Pre-“Felliniesque”: Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria
“Fellini’s structuring of his heroine’s story as a series of incidents rather than a linear plot was innovative at the time, doubly so because examples of a woman at the[…]
Author: Gary Morris
Gary Morris founded Bright Lights Film Journal as a print publication in 1974; it became a web-only magazine in 1996. He is the author of the monograph Roger Corman (Twayne Publishers, 1985) and the editor of Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (Anthem Press, 2009). Brought Low by Life: Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu
Nobody suffers like Oharu The first time I went to see Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, I asked a friend who was familiar with the film to come with me. Although[…]
Book review: Sing Out! by Boze Hadleigh
Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World by Boze Hadleigh. New York: Barricade Books. $21.95 ($30.75 Cdn), ISBN 1-56980-116-9, 328pp. To order, call 1-800-59-BOOKS or e-mail lstuart@aol.com. America’s prisons[…]
Book reviews: VideoHound’s Soundtracks; VideoHound’s Independent Film Guide
VideoHound’s Soundtracks: Music from the Movies, Broadway and Television, ed. by Didier C. Deutsch. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. 1998. $24.95. ISBN: 1-57859-025-6. 1,024pp. To order, call 1-800-776-6265, or try your local[…]
Book review: Vamps, by Pam Keesey
Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale, by Pam Keesey, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997. $21.95. ISBN: 1-57344-026-4. Trade paperback, 171pp. To order, call the publisher at 800-780-2279, e-mail[…]
Book review: Billy Wilder: A Talent for Trouble
Billy Wilder, by Bernard F. Dick. New York: Da Capo Press (a division of Plenum Publishing), 1996 (updated edition). $13.95, ISBN 0-306-80729-7. Trade paperback, 198pp. To order, contact Da Capo Press[…]
Books: September Song; Marihuana, Motherhood, and Madness
Kudos to Scarecrow for finally wising up and using attractive, well-designed dust jackets on their books. Now if they can only do something about those high prices . . . but onto[…]
Animation · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Queer Cartoons at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
“Ooh, Batman, it hurts!” Cartoons have always been a rich repository of queer subtext. How else to explain all those too-close buddies and their serious lack of female companionship? (The[…]
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Queers Without Fears: The 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
“Just as in real life, many of the characters in these works – fictional, real, or reconstructed – don’t fit a precise, undeviating profile.” There are encouraging signs in this[…]
Kurosawa on Video: Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, The Lower Depths
Three of Kurosawa’s scathing critiques of Japanese society past and present – in beautiful new video transfers. Akira Kurosawa has been seen as one of the three components of a[…]
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
The Secret That Won’t Stay Hidden: Queer Innovators at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
In James Broughton’s Hermes Bird, a seven-minute close-up of a penis in various stages of arousal, the filmmaker reads a line from one of his poems: “This is the secret[…]
Bugis Street (Yonfan, 1995)
A bittersweet look at the daily lives of the tranny whores of a legendary red-light district of 1960s Singapore – with free make-up tips! This sweet, sad sketch of a[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Seduction Is Universal: Thoughts on Radley Metzger
The master of Euro-erotica is starting to get his due in recent revivals The “golden age” of porn during the ’60s and ’70s was more fool’s gold than real for[…]
Asian · Books · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror
Book Reviews: Video Premieres, Vampires on Video, Jackie Chan, Immoral Tales, Filmmaking on the Fringe, Horror and Science Fiction Films
VideoHound’s Vampires on Video, by J. Gordon Melton (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1997). Trade paper, $17.95, 335pp. ISBN 1-57859-002-7. Vampires continue to be an important fixture on the cultural landscape,[…]
Seconds in Eternity: Experimental Film Master Gregory Markopoulos
Cinema’s long-lost “supreme erotic poet” has come back to the fold – briefly How does it happen that a filmmaker once lauded as “the American avant-garde cinema’s supreme erotic poet”[…]
Animation · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Crazy Cake: Jan Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure (1997)
Noodles up the nose, murdered dolls, toe-sucking fish – these are the hallmarks of Prague’s zaniest surrealist! Forget magic realism; this is magic surrealism, of the highest order. Czech filmmaker[…]
Opera Queens: Werner Schroeter’s Love’s Debris (1996)
Thrill as the withered opera hags revisit their vital past! Scream as the mock-incestuous-lesbian sisters kiss and waltz! Shudder as hunky baritone Sergei Larin makes goo-goo eyes at a twink![…]
Queer Love: Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger’s Boyfriends (1996)
This sweet, sad queer ensemble piece from Britain surpasses its more pompous American counterparts. The bitchy, bittersweet gay ensemble movie of the pre-2000 era, e.g., The Boys in the Band or[…]
Beautiful, Empty Spaces: Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963)
If Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang aren’t enough of a lure, how about all those beautiful empty spaces? Few observers at the time (1963) were prepared for Godard,[…]
Queer Kisses: The Cinematic Taboo Before 2000
What is it about the sight of two men kissing that drives Americans insane? Frank Oz’s In and Out can be read on one level as an attempt to relocate[…]
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