Bright Lights. 62.

"Fritz Lang's Metropolis can best be described as a myopic dystopia," writes Norman Ball in the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. "In the aftermath of pathologic greed - prophesied by Ezra Pound - what third way looms on the horizon? It's possible we may muddle through a protracted Gramscian interregnum before a cohesive new system forms in the vacuum. As for Metropolis, it ends on a rather treacly note, everyone living blissfully mediated ever after. The same assurance hardly exists for a present-day world of biologic agents, suitcase nukes, and recalcitrant greed. Still, one can hope."

"We secularists, who have long since abandoned progressive propaganda for fluidities far more anarchic than Bakhtin would ever prescribe, still persist under the culturalist spell of cinema - for the dream projections cinema affords are all our American dystopia can manage." Well, this snippet barely scratches the surface of Andrew Grossman's essay on Prokofiev and Bakhtin, modernity and polyphony and more, but it's a sentence that certainly leapt out at me.

John Calendo on Vanity Fair's spread of reenactments of stills from Hitchcock's films in the February issue: "The reader... will understand my sense of - is violation too strong a word, or titillation too frivolous? - confusion then, confusions plural, when I saw film moments I grew up on, eerie Hitchcockian mise-en-scenes whose hypnotic power can still grab me today, even after a lifetime of multiple viewings, reimagined into something rich and strange, a Mashup for the ReMix Generation, a sort of race-record cover version, with very pretty, very clean personnel - and no soul."

"There are films about relationships affected by tragedy and those about relationships that - tragically or otherwise - never seem to get started," writes DJM Saunders, setting a wandering train of thought in motion. "Before looking at a few modern examples of the latter, I'll begin with a mid 20th-century masterpiece reminiscent of the best work of Dreyer, Bresson, Fassbinder and, latest addition to the pantheon, Lars Von Trier." That would be Jean-Pierre Melville's Leon Morin, Pretre.

Lesley Chow argues the case for a "phenomenon" and "a mysterious and searching fantasy, with an almost total belief in legend": "It may not be useful to look at Wolf as a [Mike] Nichols creation, except to marvel at the conviction with which he depicts the primitive - he's one of the least misty directors around. Yet, of all places, the film is set in the power circles of New York - in rich offices and estates, all viewed with such apparent distrust that it's as if Nichols had never known what it was like to be inside."

Thomas R Britt addresses "the apparent excesses of three films that have gained a reputation for shocking the sensibilities of their audiences through indeterminate formal constructions and the presentation of exaggerated violent and sexual content. These sometimes difficult films don't form a concrete generic group, but they do share a thematic through-line: David Lynch's Lost Highway, Gaspar Noé's Irreversible and Takashi Miike's Visitor Q are all variations on the Orphic myth, with reactive heroes hurtling toward death as a means of reconciling the ruptures between them and their objects of desire."

"Lacanian academe Todd McGowan jumps on the Lynch analysis bandwagon with The Impossible David Lynch," writes Erich Kuersten. "For my part, I snapped this up immediately, having become a true McGowan fan after his excellent The End of Dissatisfaction: Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment."

"Masaki Kobayashi, the director who formed the closest alliance with him, pinpointed [Tatsuya] Nakadai's ability to embody qualities of Japan's older, pre-World War II generation and its younger postwar generation, bridging a vast gap in experience and values." An appreciation from Imogen Sara Smith: "Dividing his time between stage and screen, contemporary and period films, he has alternated naturalism and stylization, camera-oriented minimalism and heightened theatricality.... Like Hollywood's new postwar men (Clift, Brando, etc), he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals."

Also: "[T]he mask was more than a cinematic strategy; it expressed a particular mode of being: a mode of reticence, stoicism, secrecy. An immobile face was as necessary to the movie tough guy as his fedora and his gun. Dana Andrews was one of Hollywood's masked men, and even more than bigger stars like Bogart, he was the quintessential 1940s man."

"In recent years, [Norma] Shearer has become the object of a small but very devoted cult following which views her as a sort of stylish underdog, and she remains a lightning rod of critical controversy." An assessment from Dan Callahan: "Marie Antoinette was her apex, and the few films she made after it are a rather melancholy tying up of loose ends."

Damon Smith talks with Catherine Breillat about The Last Mistress and her next feature, Bad Love: "I wrote it precisely and uniquely for Naomi Campbell."

