Not as we’d like but. . . . See you down the road anyway. I hope.
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together. * * * Three Billboards outside Ebbing[…]
Category: Genres
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
A Passage to India with James Fox: Understanding a Curious Country through an English Film
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
One More, Lord: Transcendent Story and Storytelling in Hacksaw Ridge
Trauma can plant its seed-bomb in the minefield of a vulnerable mind, a risk every participant in war takes, and one the film addresses in several contexts. For the viewer,[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Documentaries · Drama · Eastern European · Middle East
History Moving, Reshaping the Landscape: The Representation of Historical Processes in Carlos and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu
Like Assayas’s Carlos, Ujică’s Autobiography mostly remains an investigation of a public figure in its public functions. And both films subtly decenter their Big Man of History protagonists. Both document[…]
African American · Drama · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships
Looking Back at Moonlight
The visual style shows people as essentially solitary, a remarkable choice of perspective in view of the importance of the wider social realities – racial and sexual – that “create”[…]
French Cinema · Literature and Film · Philosophy · Writers & Critics
The Invention of Marienbad: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Morel, and Adolfo Bioy Casares on the Left Bank
Tout le film est en effet l’histoire d’une persuasion. (The whole film is the story of a persuasion.) – Alain Robbe-Grillet1 En fait, je pense qu’on a tout à fait[…]
No Control: On Eduardo de Gregorio’s Short Memory (1979)
Within this tightly composed spiral of compounding blackmail, which implicates a high-ranking South American diplomat and resembles the byzantine schemes in Merry-Go-Round, de Gregorio catalogues a litany of sins: lust,[…]
From The Squaw Man to Rutherford Falls: The Rise of Hollywood’s Contemporary Native American Woman
Over the last few decades, however, Native women have begun to appear in multidimensional roles that not only take place in contemporary society but whose characters are pivotal to the[…]
African American · Animation · Franchises & Series · Sports
“They’re Talking About Slavery”: An Older Legacy in Space Jam 2
The implication is that fun is what is ultimately being played for – that fun is freedom’s goal, the reason that liberty is desirable at all. Michael knows that if[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Silents
A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948. To commemorate this seminal figure in cinema history, we repost BLFJ regular Gordon Thomas’s deep dive, which first appeared in 2016, into[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Essays · Hollywood · Literature and Film · Westerns
In the Country of the Dream: On Cliff Booth, John Wayne and Joan Didion
There is almost certainly nowhere in America, probably even the Western world, as infamous for its venality and ambiguities than Didion’s home for three decades: Hollywood, Los Angeles. In Once[…]
Actors & Personalities · Women in Film
Vivien Leigh: Becoming Scarlett
“[Vivien Leigh] is, I should say, the most important recruit British films have ever had . . . She is still not at all keen on going to Hollywood. She could go any day if she said the word. It’s up to the English studios to develop her over here.” — Picturegoer, April 3, 1937
African · Colonialism · Education · Literature and Film · Women in Film
A Portrait of the Artist in Black and White: Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) and François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)
Much of the affective force of Palcy’s film closely resembles and draws on the deep emotional involvement Truffaut leads his audience to invest in the vulnerable, yearning ne’er-do-well Antoine Doinel.[…]
Biopic · Drama · Writers & Critics
The Sentence and the Shot: Revisiting Citizen Kane and Absalom, Absalom!
In both texts, these strategies suggest similar attempts to represent the present moment’s relationship to the American past. Faulkner’s devastating analysis of race and Welles’s meditations on wealth and worth[…]
Drama · Military and Paramilitary · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · War
Trolley Problems: The Machinery of Ethics in Eye in the Sky
This essay discusses Eye in the Sky’s elaborate staging of the trolley problem, a famous philsophical thought experiment designed to tease out our criteria for moral judgments. The author argues[…]
Take Your Time: A Step-Chart to the Films of Abel-Gordon-Romy
Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost[…]
Books · Experimental & Underground · Philosophy
The Darkroom: Developing the Mental Images Inspired by Marguerite Duras’ Le Camion
It is, ostensibly, a story about a truck. The 32-ton Saviem truck of Marguerite Duras’ 1977 experimental film Le Camion moves relentlessly forward, steered by a faceless driver, to an[…]
Classical · Historical & Epic · TV & Streaming
Did the Roman Emperor Nero Invent Netflix? (Or: Some thoughts on the perversity of the human need for fictional heroes and imaginary outcomes)
What haunts me in the story of Nero is the mercurial nature of art and fiction. They are good for us only so far as they encourage our well-being. Human[…]
Documentaries · Film Technology & History · Videos
The Last Blockbuster: An Epitaph to the Analog Age
Herein lies the greater paradox. The attributes that underpinned Blockbuster’s success, and undermined those of others, enabled the creative awakenings of countless people. The Last Blockbuster’s interviewees comment on special[…]
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