Bright Lights Film Journal

November 2010 | Issue 70

From the Editor

Short and sweet

Gary Morris

Articles

Freedom from the Pedomorphic Ideal: A Speculation on the Tragically Cute

By Andrew Grossman

"Beyond religion, we have resorted to a more modern neurosis to calm our terrors and complement our pretended ennui: cuteness."

Haunted Cinema: Movie Theatres of the Dead

By Jack Stevenson

"There are no start times, there are no intermissions . . . there is no beginning, there is no end."

Living the New High Life: A Current Note on Race and Class in America

By Andrew Grossman

"Or Can Tea Party Porn Strike a Blow for the American Way? "

That's My Girl! Well, actually, she's not.

By D. J. M. Saunders

But we love each other anyway

Betty Compson in Sternberg's Docks of New York

Memos from a Chinese Laundry: Reading Josef von Sternberg

By Gordon Thomas

"I would very much like to attract others into my world, but my world is not the world of crowds, though the crowds have often lined up before my world."

"He's Dreaming My Dream!" Beryl Sokoloff's Web of Artists

By Arlene Ducao

Of insular wonderlands and open cityscapes

"Unique (and Just a Little Queer)": Camping with James Bond

By Rob Faunce

"We want to be Bond; we want to fuck Bond; we want to be Bond fucking."

Marxism Goes to the Movies: On Pioneering Activist Film Critic Harry Alan Potamkin

By Andrew Schenker

"He's keenly sensitive to the immense possibilities of film as not merely an aesthetic medium, but given its mass influence, a social one as well."

Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Queering/Queered Heterosexuality in "Career Girl" Films of the 1950s and '60s

By Lorrie Palmer

"Perhaps Hollywood, in trying to engage in queer possibilities for its narratives and with its audiences, could only put up a resistance to the binaries in the dominant culture through humor."

From the House to the Tomb:
Exploring the Corman/Poe Films

By Gary Morris

"Corman proved to be a surprisingly sympathetic collaborator with Poe, not only because of a shared fascination with abnormal psychology and the repression of the self, but because Corman too often emphasized ambience at the expense of action."

Movies

Looking at Charlie: Monsieur Verdoux

By Alan Vanneman

"What's all this about good and evil?"

A Dog Day's Night in Brooklyn: Revisiting Lumet, Pacino, and the '70s in 2010

By John Bredin

"My first exposure to the transcendent grit of Dog Day Afternooon, at the age of 13, may have aroused an inchoate urban longing."

Draining Dracula: What's Missing from Coppola's Version?

By Lyz Reblin

Actually, a lot

Selling Yourself: Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop

By Lee Weston Sabo

"When Banksy sits in silhouette during his onscreen interviews, we have no proof that it's really him, nor even that Banksy is a real individual."

Terms of Psychic Warfare:
Brian De Palma's Divided House

By Steve Johnson

"What makes The Fury work in the end is the complementary sense that this conflict is part of the film's very construction, so you can appreciate the audacity of the auto-da-fé."

It Would Make John Waters Proud, But Shakespeare? Musical Spectacle and the Missing Bard in Hamlet 2

By Kelli Marshall

"Coogan's representation of Jesus, ascending high above the audience, is far removed from the silly, sexy Jesus who sang to us earlier wearing a wife-beater."

The Illusionist: Film Art and Political Power

By Thomas Horne

"He tries to trick you. I try to enlighten you. Which is the more noble pursuit?"

Interviews

Chasing Windmills: Talking with Juan Luis Bunuel about Welles and Don Quixote

By Peter Tonguette

"I'd love to be Orson's assistant again."

Catching It All in Stride: An Interview with Ariel and Nev Schulman on Catfish

By Matthew Sorrento

"We just followed the leads."

Stars

Short Takes: Acting: James Dean's Clumsy Punch

By Matthew Sewell

"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."

Directors

A Somewhat Forgotten Figure to Some Extent Remembered: Notes on Television Director, Script Writer, and Occasional Actor Montgomery Pittman

By John Desmond

He helped the TV western grow up

Columns

Bright Sights: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Adelheid, The War Lord, The Exploding Girl, The Law, L'Enfance Nue, Chaplin at Keystone

By Gordon Thomas

An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

Festivals

Cinema, Virginity, and Swans: The Abu Dhabi International Film Festival 2010

By Robert Keser

"For a brief week or two, adventurous filmgoers can capture elusive truths found in works of complexity, moral ambiguity, and seriousness of purpose, all uncensored."