"Reading the more or less official correspondence of a film programmer might seem dull, revolving as it must around the search for films and information, the negotiation of rental rates, and the critical evaluation of screenings and audiences," writes Irina Leimbacher. "But Scott MacDonald's Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, like his previous book on Amos Vogel's Cinema 16, offers clear proof to the contrary. Indeed, Art in Cinema's collection of epistolary and curatorial documents creates a captivating portrait of one of America's earliest film societies and the San Francisco avant-garde film and art scene in the late 1940s and early 50s. Like so much of MacDonald's work, it is an essential contribution to American avant-garde film history."

Jon Lanthier finds in the criticism of Manny Farber "an admirably modernist gamble: there's the distinct possibility of exasperating the audience, but also the hope of unshackling the writer from a polarizing, and eventually inconsequential, opinion. What we're left with is more a critical experience than a critical assertion — prose that actually simulates the schizophrenic love/hate cycle of watching and emotionally processing a movie. In other words, criticism as an art and not a science, as it should be."

Also, Burn After Reading is "the only screwball comedy to leave all of its characters either moderately satisfied or dead."

More reviews of recent releases:

• "I've written many words about America in the pages of Bright Lights, trying to explain its past, its politics and its people through the lens of contemporary film - an explanation I desire for myself as much as for any readers." Matt Brennan on I'm Not There: "But perhaps this is emblematic of Dylan's fans and the filmmakers who follow him, searching for a story, a way of creating coherence and order from what Joan Didion once called 'the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.'"

• "With Italian horror cinema maestro Dario Argento's Mother of Tears (2007) comes not just the end of the 'Three Mothers Trilogy' that all Argento fans have been waiting for, but the end of filmmaking as we know it; or as Argento knows it, the apocalyptic cave-in of horror cinema's symbolic common language." Erich Kuersten: "In short it is, by any stretch, a stinker."

• "Today a resounding work of art seems improbable if not impossible, but despite all the trends against it, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a work of art that dazzles while it intrigues," writes Tony Macklin. "[L]ike Bergman's influence on Woody's stark Interiors (1978), Jules and Jim is a potent source."

• Boris Trbic: "Israeli filmmaker Dan Geva's Description of a Memory (2006) revisits Chris Marker's seminal documentary film, Description of a Struggle (1960), which, almost half a century ago, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and examines the settings, subjects, political, historical, and moral contexts at the heart of this film: the state of the young state of Israel and its citizens."

• "The new Women provides a cautionary note to remake happy Hollywood," argues Stephane Dunn.

"Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is a fantastic period piece, but I wasn't knocked out by either the script or the performances, or anything else, except the soundtrack," writes Alan Vanneman. "Miles Davis always had more attitude than talent, in my opinion, but I gotta admit, Paris at night in black-and-white with Miles on the soundtrack? It's a perfect fit."

Also: "If anyone had asked me, in the year 2000, to pick a director likely to come up with a highly wrought, $90 million, neo-Kubrickian, neo-Hitchcockian meditation on the perils of abyss-gazing, it wouldn't have been Robert Zemeckis." But then along came Cast Away.

Robert Ecksel looks into how Goethe's Faust "served as a springboard for one of the signature films of the 1960s, John Frankenheimer's harrowing Seconds."

Festival reports: Lesley Chow on this year's Melbourne International Film Festival and BL editor Gary Morris on the 2008 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and Portland's 2008 Queer Documentary Festival.

"Warner Home Video has simultaneously released two two-disc special edition DVDs of MGM's musical fables An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), titles ripe for the kind of digital repolishing their cousins Meet Me in St Louis, Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon have already enjoyed," writes Matthew Kennedy. "Revisiting the All Singing All Dancing classics sometimes feels like a walk among dinosaurs, which is not always a bad thing. In fact, it may invite contemplation on the very devolution of society. Did movies once really have this much grace, craftsmanship, musical wealth, gentle wit, devout elegance?"

Then come Gordon Thomas's DVD roundup (The Italian, Traffic in Souls, Privilege, Wings, The Ascent, Tropical Malady, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and J'Accuse) and Gary Morris's "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Affinity, La Corona, Cthulhu, Hair: Let the Sunshine In, Lolita, The Nutty Professor, Renaissance Village, Rock Bottom, In Search of the English Folksong, Summer Heights High and War Dance.

Posted by dwhudson at November 9, 2008 11:57 AM