Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience
Is the filmmaker tyrant, aesthete, ringmaster, or hermit? For whom does an artist create? It is a question frequently put, perhaps more to writers than to others, and perhaps the[…]
Author: A. Jay Adler
A. Jay Adler, a New Yorker always, did his graduate work at Columbia University, and is professor of English Emeritus at Los Angeles Southwest College and Adjunct Professor of English at California State University Dominguez Hills. He writes in all genres, including fiction and creative nonfiction, and is contributing poetry editor for West magazine. Adler's screenplay What We Were Thinking Of won second prize at the Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition. In addition to Bright Lights Film Journal, his film criticism has appeared in Senses of Cinema and the Fortnightly Review. Forthcoming in 2014, Adler will appear as the featured writer, with poetry and prose, in the inaugural issue of Footnote, a Literary Journal of History.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows
“Whether alone or with others, you live with yourself.” Like Jean-Pierre Melville, Albert Camus was a young man active in the French Resistance, during which he wrote editorials for the[…]
More
A History of Violence: A Minimum of Thought
“A whole load of ‘Aw’ with not a lot of ‘shucks,’ updated only by a little cunnilingus.” If David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence were an actor, it would be[…]
The Disturbance of the Real: Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen
How real is the director’s much-vaunted “multilayered depiction of reality”? The question is, does it frighten you more that your congenial neighbor – the one whose house has the hummingbird[…]
The Altered State of War: Heaven, Hell, and the Structure of the Combat Film
“The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”
Together Again for the First Time: Movies Holding Mirrors Up to Movies
Imitation: great for flattery, bad for art
Links + BSA
