actor profiles
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
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Writer's Guidelines
Bright Lights Film Journal is a popular-academic hybrid of movie
analysis, history, and commentary,
looking at classic and commercial, independent, exploitation, and
international film from a wide range of vantage points from the
aesthetic to the political.
We are interested in short pieces (reviews of single movies, videos, etc.) and more substantial studies of directors and other key production figures (cinematographers and producers, for example), analyses of genres, studios and studio style, and topics like gender and minority contributions to film. A prime area of focus is on the connection between capitalist society and the images that reflect, support, or subvert it — movies as propaganda.
Much of our material comes from students and professors, but enthusiastic, educated, smartly written fan pieces are always welcome. Bright Lights is not an academic ghetto, and looks more for idiosyncratic style, and the ability to make ideas available to wide audiences, than bone-dry scholarly analysis. We are most interested in bringing ideas to a wide readership hungry for information but put off by standard, navel-gazing academic writing. If your submission is laden with Lacanish, psychoanalytic, and other specialist hermetic jargon (e.g., words like "semiotic" and "transumption"), please head elsewhere.
Some sample paragraphs from back issues will illustrate the strong, sometimes combative tone we most appreciate:
"In the novel, Dracula is overtly polysexual; he desires men, women, and children, and he rejects all conventional forms of sexuality because intercourse is never his object... The romance in Coppola's version of the vampire legend leaves out precisely what makes the legend dangerous and the vampire monstrous—his alternative sexuality..." (from Judith Halberstam's "On Vampires, Lesbians, and Coppola's Dracula")
"In the Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s, our and the detective's reading of the mystery is frustrated by the detective's limited awareness and exaggerated vulnerability. The confused Marlowe of Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944) falls repeatedly into "black pits" and drags us there with him; he is drugged and finally blinded. Mike Hammer fails to unscramble the mysterious identity of the great atomic whatsit until it virtually explodes in his face in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. (from John Belton's, "Knights of the Road: Hoboes and Tramps in Film Noir")
"Screwball Squirrel (1944) is in fact a virtual paragon of obnoxity, launching Avery's most single-minded attacks against cute-little-animal schools of cartooning. Where audiences were tickled pink by such smart alecks as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, enjoying these characters' slick resourcefulness in outwitting the hunters, the wiseacre Screwy Squirrel is conversely calculated to upset audience composure, shatter audience complacency with his snot-nosed sniffling and unpleasant grating chuckle." (from "Tex Avery: Arch-Radicalizer of the Hollywood Cartoon," by Greg Ford).
Nuts and Bolts I
We exist only as a Web page, so keep that in mind when you submit articles. We are in this for the pleasure not the profit, and since we don't make money off it, neither will you. (We take the phrase "free marketplace of ideas" literally.) We can publish articles of practically any length, though we discourage you from sending us your books or dissertations.
Though there are no financial benefits, there are other ones, as follows:
1. You retain all rights to your articles. And you are free to recycle them into other publications, something we encourage particularly for print publication. Though we hope as a courtesy you will mention the piece was previously published in Bright Lights.
2. You are in good company. We publish the best writers in the field. We accept a very small percentage of submissions — only the best.
3. We respect your work. We present it as appealingly as possible, with a crisp, clean layout and lots of illustrations.
4. You will be read. Bright Lights is one of the most popular sites of its kind on the Web, with a google PageRank of 7/10 and an average of 300,000 unique visitors per month (as of February 2008). We've been on the Web since 1996.
Nuts and Bolts II
Ideal length for straight reviews is 600-1800 words, for overviews, interviews, or more ambitious think pieces, 2000-3000 words is good. However, we can accept virtually any length if the subject merits it, though we will have a hissy fit if you send us your book or dissertation. E-mail submissions only, please.
We have no set taboos and prefer passionate, opinionated, even ranting pieces that are intelligently and engagingly written. Political, anti-capitalist, pro-sex tirades always welcome.
Typically, we have no particular theme, preferring a potpourri — or maybe goulash is a better word — made up of what your editor, our regular writers, and other contributors are thinking and writing about.
We always need overviews of international and minority cinemas, in-depth director interviews, discussions of the impact of multimedia on film, breakthrough technologies, animation, and studies of neglected or misinterpreted figures in film history.
Gary Morris
Bright Lights Film Journal
E-mail:
b r i g h t l i g h t s f i l m @ y a h o o . c o m
(no spaces)
ALSO: See our list of banned words.
