The Film Journal. 13.

The Film Journal may be going on hiatus - "hopefully no more than a year," writes editor Rick Curnutte, but there's a fine issue to hold us over before the Journal returns from its new base in Chicago.

The centerpiece of Issue 13 is a six-article retrospective devoted to Richard Fleischer, opening with...

• This from Zach Campbell: "If it is not too perverse a statement to make regarding the spirit of this collection of articles, I would like to propose something that would be only too obvious in many circles: that Richard Fleischer is not an auteur in any commonly held sense, but instead a metteur-en-scène." The question here: "[H]ow does one deal with the direction of a film (as a craft, as an art) when the director is not a master, not even the driving force behind a film's conception and exhibition?"

• Michael E Grost examines Fleischer's use of pans in Bodyguard, Follow Me Quietly, Armored Car Robbery and The Narrow Margin.

• Robert Keser takes a long look at Mandingo, Fleischer's 38th feature, "and arguably his finest": "[T]he film's uncompromising depiction of the moral wreckage caused by the slavery system remains undiminished."

• Dan Sallitt on Barabbas: "the fusion of [Par] Lagerkvist's philosophically challenged protagonist and [Anthony] Quinn's mumbling, fidgeting puppydog savage is one of the main reasons that Fleischer's version of the story lingers in the memory longer than [Alf] Sjöberg's thoughtful earlier adaptation."

• Blake Lucas explores the context of These Thousand Hills, which "directs us to a specific gift of this director, which I will call a gift for contextualizing."

• Michael Worrall wraps the retrospective with an overview of the career: "The overall effect of Fleischer's cinema is to be shaken and moved by the emotional and physical violence that erupts across the screen."

The "Essays" section opens unexpectedly with an excerpt from Aunt Bessie's How to Survive a Day Job While Pursuing the Creative Life, a breezy recollection from the late director, Robert Wise.

Jump cut to Vartan P Messier's revisitation of that heady ground where Baudrillard and The Matrix meet; but the prose isn't nearly as chewy as it might have been, the lines it draws quite easy to follow.

Victoria Oxberry looks into the influences of early 30s American horror films and, by extension, the German Expressionist classics of the 20s on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Brian Wilson admires Majid Majidi's Baran, an accomplishment more complex that it may seem at first glance. Also: "Brief Notes on Land of the Dead."

Werner Herzog is currently being celebrated right and left, but David Church has problems with Even Dwarfs Started Small: "[I]t cannot avoid negative stereotypes of disability which taint its more positive objectives."

Amar Bakshi on François Truffaut's The Wild Child, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and Fritz Lang's Fury: "[I]t seemed to most of these filmmakers, that the very means of overcoming subjugation to institutions of power is embedded in a new mechanism of power - the film."

"No film, however superficial it might appear, is ever ideologically innocent," writes Leon Saunders Calvert in "Ideology and the Modern Historical Epic: How the political concerns in the genre have changed since 11th September 2001."

2005 was, like 1993, one of those years for Steven Spielberg. James Rose considers a scene in the movie that gave him the clout to pull off such feats - Jaws.

"What does it mean when a practitioner, even a master, of one art form (in this case, film) goes out to praise an entirely different art form? I suggest that it can - and in this case, does - signal the creation of a brand new language." Justin Vicari on that voracious reader, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Andrew Repasky McElhinney claims Murder-Set-Pieces is "the exploitation film of the 9/11 decade" and talks with director Nick Palumbo.

Reviews:

• Christopher Bourne on Samira Makhmalbaf's Five in the Afternoon.
• Jenna Ng on Brokeback Mountain.
• Bourne on Shinya Tsukamoto's "beautiful new film," Vital.

Posted by dwhudson at January 24, 2006 2:54 PM