May 4, 2005
Bright Lights. 48 + 6.
How could Bright Lights Film Journal possibly outdo itself? Take it away, Gary Morris: "Not content with publishing one issue, we've also added the entire contents of the Douglas Sirk print issue of Bright Lights from the halcyon winter of 1977-78." What's more, "we've also added two associate editors to the roster, BL regulars Megan Ratner and Robert Keser. They join Alan Vanneman in this exalted status." Before sampling the "köstliches Festmahl" of the new issue, then, back to 1977, when Gary Morris wrote, "This is our first issue dedicated to a single director. Douglas Sirk was the logical choice."
The floor is then yielded to Andrew Sarris. What's appealing about this piece is the immediate and open admission to his early prejudices against Sirk before he came around to appreciating that "oblique art of mirrors and windows and compassionate contemplation." He doesn't say exactly when that happened, but in 1977, he's still defending that appreciation. In other words, the critical establishment was still playing by strict rules in the States, whereas much earlier in Europe, as Sarris notes, "there sprung up in a new generation of film critics a desire to analyze films stylistically rather than thematically." Just as a point of reference, though, Fassbinder, who had a hand in a Sirk retrospective back in 1971, had by this point already managed to marry melodrama and (relatively) radical politics.
It's Jean-Loup Bourget who clarifies several of the questions raised by Sarris's piece by starting over and tracing the various intertwining strands of critical reception before staking out his own position: "To a large extent, the artist is a medium, not a demiurge." In short, Sirk's a-okay. In a second piece, Bourget notes the difficulty of sorting through what in his films is "personal" and what is simply part and parcel of the assignment.
"Sarris must be given credit for calling attention to Sirk at all and for suggesting that his films are best apprehended by seeking a dialectic between the subject matter and the director's execution," acknowledges Stephen Handzo; at the same time, he's got a bone to pick with Sarris over his definition of "hilarity."
Robert E Smith guides us along a slow, downward spiral as love fades from Sirk's oeuvre.
Jeanine Basinger considers the "re-interpretation of romantic myths" in There's Always Tomorrow and All I Desire.
Clips of comments from screenwriter George Zuckerman and producer Albert Zugsmith make for a nice bridge to the big payoff, Jane and Michael Stern's long talks with Sirk himself.
Departing Switzerland, we crossfade to the new issue, and personally, I was drawn right away to Stephen M Glaister's attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of AI. Good on Glaister: "AI emerges as coherently engaged with complex and decidedly unschmaltzy ideas and arguments, making it, in all likelihood, the most explicitly philosophical mainstream film since 2001." That might be overstating the case, but the film has been so unjustifiably maligned, a little pendulum-swinging is excusable, especially when conducted in the spirit that allows for a bit like this: "Before moving on to our AI primer, some rules of the game for this essay: Save the Spielbricking for later..."
Because Gary Morris's regular feature, "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror)," a collection of brief reviews, always pulls up the tail end of the TOC of each issue, I usually mention it last, too; that hardly seems fair.
Another regular feature: "Distribute This!" Tom Sutpen makes the case for Allen Baron's Blast of Silence. And the "revival room," you'll find Paul Brand on Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death.
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Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2005 2:33 AM
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