Illuminating the Interior:
The DOC NYC Festival Debut

By Megan Ratner

Boasting Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, fest sets a high standard

I'm Not There: The 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival

By Lesley Chow

"The Killer Inside Me recalls the novel and film of American Psycho, in which a handsome killer unleashes three-dimensional violence on an otherwise banal society."

Heavy Hitter in a Delicate Balance:
The 48th New York Film Festival

By Megan Ratner

Despite concessions to commerce, much to admire

Movie Love: The First TCM Classic Film Festival

By Joan McGettigan

"Standing in line ahead of someone was enough to start such a friendship."

Recent Posts

The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943) | watch »

Margaret Lockwood in The Man in Grey One of the great Gainsborough melodramas, in the longer UK cut, on the always accommodating (if sometimes only temporarily) YouTube. Margaret Lockwood is as "wicked" here as she is in Wicked Lady. Watch it before the copyright police come a-callin'!

Watch on Youtube »

Gordon Thomas, and other BL staff, check out the eye- popping pleasures of Blu-Ray.

» Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
» The General (Keaton)
» Sunrise (Murnau)
» 8-1/2 (Fellini)
» Playtime (Tati)
» Winstanley (Brownlow & Mollo)
» Permissive (Shonteff)
» Lola Montes (Ophuls)
» My Childhood, My Ain Folk ... (Bill Douglas)
» In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
» Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
» Repulsion (Polanski)
» Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
» Everlasting Moments (Troell)

BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

» 30 Rock
» The American President
» Archer
» Batman: The Animated Series
» The Big Bang Theory
» Broadway Theatre Archive
» Car 54, Where Are You?
» Charlie’s Angels
» Cowboy Bebop
» Death of a Salesman
» Dollhouse
» Freaks and Geeks
» Have Gun Will Travel
» Mad Men
» Magnum P.I.
» Monk
» Pamela Anderson Roast
» PBS
» Renegade
» Sex and the City
» Sports Night
» Star Trek

I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

» Creative Commons
"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

» The Ivy Compton-Burnett home page
A Bright Lights side project created by George Brown devoted to the greatest novelist of the 20th century. There, we said it.

» Raw Vision
The leading online site (and print publication) devoted to those zany untrained artists who channel personality quirks, neuroses, idées fixes, and downright craziness into Art.

» Siklink.com
An endlessly fascinating clearinghouse for "the greatest hand-picked collection of bizarre, strange and unusual websites on the internet today." Highlights include the enchanting "Prison Bitch Name Generator" and "Life Gem" – how to "turn your deceased loved one into a diamond."

» Clark Ashton Smith
The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

» Classic Arcade Games
Miss Asteroids? Centipede? Frogger? Miss that you missed them? Here's your chance to enjoy the state of the art circa 1980s.

» Jack Vance
Wikipedia's gateway to our favorite writer in and of science fiction and fantasy. A national treasure.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation
"EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." Go EFF!

» The Canonical List of Weird Band Names: The Peculiar and the Profane
Another Bright Lights side project from the inimitable George Brown. You probably know the Meat Puppets but how about Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders?

» James Purdy
A good introduction to a criminally neglected postwar literary master. Be 21 or be gone for his gorgeous, harrowing works, kids.

» The Radical Ant Farm
This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

» Spectro-Pop
Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

» The Left Business Observer
Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

» Jane Bowles
Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

» WFMU
The best online radio station for our money. A deep archive and no-music-turned-away policy will keep you rollin' and tumblin' till the apocalypse.

» Henry Green
Must we create a detailed tribute page to this extraordinary British novelist championed by Auden, Updike, and Terry Southern? Or will you do it? Start with Concluding (1948).

» Women of Surrealism
They weren't all "muses" and maids – these women equaled or surpassed their more celebrated male counterparts in vision and technique.

» Ronald Firbank
He called the president of Haiti "a perfect dear" and was known to eat a single pea at dinner. Oh, and he ranks with Joyce and Woolf (see Edmund Wilson) as a groundbreaking literary modernist.

» Essential Vermeer
Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.