Bright Lights Film Journal :: Articles

"Just Another Man": On James Toback's Tyson

Getting out of the ghetto

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by Robert Ecksel

"Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn't pull his punches."

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What Is Cheaper Than Nothing at All? Czech Dream, Culture Jamming, and Consumerism

by Stephen Harris

"I jam because I am without ID."

Liverpool Lullaby: On Terence Davies' Of Time and the City

Out of Oblivion: Chris Marker and Cinematic Memories of Israel in Dan Geva's Description of a Memory

"Through cinema the past is regained."

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by Boris Trbic

"It is an opportunity to film people and events that could be recalled at any time to affirm, lament, or challenge a moment in time in this troubled region."

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When I Knew

When did you know you were gay? That's the simple premise of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's engaging Cinemax documentary

Married in America 2

Na Kamalei: The Men of Hula

Tracking nine couples from wedding to married life when the celebrations end and the problems begin

For the Bible Tells Me So

An endearing, often moving portrait of a group of men for whom hula has been a kind of salvation

What's Up, Docs? Nonstandard Operating Procedures in Recent Documentaries, and Interviews with Patricio Henriquez and Doug Pray

Director Daniel Karslake showcases five average, churchgoing American families, all raised on boilerplate "God hates fags" propaganda.

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Innocence Lost or Regained? The Clear-Eyed Vision of Jesus Camp

"Why didn't you just stick to the truth?"

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by Alan Jacobson

"Real things happening to real people"

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The Passion of the Auteurist: On Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient

Made in China: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky on Their Travels Across Manufactured Landscapes

"It's not enough to like this movie"

by Damon Smith

"We've created a world that buffers us from nature."

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Stay Well, or Else . . .: Michael Moore's Sicko

Closing the Closet: QDoc: The 2007 Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival

"What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening."

Treed by the Family: On 51 Birch Street

"We couldn't figure out how to divide the cat . . ."

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On the Border of the Thermian Gulf: The Ninth Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival

For boomers, "the idea that Mom and Dad are flawed human beings with complicated histories and real feelings can be hard to accept."

Spirit in the Dark: Barbara Kopple on Filming the Group That Wouldn't Shut Up & Sing

"The documentaries that most stood out have a near fictional flair, blurring the border between reality and fable."

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by Damon Smith

"Just put your sneakers on and go. Go on the journey."

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Cultural Equity: On the Documentary Lomax the Songhunter

by Tom Sutpen

"Every smallest branch of the human family at one time or another has carved its dreams out of the rock on which it has lived." (Alan Lomax)

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The Image-Makers, at Dusk: On the Documentary Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography

by Richard Armstrong

"Glassman uncovers networks of influence and inference, whole microhistories around the camera . . . "

Eco-Apocalypse and the Powerpoint Film: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

by Jayson Harsin

"The film is a kind of subtle argumentation by analogy, whose success rests on the viewer's desire to identify with Gore."

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Surreal Women: Leonor Fini and Kay Sage Documentaries

Great Scott! Herzog Profiles God's Angry Man

"All there is to do now is scream."

by Tom Sutpen

On the madness of Dr. Gene

Speaking Out: Pioneering Doc Word Is Out Turns 29

Buried Alive: On Frederick Wiseman's Juvenile Court

Assimilate this

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by Tom Sutpen

"The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls."

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Riefenstahl's Heights and Wiseman's Follies: Allegories of Flesh in Olympia and Titicut Follies

by Anya Meksin

The body beautiful meets the body besieged

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Ready to Rumba? Dance Fever Doc Mad Hot Ballroom Busts a Groove

The Rage from Nowhere? Arthur Dong's Licensed to Kill Interviews Murderers of Gays

These kids are more than all right

Rebel Girls: Six Documentaries by Kim Longinotto

"I'm bad, but I'm locked up."

In the Realm of the Real: The 3rd Chicago International Documentary — Film Festival

On Dream Girls, The Day I Will Never Forget, Divorce Iranian Style, Shinjuku Boys, Gaea Girls, and Runaway

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Shocking Times: Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue on DVD

"The governments will be forgotten but the masterpieces will remain."

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Defending the Deviates: Evelyn Hooker Documentary — Changing Our Minds on Video

While the counterculture turns on, Miles plugs in — with startling results

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Going Mental: The Travesties of Tarnation

"It had something to do with my sexual intercourse"

Do the Wrong Thing: Confronting The Corporation

"He'd fuck himself if he could"

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A Succession of Presents: Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Corporations, go to the head of the line; everyone else, wait

Jack-Ass II: Downsizing Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me

"Pay attention to that man behind the curtain

by Omar Odeh

Spurlock's no Sherlock

Ai-yi-yi, Robots! Survival Research Laboratories: Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem on DVD

A Memoir of Circumstance and Substance: My Architect

A Cruel and Rebellious Plot to Pervert the Minds of Viewers to Unholy Uses

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"Being There": No Maps for These Territories on DVD

A son looks at a father and sees much more in this super doc

by Scott Thill

"I was just doing my job."

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Cinerama Adventure

Put the Camera on Us! Documentaries at the 2003 SFILGFF

"See it without glasses!"

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His Brother's Keeper: Steve James' Stevie

Reality cinema celebrates homos of this year and yesteryear

Trembling Before G-d, or Die Volkschmiere

The ills of this wounded Everyman may be beyond healing

by Andrew Grossman

Who will judge the judges trembling before sex? The atheists!

