Bright Lights Film Journal

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    • Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:

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Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals

2

Take What You Have Gathered from Coincidence: D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967)

  • February 2, 2016

“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]

“In these machines is contained the Dream.” The mad scientist and the piano-tuner.

Essays · Experimental & Underground · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics

1

Time and the Image: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

  • January 28, 2016

These things never happen but are always. – Sallust The dead love the most, love the longest. – Malvina von Stille * * * INTRODUCTORY Centuries of thought and imagination,[…]

Treat Williams in Prince of the City

Crime · Directors

0

Dramas of Morality and Corruption: Sidney Lumet’s Police Quartet – Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A, Night Falls on Manhattan

  • January 25, 2016

Taken as a quartet, these films shift from lauding the exposure of police corruption to struggling futilely against its pervasiveness. In Serpico and to a lesser extent Prince of the[…]

Kurt Russell as John "Hangman" Ruth, Jennifer jason-Leigh as Daisy Domergue, and Samuel L. Jackson as Major Marquis Warren

African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Westerns

2

The Hateful Eight: History’s Dark Bounty

  • January 19, 2016

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will[…]

Gueros

Drama · Reviews

0

Mexican Roadtrips: Güeros, Sicaros, and the Search for Mexico

  • January 16, 2016

Güeros is the story of a search without an object, and it offers an approach to making political art that dwells not in the illusion of authenticity, but in the[…]

Rey and Finn on Jakku

Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy

10

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: An Archetypal Review

  • January 10, 2016

Critics and fans love the film, but complain that it is less “mythic” than its predecessors. The myth is still there; it is just harder to see because it is[…]

Essays · SF & Fantasy

3

Synthetic Mythology: George Lucas, Disney, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens

  • January 2, 2016

The marriage of Disney and Lucasfilm is a match made in heaven. Disney – the man and the company – spent the better part of a century trying to homogenize[…]

Is Ava simply a machine wearing a human mask?

Philosophy · SF & Fantasy

1

A Good Game of Chess: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015)

  • December 29, 2015

“Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did.” * *[…]

Network

Activist & Political · Counterculture · Essays

0

All the World’s a Stage and Every Revolutionary a Commodity: Network and Its Progeny

  • December 11, 2015

The challenge is to convince the suits who kept recycling dramas about state-legitimized violence to get on board with the notion that counterculture or revolutionary violence can also sell. When[…]

Drama · Essays

0

A Regular Film: Deluded or Clear-sighted? (When artist and critic are one)

  • December 7, 2015

Regular or otherwise, interesting films famously have the power to take us inside other people’s heads. * * * In the 2014 film Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, director/co-writer David Zellner[…]

Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews

5

“A Different Space and Time”: Hou Hsiao-Hsien on The Assassin (2015)

  • November 21, 2015

Hou on The Assassin: I don’t believe we should blindly obey masters. Nie Yinniang is ordered by her master Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi) to kill a high-ranking official, but – once[…]

Screenshot from Manhattan

Comedy · Directors

2

“A much more thoughtful and (is it possible?) more mature director”: Woody Allen at Eighty

  • November 14, 2015

Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]

Crime · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics

1

The Complex Art of Murder: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

  • November 8, 2015

Someday someone will tease apart the many layers of Damon’s performance: the charming Ripley, the frightened Ripley, the exposed Ripley, his voice subtly betraying him even as face remains serene.[…]

Screenshot from Larry Clark's The Smell of Us

Festivals & Awards

0

Pretend We’re Dead: The 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival (July 30-Aug. 16)

  • November 1, 2015

How radically mundane can things get? * * * Doing Nothing, Really Well At her workshops in New York, the renowned screenwriter Yvette Biro asks students to come up with[…]

Screenshot from Thom Eberthardt's Sole Survivor

Horror · Reviews

2

Sh! The Horror! 13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience

  • October 29, 2015

Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning cinema’s[…]

Crime · Philosophy

0

The Horror of Depersonalisation: Lav Diaz’s Norte, Baudrillard, and the End of History

  • October 24, 2015

Fabian’s self-destructive peregrination, the ordeal he has imposed on himself through others – from the double murder, to the rape of his sister, to the slaying of his once beloved[…]

Marco Bellocchio's Blood of My Blood

Directors · Festivals & Awards

1

Thrilling and Horrifying: Bellocchio and De Palma at the Venice Film Festival 2015 (with Detours to Childhood of a Leader and Beasts of No Nation)

  • October 19, 2015

From the start of Blood of My Blood, we can sense the power that is contained within the mysterious malleability of light. Within a scene, some actions are clearly etched[…]

Books · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray

0

“Secret Energy and Vital Intelligence”: On Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)

  • October 5, 2015

What’s remarkable, in both book and film, is how the metafictional elements do not detract from our emotional investment in the straightforward fiction. Where Fowles’ interjected commentary and authorial intrusions form[…]

Naomi Watts in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (screenshot)

Actors & Personalities

0

Happy Birthday, Naomi Watts! Cinema’s Postmodern Mother of Mirrors

  • September 27, 2015

“There was a time — in movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo — when characters left the screen and came down to be incarnated into real life … Today, it would be reality that is transfused into the screen to be disincarnated. Nothing separates them anymore. The osmosis, the telemorphosis is complete.”

A shot from House of the Devil

Directors · Horror

1

Ti West Is Pregnant (On the Low-Budget Auteur of The Roost, The Innkeepers, and House of the Devil)

  • September 19, 2015

A reluctant genre force who admits his pictures start out as regular films but turn into horror movies much the same way he describes the process of filmmaking itself as[…]

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