a premise that would sound downright exotic coming from a member of the United States Senate today. He believed that US military agression in Southeast Asia had to cease. Period. Not for the reasons its establishment critics cited at the time: wholly pragmatic grounds such as the loss ... read more »

[dailymotion id=x652td&related=1]Amid every rash, destructive, feral thing that happens in the mere four minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Across the Universe (1998), the overall bearing of Fiona Apple throughout is perhaps the most mysteriously compelling of all. Somehow this woman carries herself . . . within the slow-motion, monochromatic chaos that is its backdrop of ... read more »

Over the weekend I read an essay on J.D. Salinger which Janet Malcom published in the New York Review of Books back in that now lost and fabled time, June of 2001. Though I still incline toward the negative conclusions arrived at by his contemporary critics, it was an admirable defense of America’s best known, ... read more »

Entering into negotiations with executives at Time, Inc. over the sale of a film he’d shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder was adamant that his 26.6 seconds of 8mm Kodachrome safety stock be used in the most dignified manner possible. He had visions, awful nightmare visions of seedy people ducking into some ... read more »

Hands Across Iraq(Tom Sutpen; 2008) On March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush interrupted the primetime programming lineups of all major television networks and a handful of Cable outlets, to deliver an ultimatum to the ruler of Iraq. “All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end,” he stated, with an ominous ... read more »

In this excerpt from Brett Thompson’s not unworthy 1996 doco, The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the late Maila Nurmi recounts her romance with the one of cinema’s great (if grossly over-examined) figures.

[dailymotion id=P6JVOTxsIdHiDbxq3]Nerone(Nero; or The Fall of Rome)(Luigi Maggi; 1909) Produced by Turin’s pioneering Film Ambrosio, Luigi Maggi’s Nerone may not be as formally elaborate as the epics of Mario Caserini and Giovanni Pastrone . . . what is, in fact, extraordinary about Italian filmmaking in that period is how its scale vaulted in such a ... read more »

Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in the main blogging area, so to speak, I thought I’d follow suit. My apologies for the tardiness (and haste) of this reply: I’ll admit it’s ... read more »

[dailymotion id=6o2qYgBPxS975axHd] Sing, Bing, Sing(Babe Stafford; 1933) There’s a lot of things you can say about Sing, Bing, Sing: You can say it’s a perfect showcase for the formidable song stylings of Bing Crosby at the height of his powers; the last film Produced by Mack Sennett to carry a lone echo of Keystone (though ... read more »