Bright Lights. 59.

Via Bright Lights After Dark comes new not only of a new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal but also of Film Annex's interview with BL editor Gary Morris, who tells the story behind the journal. Since its launch in 1974, he says, "the magazine has definitely evolved over the years. My ongoing interest in leftist politics, alternative subcultures, and mixing popular and academic voices has expanded it beyond the early auteurist slant, though director studies remain important."

So, as a way into Issue 59, let's start with those. "For most of his career, Peter Watkins has had a growing apprehension over the developing 'language' of Western - and now international - audiovisual media, whether generated by a movie screen or a TV set," writes Gordon Thomas. "Entertainments like the Bourne films are drugs, and Watkins calls their delivery system Monoform: in his words, 'the repetitive language that uses rapid "seamless" cuts, and an incessant bombardment of movement and sound.'... In the 19th-century Norway and Sweden, respectively, of his films Edvard Munch and The Freethinker, it's the newspapers that functioned as film and TV, manipulated by humongous corporations, do today. In those days, it was the monarchies pulling the strings. Then came Griffith and the movies."

With a newly "remixed and remastered" The Living End screening at Sundance (and soon, in Berlin), Damon Smith met Gregg Araki in Park City for a retrospective chat.

"In some sense I had always assumed [Wes Anderson] identified with the alienated powerlessness of Max in Rushmore and Margot in The Royal Tenenbaums, but really it's Max's willfulness, Royal's manipulative sneakiness, and Zissou's and Owen Wilson's whiny controlling streaks that are truly at the lonely hearts of his films," writes Joseph Aisenberg. "They're all spoiled children trying to make the world give them the great wonderful thing they think they want that somehow or other keeps slipping out of their grasps."

Then it's onto actors. Justin Vicari remembers Heath Ledger: "The entertainment industry has been known to squeeze blood out of stones; it is a truism that the system tends to breed real-life disasters more poignant and heartbreaking than the plots of the films it churns out."

"[S]ince the dawn of movies, eras have been remembered not by their all-too human political and military leaders, but by their movie stars, the goddesses, à la Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda, Madonna - who emblemize the spirit of our peoples, and the sacrificial virgins, à la Janet Leigh, and now Naomi Watts, shadow mother of mirrors for the postmodern 21st century - who symbolize the devouring nature of media itself," writes Erich Keursten.

"Like Cary Grant, who might be his younger, pricklier British brother, [Charles] Boyer was happy to provide support for a complex, flashy female co-star," writes Dan Callahan. "Also like Grant, he has been consistently underrated as an actor."

As for the, well, synergy, I suppose, of the director and actor: "In his classic 1933 text, now issued as Film as Art, Rudolf Arnheim shows how the unique limitations of film (when compared with lived reality), though commonly viewed as weaknesses of the art form, were in actuality the properties that granted the medium its singular effectiveness," writes Andrew Schenker. "Out of this limited capacity for characterization, directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jia Zhang-ke and many other of the world's best filmmakers have created a new conception of character, more in tune with the cinema's real capacities, a conception that sets the characters unemphatically into their environments and makes no attempt to provide them with a false complexity that the film would be incapable of sustaining."

"In cinema, making up a twin, a doppelganger, or an alter ego is almost a conventional thing to do: as common a ploy as the forging of love letters," writes Lesley Chow in a piece on Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett. "But there is another reason why a character might choose to divide: honesty."

Andrew Grossman: "Film music is generally misdiagnosed as an aesthetic problem: how does one maximize through music the expressivity of a scene? Rarely is it appreciated for the moral problem that a Sidney Lumet or Satyajit Ray recognized it to be: how can the sparest possible use of music maximize the audience's imaginative interaction with the image?"

In a piece on editing, DJM Saunders considers City of God and Central Station; The Man Who Wasn't There and Moonrise; and Good Night, and Good Luck.

"The destruction of Pruitt-Igoe exists in American culture as an early moment of crisis for modernist fantasies of the city," writes Amy Abugo Ongiri. "However, popular and low culture had been pointing the direction to this crisis for years through their representation of the abject spaces of the country and the ghetto. In this paper, I draw on two seemingly unrelated, under-celebrated moments of cinema production history - hillbilly sexploitation and blaxploitation - in which those spaces not only figure significantly but are also significantly refigured. I do so not only to consider urbanity's disjunctions but disjunctions in the national imagination that governs representational notions of race, class, and power."

"Recent Cinema Roundabout":

• With L'Âge des Ténèbres, Denys Arcand is unsparing in his satire of the super-bloated Quebec bureaucracy, the nanny state par excellence in action," writes Neil Rogachevsky.

• Megan Ratner: "In 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, lies inform every word of dialogue; all bets are off and you're on your own. The performances enhance the camerawork and the spare script. [Cristian] Mungiu's first-rate achievement is to have made a film both accurate to a specific place and time and a timeless illustration of the DNA-level damage such repression can wreak. It signals the arrival of a filmmaker of the highest order."

• Reviewing I Am Legend, David L Pike considers the "many interesting effects [that] ripple out from the need to reconcile [Will] Smith's star persona with the film's debt to [the] seminal cycle of 70s paranoia and pop-apocalypticism."

• Erich Kuersten revisits Death Proof: "Like the best of 'cult cinema,' it offers pleasures both transgressive and visceral, and like the best of 'art cinema,' it offers deconstruction of same, even as it's roaring along at 200 mph."

Alan Jacobson praises the "triumphant blend of content and filmmaking brio" in Jesus Camp.

Festival reports: Cleo Cacoulidis from Thessaloniki and Robert Keser from Chicago.

Gary Morris turns in another terrific edition of "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema."

"Revival Room":

• Roger Corman's Bloody Mama "casts the Barkers' struggle as an inversion of the American success story, pitting an intensely determined, violently antisocial, self-motivated, and self-enclosed group against the 'civilized society' around them," writes Gary Morris.

• "On the surface, each of the three vignettes of the richly complex Mystery Train (1989), [Jim] Jarmusch's first foray into color, is connected in being about aliens making their way in Memphis, trying to reconcile their foreignness with perhaps the most mythically 'American' city," writes Alan Jacobson. "But a closer read reveals more because with a work of art as at once compelling and obfuscated as this film, clues offer rare help in discerning meaning."

• "For all its historical significance as one of only six all-black films made during the Hollywood Studio era, The Green Pastures (1936) has been largely neglected by criticism," notes GS Morris. "[Playwright and co-director Marc] Connelly intends not a realistic portrayal of the souls of black folk, but a comforting, nonjudgmental, harmlessly tolerant religion that can provide a balm for his increasingly agnostic generation. He achieves this dubious purpose by locating his God in a kindly Uncle Tom - 'hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind.' With his Uncle Tom God, Connelly crafts a religious vision that can satisfy his spiritual needs while affirming his own white liberal racism and defending the white, middle-class status quo."

• Lili features Leslie Caron's "most touching performance, and it shows the intelligence of her technique both as a dancer and as an actress," writes Dan Callahan.

And Gordon Thomas has a massive DVD roundup.

Posted by dwhudson at February 4, 2008 10:43 AM