Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
Mae West: Pleasure Woman
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
Category: Women in Film
African American · Literature and Film · Women in Film
“And if you can, why wouldn’t you?” Nella Larsen, Netflix, and Passing (2021)
The staying power of Passing in 2021 goes far beyond its ripped-from-the-headlines resonances, however. Larsen’s story endures, on the one hand, for its intricate depiction of female friendship, rivalry, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
An Innocent Lulu: How Pabst Rewrote Wedekind in Pandora’s Box
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Horror · Psychology · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming · Women in Film
A Record of Human Matter: John Newland’s One Step Beyond
But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it[…]
African American · Drama · Melodrama · Reviews · Women in Film
Intimations of Lifelessness: Sirk’s Ironic Tearjerker
This article appeared first in our all-Sirk print issue (#6, Winter 1977) and was reposted in the March 1997 online version of Bright Lights. We present it here to celebrate[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Women in Film
The Nouchka van Brakel Trilogy: An Anthology of Awakenings
The relative obscurity of van Brakel’s works gives these decades-old films a sort of newness. Indeed, there’s a genuineness in the films that seems foreign, even exotic, in our streaming[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Being Nobody: The Rise and Fall of Rey Skywalker
In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey learns that her grandfather is Emperor Palpatine. Feeling more like a backtrack than a step forward, this new information is a betrayal of Rey’s[…]
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[…]
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.[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film
Book review: Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure
Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). The Coppola who emerges from Rogers’s study is therefore something of a double agent. On[…]
Essays · Feminism · Women in Film · Work and Workplace
Making Space: Proxima Reckons with Working Motherhood in the Movies
Sarah is a good astronaut because she is a mother, not in spite of it. And she is a good mother because she is a good astronaut. If Sarah were[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Horror · Literature and Film · Women in Film
“The Shadow and the Ghost”: The Spirit of Hitchcock and Rebecca’s Suspicions of Succession
In transposing Rebecca, notice how Hitchcock’s camera attends to shadows – bisecting faces and bruising frames – to approximate du Maurier’s disorienting syntax and looming dread. Or watch as his[…]
Activist & Political · Hollywood · Teaching · War · Women in Film
Ingeworthy: Teaching William Inge in Kabul
It is in the American women’s picture that, in my classroom at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, I’m able to lead students in a global reading of women’s[…]
Books · Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Women in Film
Her Incantatory Voice: Barbara Rubin and Christmas on Earth
From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the[…]
SF & Fantasy · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
A World Like This Deserves Contempt: Adapting Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog
A Boy and His Dog’s promotional advertisements also reveal how the novella was adapted and modified to suit the tastes of the American popular film-going public. The movie’s promo posters[…]
Drama · Horror · Women in Film
The Birds Is Us: Where Did We Come From?
The movie is, literally, a projection of our mental landscape. We passively sit back (like Jeffries in Rear Window) and the world appears as we live and make it. We[…]
Directors · Indigenous · Interviews · Women in Film
On Canción sin nombre (Song Without a Name): Talking with Director Melina León
It’s the kind of film I wanted to make where you see social implications growing from a personal story. What made it very hard was the sadness of it and[…]
#MeToo · Activist & Political · Drama · Women in Film · Workplace
#MeToo in Three Recent Films: The Assistant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and On the Record
#MeToo has been an unequivocal success in terms of calling out the rampant sexual abuse that exists in the veins of Hollywood, but has been less successful in allowing room[…]
Essays · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · Women in Film
Welcome to the Ranks of the Disenchanted: Feminism and Pacifist Spectacle in The Gauntlet
This essay is a revised version of a book chapter that originally appeared in the anthology Clint Eastwood’s Cinema of Trauma: Essays on PTSD in the Director’s Films, eds., Charles[…]
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