The Demiurge in the American Eyesore: Night Tide
If Curtis Harrington had not had the ruined mall of hell unveiled to the world in 1905 as Venice of America as a setting for his occult fable, he might[…]
Author: Tom Sutpen
America is Hard to See (Emile De Antonio; 1970)
Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign started on a premise that would sound downright exotic coming from a member of the United States Senate today. He believed that US military agression[…]
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FilmCrit and the Skidoo Epiphany
Over the weekend I read an essay on J.D. Salinger which Janet Malcom published in the New York Review of Books back in that now lost and fabled time, June[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Some Remarks on Bruce Conner and Report
Entering into negotiations with executives at Time, Inc. over the sale of a film he’d shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder was adamant that his 26.6 seconds[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Close to Home: The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works Su Friedrich is a disciplined and highly skilled filmmaker who teaches school (film and video production at Princeton, to be precise) and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
More Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, The Nutty Professor, no Gorilla (I think), and no Allen Ginsberg (or Ginzberg)
Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in[…]
The Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim Part One: The Pinnacle
“Like every other skilled fabulist on earth there would forever be a part of Stroheim that truly believed his own fantasies.” 1. True Fake Nobleman Somewhere between his departure from[…]
Just Another Guy on the Lost Highway: Revisiting Two-Lane Blacktop
“It’s not some metaphorical struggle between two mighty kings of the road. It’s more like a self-deceiving ritual carried out by two of its prisoners.” In their April 1971 issue,[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Cultural Equity: On the Documentary Lomax the Songhunter
“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 It was a remarkable[…]
Attack (1956)
When Jack Palance’s Lieutenant Joe Costa suddenly returns from what seemed a certain death in Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) – his left arm hanging lifeless, rendered to ground beef by[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Writers & Critics
Sleazoid Express (2002)
Here in America we have something that, with the straightest of faces, we call our Film Heritage. What people usually mean when they invoke this solemn, unconscionably sentimental honorific is[…]
This is The Town and These Are the People
[dailymotion id=23yvenWOLheom26Si]The Town(Josef von Sternberg; 1945) Produced under the imprimatur of the U.S. Office of War Information, The Town was the only film directed in its entirety by Josef von[…]
The Ballad of Smith & Siegel:First Stanza
There’s always something very dubious about public feuds; spitting contests luminaries get into that play themselves out in a mass media culture hooked on diversion. No matter how vituperative and[…]
Great Scott! Herzog Profiles God’s Angry Man
On the madness of Dr. Gene When I was a child and life was simple, one of my favorite forms of entertainment on the dawn of a dreary Sunday morning[…]
Auteur in Distress: On Wallace Beery, von Sternberg, and Sergeant Madden
Cinema’s supreme pictorialist surrenders to “the cop on the beat” Wallace Beery was always a strange case. An outstanding character actor throughout the silent era and the early sound period,[…]
Buried Alive: On Frederick Wiseman’s Juvenile Court
“The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls . . .” The long, astonishing final sequence of[…]
Far from the Madding Multiplex: The Subtle Horror of The Innocents
This ghost story’s charms are far from ephemeral At a point in cinema’s long history when multiplex horror films either have the staying power of 20-year-old aspirin (The Ring) or[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
The Nixon of Our Dreams? On Robert Altman’s Secret Honor
We loved him, we loved him not Of all the Presidents the United States has had to endure over the last couple of centuries, this country’s relationship with Richard Nixon[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Reviews
Distribute This! Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967, Great Britain)
Watkins’ savaging of commodified culture remains disturbingly relevant After retailing Scotland’s Jacobite rebellion of 1746 to almost universal acclaim in Culloden (1964) and, in less than a year, establishing an[…]
Distribute This! Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, U.S.A.)
This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place
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