Bright Lights Film Journal

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Jayro Bustamante

Activist & Political · Directors · LGBT & Queer

0

Seeing Double: Two New Films by Jayro Bustamante – Temblores and La Llorona

  • September 7, 2020

Despite their focus on timely sociopolitical matters, the films are almost never didactic (the final act of Temblores is an exception), because Bustamante is too keen to explore and shed[…]

David Whiting

Crime · Hollywood · Memoir · Stars

0

Who Was That Masked Man? Something About David Whiting

  • August 31, 2020

Why was a man who made so many bad choices in his life impossible to forget? * * * If you want to be remembered long after you are gone,[…]

Uptight

Activist & Political · African American · Drama

0

“Don’t talk to us about being killed”: Uptight and the Problem of Black Cinema in Hollywood

  • August 26, 2020

Like Dassin’s 1950 noir classic Night and the City, Uptight is shot predominantly at night, with oddly titled camera angles and bright, glaring colours, ironically organised around the shades of[…]

A Boy and His Dog

SF & Fantasy · Women in Film · Writers & Critics

0

A World Like This Deserves Contempt: Adapting Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog

  • August 21, 2020

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[…]

Birds

Drama · Horror · Women in Film

0

The Birds Is Us: Where Did We Come From?

  • August 18, 2020

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[…]

documentary

Documentaries · Historical & Epic · War

0

Sacrifice in the Name of Documentary: Apollo 11 and For Sama

  • August 15, 2020

The pair have little in common, but each goes against the grain of how this form is typically used, sacrificing everything else in the pursuit of an important story that[…]

Daredevil Reporter

Directors · Journalism · Silents

0

The Daredevil Reporter (Der Teufelsreporter) (1929): Billy/Billie Wilder

  • August 12, 2020

Before Wilder considered his own career as a filmmaker as having begun, and then reached movie fame on the other side of the Atlantic, he left behind a stumbling career[…]

Mädchen in Uniform

Drama · LGBT & Queer

0

Positive Freedoms in a Negative Space: Revisiting Mädchen in Uniform

  • August 9, 2020

From these socio-erotic negotiations sprung cinema’s first expressly lesbian-themed feature, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), not simply a tale of forbidden love but a historically particular challenge to Weimar Germany’s separation[…]

Florida Project

Drama · Essays · Urban Conflict

0

Fighting for a Place to Be: Urban Space in Tangerine and The Florida Project

  • August 6, 2020

This conditional access to space is also there in Tangerine, but it is never tested to the breaking point. The conflicts that occur between the characters and the managers of[…]

Melina León

Directors · Indigenous · Interviews · Women in Film

0

On Canción sin nombre (Song Without a Name): Talking with Director Melina León

  • August 3, 2020

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

#MeToo · Activist & Political · Drama · Women in Film · Workplace

0

#MeToo in Three Recent Films: The Assistant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and On the Record

  • July 31, 2020

#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[…]

Bacurau

Activist & Political · Brazilian Cinema · Indigenous · SF & Fantasy · Westerns

0

Bacurau: Sheltering in Place

  • July 28, 2020

When I watched Bacurau again this summer online, so much felt different: the open-air communal life of the villagers seemed even more distant and utopian; after months of Brazil’s president[…]

Sid Grauman

Exhibition · Film Technology & History · Impresarios & Moguls · Movie Theatres · Silents

0

Prologue to Hollywood: Sid Grauman and the San Francisco Origins of Tinseltown Spectacle

  • July 25, 2020

While Grauman is mostly known for spectacular venues reflecting Hollywood’s film fantasies, his early San Francisco period indicates that throughout his career he showed remarkable consistency in referring to the[…]

Driveways

Directors · Drama · Interviews

0

On Driveways and Spa Night: Talking with Director Andrew Ahn

  • July 22, 2020

“I try very hard to give the characters in my films a sense of humanity. I want this feeling for the audience that these characters exist outside of the frame.[…]

Mrs. Soffel

Drama · Interior Monologue · Letters

0

Just a Violet: On Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel

  • July 19, 2020

(interpolating material by Paul Simon, John Sebastian, Johnny Jewel, Johnny Mercer, Emily Jane Meluch, Conor Oberst, Jaret Ray Reddick, and Eddie Argos)  * * * The weight of the world[…]

Benny's Video

Absurdism · Crime · Digital · Directors · Food

0

“Will You Be Able to Stomach It?” Haneke’s Food Motif and the Violence of Creation and Consumption in Benny’s Video

  • July 15, 2020

Rage … Rage, O world and quake Here I stand and sing In perfect calm – “Jesu, mon Freude” by J. S. Bach * * * Consider the pig. Benny[…]

Suture

African American · Horror · Race

0

Color-Blind in Black and White: How Suture Wants Us to Ignore Race

  • July 13, 2020

As it stands, Suture’s bold attempt at cultural effacement never drives home any type of allegory, just as Clay is only a passenger in a narrative with barely any causal[…]

Gauntlet

Essays · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · Women in Film

0

Welcome to the Ranks of the Disenchanted: Feminism and Pacifist Spectacle in The Gauntlet

  • July 9, 2020

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[…]

Game of Thrones

Drama · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming

0

A Song of Ire: Game of Thrones, A Year Later

  • July 5, 2020

It is a fascinating exercise to consume this show according to the twenty-first-century rules of binge-watching. As the hours pass and the on-screen death count rises, the sustained passivity of[…]

Cremator

Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · Eastern European · Horror

0

The Cremator (1969): In Love with Death

  • July 2, 2020

The Cremator, only Juraj Herz’s second film, was adapted from a novel by Ladislav Fuks. It was well received, won a few awards, and was promptly banned for two decades[…]

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