Bright Lights Film Journal

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Nina Paley

Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality

0

Making Fun: The Satiric Impulse in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism

  • January 21, 2019

In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]

Suspiria

Designers · Horror · Interviews

0

In the Mütterhaus: A Conversation with Suspiria’s Production Designer, Inbal Weinberg

  • January 17, 2019

“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame.” * * * Luca Guadagnino follows up 2016’s A Bigger Splash and 2017’s Call Me by Your Name with 2018’s Suspiria, a remake of[…]

Thessaloniki

Festivals & Awards

0

The 59th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (Nov. 1-11, 2018)

  • January 14, 2019

From volatile sibling relationships to House of Atreus–style depravity, traditional ideas about family were upended and replaced with a contemporary look at the complex, ever-expanding definition of the ties that[…]

Sparrow

Asian · Crime · Directors

0

Modernity, Melancholia, and Cultural Heritage: Johnnie To’s Sparrow

  • January 11, 2019

In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]

voice-over

Essays · Sound & Language

0

Between Diegesis and Mimesis: Voice-Over Narration in Fiction Film

  • January 7, 2019

This brief essay will seek to answer the distinctions between mimetic and diegetic elements in a filmic text, isolate the voice-over as a unique event located between the strict division[…]

Enfermedad del Domingo

Drama

0

Mother Nature: Ramón Salazar’s La Enfermedad del Domingo (2018)  

  • January 3, 2019

“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]

Ardel Wray

Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics

0

Ardel Wray: Val Lewton’s Forgotten Screenwriter

  • December 26, 2018

Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]

post-horror

Essays · Horror

0

Post-Horror Kinships: From Goodnight Mommy to Get Out

  • December 20, 2018

“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]

Unforgiven

War · Westerns

0

Wars, Whores, and the Moral Reconstruction of the West: Unforgiven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

  • December 17, 2018

The characters’ fates are determined more by chance than by anything else, so pursuing justice in Unforgiven is about as futile as fighting an organized battle in Good Bad Ugly.[…]

Directors

0

“Nicholas Who?” An Irreverently Linear Journey Through the Work of the Late Nicolas Roeg, Director of Well Over Four Films

  • December 12, 2018

“There’s something that happened, and there’s a kind of ring around that event – or it’s fenced off – and everything else is okay around it, but there’s just something[…]

noir

Books · Noir

0

Book Review: It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey

  • December 3, 2018

It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]

Herzog

Directors · Documentaries · Essays

0

But It Did Happen! Werner Herzog and the Ecstatic Truth

  • November 27, 2018

I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]

production design

Designers · Interviews

0

Designing Women: Talking with Costume Designer Olga Mill and Production Designer Grace Yun about Hereditary and First Reformed

  • November 23, 2018

We worked to create a “slow film” aesthetic, with distinct moments where it broke from the rules. Paul planned to use boredom and duration as the method, with longer takes,[…]

shampoo

Comedy · Counterculture · Drama

0

Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Enduring Charms of Shampoo

  • November 20, 2018

Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]

Almacenados

Absurdism · Drama · Workplace

0

Godot’s Never Coming: Almacenados’ Anti-Absurdist Vision of the Workplace

  • November 15, 2018

The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]

Directors

0

Le Misanthrope: On Lars von Trier

  • November 10, 2018

If there’s an authorial hand in Trier’s films, it serves only to pull the wings off the fly. * * * In the thirty-five-odd years he’s been active, Lars von[…]

Festivals & Awards · Women in Film

0

Pop Deluxe: Natalie Portman and Sasheer Zamata at Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 6-16, 2018)

  • November 5, 2018

Rather than a fascist leader, in Vox Lux Celeste suggests a different sort of monstrosity – a receptacle for the nation’s horrors and fantasies, even more than a Madonna or a[…]

Liberty Valance

Essays · Westerns

0

John Wayne Burns His Hand: Gestures in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

  • October 31, 2018

Some actors’ gestures are the equivalent of a great singer, dancer, or athlete achieving the heights of their profession. And the reason so many people respond to Ford’s films by[…]

Breaking Away

Drama · Youth

1

Peter Yates’ Breaking Away at 40: An Early Warning of America’s Culture War

  • October 26, 2018

Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]

Mandy

Drugs · Horror

0

Galactic Angst: Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy Swallows the Cosmos

  • October 20, 2018

The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]

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