[dailymotion id=6F725G6Vk8OgUa6bJ]My Name is Oona(Gunvor Grundel Nelson; 1969) Far less critical of gender roles than her other work (that which I’ve seen at any rate), Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona emerged as one of the loveliest works in American cinema of the late 1960s (a time when you could use such terms as ‘poetic’ ... read more »

If the Committee will permit, I’d like to rise to a point of personal privilege at this time and wish my fellow Bright Lights Film Journal contributors all the best, all the brightest, all the luck and hope in the world for this Holiday season. It is an honor to be among you. Thank you, ... read more »

[dailymotion id=7rR8QVTnGJth95BJW]Pete Roleum and His Cousins(Joseph Losey; 1939) In 1939, Joseph Losey became a walking emblem of what is still a relentlessly paradoxical and fitful accomodation between the imperatives of art and progressive ideas. He was at that time a stage director who could cite as accomplishments a tour of duty with the Federal Theater ... read more »

My friend Richard Gibson, who not only classes up a blog I co-produce, but has his own estimable corner of the blogosphere as well, has asked me to spread the word about a year-end survey he’s conducting. I’ll let him take it from here: Seeing as all the magazines, newspapers, websites will conduct a poll ... read more »

http://youtube.com/v/2E432cI5V3cNow!(Santiago Alvarez; 1965) Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and an amazing (if slightly over-arranged) 1963 recording by Lena Horne (composed, if you can believe it, by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green), Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off Now!, one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s. Not intended as ... read more »

[dailymotion id=59ptllqGKWK0g3WrI]Max reprend sa liberté(Troubles of a Grass Widower)(Max Linder; 1912) The beauty of this affable domestic morality play by Max Linder rests entirely with the actor/director’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to balance that ineffably graceful screen presence of his against the stock character of a less than competent husband, consigned to his own dysfunctional devices ... read more »

When Jack Palance’s Lieutenant Joe Costa suddenly returns from what seemed a certain death in Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) – his left arm hanging lifeless, rendered to ground beef by the tread of a German tank – he becomes, through a fateful marriage of Joseph Biroc’s noirish lighting scheme and Palance’s one-of-a-kind cheekbones, a gargoyle; ... read more »

Here in America we have something that, with the straightest of faces, we call our Film Heritage. What people usually mean when they invoke this solemn, unconscionably sentimental honorific is not just any movie made here in these United States, but a specific kind of movie: Something more or less old, and at one time ... read more »

[dailymotion id=4IbP5m97ofl4P3nWk] This is a 1974 interview with Orson Welles, conducted by BBC stalwart Michael Parkinson. In the 1970s, Orson Welles appeared on a great many television chat shows, generally avoiding any serious discussion of his filmmaking. It was a topic he would save for credulous interviewers, generally of the cinephilic variety, whom he knew ... read more »

[dailymotion id=3PHjXURzxJiza38Hm]Meetin’ WA(Jean-Luc Godard; 1986) One of the least remarked upon attributes of Jean-Luc Godard is how thoroughly he mastered the medium of video production. For him Video was not a mere substitute for film, but something separate and distinct, an aesthetic platform all its own to which he brought a heretofore unrevealed dimension in ... read more »