The body beautiful meets the body besieged Leni Riefenstahl and Fred Wiseman, though rarely grouped together, are in a category apart from most documentary filmmakers in that they both used[…]
Category: Artists
Quickies: Random Short Reviews from Bobby Abate to The Whale Rider
“It’s a spring break party 24/7 365 days a year!” Bobby Abate In his online bio, queer avant-garde filmmaker Bobby Abate compares himself to Britney Spears. Like her, he says,[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Reviews
Rebel Girls: Six Documentaries by Kim Longinotto
On Dream Girls, The Day I Will Never Forget, Divorce Iranian Style, Shinjuku Boys, Gaea Girls, and Runaway The combination of reality TV and George W. Bush’s ascendancy (one wants[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Private Rituals Made Public: The Lost Erotica of Fred Halsted
“The whole world wears a jockstrap!” One of the late George Sanders’ greatest contributions to culture was found in an interview with Rex Reed (in the book Conversations in the[…]
At War with Myself: A Word with Lars von Trier at Cannes 2005
On Manderley and more Most directors at Cannes you can meet at their hotels lining the boardwalk, for a Perrier and an interview. Not Lars von Trier, the director of[…]
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
The Kid Behind the Camera: Chatting Up Darren Stein
Put the Camera on Me‘s queer wunderkind speaks I first saw Put the Camera on Me at the 2003 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and wrote about[…]
The Human (Tragi)Comedy: Talking to Arnaud Desplechin
Of Kings and Queen and other subjects I met with Arnaud Desplechin in New York last April before a sneak preview of Kings and Queen at the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn.[…]
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[…]
Thinking (and Talking) It Through: Arnaud Desplechin and Kings and Queen
“Is there anything more dazzling than the possible?” Sophisticated, high-spirited, and unpredictable, Arnaud Desplechin might be likened to a raffish, Gallic Woody Allen – the comedic aspects and neurotic energy[…]
Pulp with a Soundtrack: Getting Elmore Leonard on Film
“My sound is the absence of me.” – Elmore Leonard The curious thing about Elmore Leonard is that while his books move fast, the films that capture his tone seem[…]
Superwomen? The Bad-Ass Babes of Sin City – or Are They?
This noir-drenched comic adaptation is retro in more ways than one In the sordid, febrile netherworld of Sin City, the eponymous film re-creation of the comic by Frank Miller, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Silents
Looking at Charlie – the Mutuals: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet, brings hope and peace to Easy Street” “Fulfilling my contract with Mutual was, I suppose, the happiest period of my life.” Charlie Chaplin had[…]
Sirk and the Critics
(above) The happy-go-lucky “Sirk ensemble” from All That Heaven Allows: Russell Metty, Agnes Moorehead, Sirk, Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Ross Hunter, and dialogue director Jack Davis.
God Is Dead, or Through a Glass Darkly: On Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
Jon Halliday’s indispensable Sirk on Sirk has confirmed what Sirk’s admirers and students had long suspected: that his films are not all equally “personal,” and that he had a much[…]
Two Weeks in Another Town: Interview with Douglas Sirk
Introduction (Jane Stern) There are more drugstores in Lugano, Switzerland than in any other town in Europe. They are small cliniques, filled with Jacuzzi pumps, sitz bath salts, pine oil[…]
Introduction to Bright Lights’ Douglas Sirk Issue
This is our first issue dedicated to a single director. Douglas Sirk was the logical choice. While not exactly a household word himself, some of his films were among the[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
Sarris on Sirk
The very strange, controversial career of Douglas Sirk raises perplexing questions about form and content in the cinema. For one thing, Sirk’s literary source material has ranged from Anton Chekhov[…]
Zuckerman and Zugsmith on Sirk
GEORGE ZUCKERMAN ON SIRK Robert Wilder’s novel had been shelved and written off (because of Breen office objections and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds tobacco family) when I first[…]
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