Cineaste. Winter 08.

The editors of Cineaste introduce a critical symposium on "Cult Film": "What initially drew our attention was that not only did cult film turn up in our conversations with great frequency, it also arrived in numerous guises. Cult as shock and schlock; cult as nostalgia; cult as marginality; cult as intensity and passion; cult as marketing hype; cult as fad and fashion; cult as subversion; cult as historical era marker. Too many things to too many people, cult film seemed to us to be stretching so thinly before our eyes as to potentially lose its meaning in a dizzying vortex. It seemed an untenable situation ripe for critical investigation."

"In cult film, audience attention to body parts is analogous with the way we identify routinely with characters," argues Lesley Chow. "In a cult movie where fixations abound, our feelings of surprise, dread, and arousal leap not only from person to person but from body part to body part. Is it any wonder that cult films make such a fetish of mouths: the red lips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)... have come to symbolize the psychic and sexual transfers of that film. More recently, Showgirls... offers an equally arresting yet confounding sexual image. Paul Verhoeven creates a race of glazed, surgically perfected dancers - like blonde androids - whose manic thrusts and gyrations suggest a crazed distortion of the Hollywood ideal. Such films destabilize our normative relationships with our bodies."

Martha P Nochimson (site), author of Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong on the third volume of the Warner Gangsters Collection: "Put simply, none of the films in this collection is as challenging to American values as what I call the true gangster film. Some of the films in this collection don't even contain gangsters."

"Despite [Brideshead Revisited's] position as a novel of cultural criticism and one fertile with possible connections to current concerns affecting British society, the latest incarnation of [Evelyn] Waugh's most lasting work compromises that potential, reducing the plot primarily to its romantic elements," argues Oliver Pattenden.

"Complex as Berlin Alexanderplatz may sound, with its multiple levels of address, its theatricality, and its manipulation of time," writes Jared Rapfogel, "it is ultimately one of Fassbinder's most direct, emotionally transparent films, disarmingly free of irony or affect; even the epilogue, in which Fassbinder departs from the style and mode of the rest of the film to create an experimental, surreal, phantasmagoric meditation on the themes and motifs of the past thirteen hours, is actually a fairly faithful attempt to dramatize the novel's final, virtually unadaptable couple chapters, with almost every element, even the most outlandish, coming from the text."

Rahul Hamid on Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film 1900 - 1934, Saved from the Flames: 54 Rare and Restored Films 1896-1944 and Discovering Cinema: Learning to Talk and Movies Dream in Color: "In some sense these releases and others like them can keep the tradition of the autodidact film buff alive in a world where expertise in film is increasingly professionalized through the continuing expansion of the academic field of cinema studies in universities."

David Sterritt reviews Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard: "Brody's great accomplishment is to shape Godard's working life into a lucid and coherent narrative, considerably longer and more detailed than Colin MacCabe's estimable 2003 biography Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, yet eminently readable and admirably informative.... [T]he chronological structure and straightforward style make for a compelling and sometimes spellbinding read. Ironically, however, the book's crisp narrative through-line gives rise to its main weakness - too much emphasis on romance as a motivating power - as well as many of its strengths."

Posted by dwhudson at December 2, 2008 7:36 AM