Bright Lights Film Journal

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    • Latest Stories

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    • Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris

      February 18, 2019

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      February 15, 2019

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      There Goes the Friendly Neighborhood: Why Spider-Man Needs Adversity

  • Siodmak Ophuls Bernhardt

    Directors · Essays · Noir

    0

    Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris

    • February 18, 2019

    Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]

  • sneakers

    Essays · Fashion

    0

    You Say You Want an Evolution: Sneaker Cinema’s Narrative and Aesthetic Ground Zero

    • February 15, 2019

    What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby[…]

  • Betty Garrett

    Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals

    0

    Who Becomes a Legend Most? And Why Wasn’t It Betty Garrett?

    • February 12, 2019

    “The reason I sought out Betty Garrett’s book in the first place was because of something devastating that I read – and didn’t want to be true – in Farley[…]

  • Birdbox

    Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy

    0

    Facing “Ultraviolence”: Blindness as Insight in Bird Box

    • February 10, 2019

    Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]

Most Recent

Cuarón

Directors

0

The Auteurist Stork: Alfonso Cuarón’s Cinema of Deliverance

  • February 6, 2019

Roma is the latest edition in what can be considered Cuarón’s prenatal trilogy, preceded by Children of Men (2006) and Gravity. This is a director obsessed with matters of pregnancy,[…]

Comedy · SF & Fantasy

0

“Downsizing” Liberal Hollywood: How the Film’s Christian Message Undermines Arguments for National Health Care

  • February 2, 2019

Downsizing is a dystopic satire on American values that has an unsurprising and credible core involving a sick and impoverished underclass. It is credible because the USA is alone among[…]

More

Montgomery Clift

Actors & Personalities · Documentaries

0

Making Montgomery Clift: An Intimate Exploration of a Hollywood Enigma

  • January 30, 2019

As Robert Clift states in the film: “The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice: in his death, and then again when they couldn’t find him in[…]

Mitchum

Actors & Personalities

0

Looking for Quiet: The Other Side of Robert Mitchum

  • January 26, 2019

Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]

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,[…]

Snow White

Animation · Women in Film

0

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and #MeToo: Reclaiming a Classic

  • December 30, 2018

Snow White’s frailty isn’t her weakness or her fault. Disney saw the child in her, and loved it well enough to accentuate and nurture it. Today, we present children with[…]

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.[…]

Nicolas Roeg

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[…]

Actors & Personalities · Artists

10

Extinguishing Features: The Last Years of Richard Pryor

  • December 10, 2018

Editor’s Note: Richard Pryor died on this date, December 10, 2005, nine days shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. We salute this comic genius and cultural game-changer by reposting Julian Upton’s[…]

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[…]

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