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Bowling a Strike for Columbine

by Robert Ecksel

Michael Moore hits the screen with both barrels blasting

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Fidel

San Francisco Int'l Lesbian & Gay Film Festival: The Docs!

Estela Bravo's documentary offers an affectionate, in-depth portrait of the enduring world leader who stood up to the U.S.

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The Revolution Starts with Glitter! The Cockettes

As usual, reality trumps the alternatives

Occupied Territory: Sylvie Groulx's In the Shadow of Hollywood

The legendary campsters of the counterculture take a bow in this diverting documentary

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by Joanne Bealy

America's cultural colonizing is scored in a French-Canadian documentary you'll probably never see

Mondo Tranny: Monika Treut's Gendernauts

Rave On: Five Indie Music Docs on Four DVDs

This love letter to San Francisco's tranny community is a little too loving

Beauty and the Beast: The Architecture of Doom on DVD and VHS

Jello Biafra meet ‘90s D.I.Y. meet Patti Smith meet Rave Kulture meet…

Fear of Darkness: Light Keeps Me Company on VHS

The artistic underpinnings of Nazi terror

Something to Come Out To: Queer Docs Triumph at the 2001 SFILGFF

Bergman's cinematographer found more solace on the set than in real life

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Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes

A bumper crop of docs scale the heights and trawl the depths of queer culture

Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back on DVD

Livin' large with the Hung One

Stephen Sondheim's Company on DVD

The dude with the 'tude

Louis Prima: The Wildest! on DVD

Life is shit: Let's put on a show!

Feedback from the Global Village

The illustrious history of the king of the hepcats (and the queen of deadpan)

Yugoslavia in Focus: Observations From the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival

From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China offers three documentaries on DVD for the price of one; Genghis Blues is too shaggy for words

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by Cleo Cacoulidis

Archival footage, dramatizations, and dark satire capture the dire end-of-century events in the former Yugoslavia

San Francisco's 2001 International Human Rights Watch Festival

Too Haute to Handle: Jazz on a Summer's Day on DVD

Celebrating activism and exposing some of the more chaotic corners of world politics

The best jazz documentary just got better

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The Jaundiced Eye

Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment

Nonny de la Pena's grimly effective documentary looks at the near-ruination of a family when a father and son are falsely convicted of molesting the son's five-year-old boy

Long Night's Journey into Day

The "moment" is both defined and celebrated in this exceptional documentary

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Post-apartheid South Africa's rituals of admission and absolution

Fetishes

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story

Literal commodity fetishism in the far fringes of New York's S&M scene

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The Sex Pistols in The Filth and the Fury

Liberated porn queen or psychological wreck? You be the judge

Documentaries in the 2000 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Julian Temple's engaging documentary about everybody's favorite spitting, puking punk band

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street

Tammy Faye Bakker, bitter rent boys, and South Africa's liberated queens are part of this year's queer reality parade

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Going down in San Francisco's street-kid smack underground

Richard Dindo

The eminent Swiss documentarian looks at saints and sinners of history — without telling you which are which

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The Source

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

A look at all things Beat

Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin

Hitler's hired hand and master filmmaker Riefenstahl is both wonderful and horrible in Ray Muller's 1993 documentary

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Documentaries in the 1999 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

If you think Benchley, Woollcott, et al. are wits, you're half right

Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance

Gendernauts, military drag queens, communist queers — and, oh yes, John Waters distinguish this year's docs

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Contested Flesh: Paulina

Flashing needles and literal crowns of thorn mark the work — and the body — of performance artist Ron Athey

Pierre et Gilles: Love Stories

Land rights and body rights clash in this striking docudrama about a woman wronged

Frank Capra's American Dream

The love in this film about the two lost boys of Eurotrash art is mostly self-love

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This beloved film artist was driven as much by self-doubt as by his belief in the power of the "little man"

I Am Cuba

The early '60s political epic shows that art and agitprop can happily coexist.

Unmade Beds

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour

This very effective quasi-documentary looks at the mostly miserable lives of a quartet of aging New York singles

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Susan Stern's entertaining documentary takes a jaundiced look at the history and vast influence of the disturbing doll

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Love's Debris

Werner Schroeter's film on love, death, and opera

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Gay U.S.A.

Queer activism circa 1977 showed a diverse optimistic community moving ever closer to unity — before the body blow of AIDS

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Afro Promo

Curator Jenni Olson looks at the history of marginalized groups through one of the most ephemeral cultural forms, the movie trailer. Her latest compilation of coming attractions focuses on blacks in mainstream and low-budget Hollywood films from 1946 to 1976

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Gay Cuba

A refreshing look at Cuba's gay community

The Queen

This grimy, exciting artifact from the '60s shows how important beauty contests were to the queens who ruthlessly — and kind of sadly — mimicked their straight counterparts

Synthetic Pleasures

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business

After seeing this film that features everything from body and mind modifications to cryogenics to the fresh hell of cyberspace, you may want to go eat some dirt

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From the Journals of Jean Seberg

Carmen Miranda's story is far more complex and heart-wrenching than one would expect

Dialogues with Madwomen

Writer-director Mark Rappaport has devised an ingenious strategy for examining Jean Seberg's life and career. He hired Mary Beth Hurt to play the actress as if she didn't commit suicide in 1979 but lives on — like all actors — through the magic of film, reincarnated as a sort of performance artist, film historian, and cultural commentator.

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