New Bright Lights Film Journal

Image from My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Wai Ka-Fai with Johnny To, 2002).

Read The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011) By Lesley Chow

Film Studies For Free heard, via David Hudson, of a brand new, and excellent, issue of online Bright Lights Film Journal. Just feast your eyes on the below, directly-linked-to contents.

As an old advertising campaign used to say, "I never knew there was so much in it..." Except that FSFF always did know this about BLFJ, a truly brilliant repository of incredibly lively, scrupulously edited, and highly informative online film writing....

From the Editor

• America’s New Secret Weapon:
  Bright Lights!
• Gary Morris

ARTICLES

• Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources ,By JD Markel. In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid

• The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity, By Andrew Grossman “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges

• Culture and the Individual Talent? Three Filmmakers on Male Mid-Life Crisis, By John Engle“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

• Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex, By Marilyn Papayanis “How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” — Rachel P. Maines

• The Film Criticism of Alexis De Tocqueville: Or, When Heroes Yearn as Clouds Drift, By Andrew Grossman “These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”

• Helping Humanity: We All Get Stressed Out, By D. J. M. Saunders But have you stopped behaving strangely?

• Short Takes: Mise-en-Scène: Dorothy’s Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning By Matthew Sewell “George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”

• A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), By John Hall “Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”

• Sirk or Brecht? Or Both?: Determining the Guiding Influence in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, By Peter Tyson “Is Fassbinder a Sirkian who, despite distancing techniques and irony, achieves audience identification and emotional catharsis? Or is he a hard-nosed Brechtian who distances us clinically from his characters so that we can calmly criticise their shortcomings?”

• Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption, By Prakash Kona “During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)

EXPLOITATION

• Strangers with Candy: The Highway Safety Foundation and The Child Molester (1964), By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas “The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”

MOVIES

• Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty, By Jacob Mikanowski “When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”

• (God)Father and Son: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather, By Joseph Aisenberg “There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”

• Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003), By Ian Murphy “Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”

• Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems, By Norman Ball “How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”

TELEVISION

• “You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer, By Alan Vanneman Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo

STARS

• Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster, By Jake Hinkson “Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”

• Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author, By Penelope Andrew “The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband

• The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers, By Christopher Sandford “Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”

DIRECTORS

• The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes, By Rob Smart “These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”

• Between Heaven and Hell: Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground, By Joanne De Simone “Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”

• Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai, By Michael Ward “Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”

FILM FESTIVALS

• The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011), By Lesley Chow, “This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”

• A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival (2011), By Megan Ratner “Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”

• Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010) By Tijana Mamula, Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism

COLUMNS

• Bright Sights: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within By Gordon Thomas An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

INTERVIEW

• Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce By Matthew Sorrento “Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”

BOOKS

• Swedish Sensationfilms, Daniel Ekeroth, reviewed by Erich Kuersten

• Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle, reviewed by C. J. Kutner

• Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival, by Justin Vicari, reviewed by Robert von Dassanowsky

• Back to the Future, by Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate, reviewed by Leah Anderst

In authenticity: Douglas Sirk and the Sirkian Melodrama

Image from Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

I first saw Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life in 1959 at The Yeadon, a neighbourhood movie house in a white working-class suburb of Philadelphia. I was 16. Imitation of Life was about four women, two of them black. When we came out afterward, most of us were crying. The theatre owner's wife was standing in the lobby with a box of Kleenex. Many people gratefully took a tissue to dry their eyes. This is what Sirk wanted, I believe. [Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005]

[W]ith the reconsideration of directors like Douglas Sirk and the application of (gasp) irony, “melodrama” isn’t the dirty word it once was. Initially, film studies criticism used the term pejoratively to connote unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tales of romance or domestic situations with cliché-ridden characters intended to appeal to female audiences. Understandably, these were considered to be lesser films, sentimental pap churned out by the Hollywood tear-jerk machine. And if one couldn’t look beyond these tropes – if the viewer were unable to see through them – they might find themself (like many critics of the 1950s) unjustly unwilling to give credit where credit is due.

     Sirk, for example, a contract director working mostly at Universal, was known for turning out dizzy romantic fiascos; glossy and kitsch, excessive and (sometimes) silly, these dependable studio projects were routinely panned by critics and “sophisticated” audiences. What these viewers missed was the subversive strain running through Sirk’s art. He wasn’t just making a melodrama, he was using it. Even the critic James Harvey admits to “missing” Sirk the first time around, remembering his biggest hits, Written on the Wind (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), to be “unredeemably bad”. But twenty years after its release, Harvey returned to Imitation of Life and found himself overwhelmed.

     My awareness of even a possible ironic intention seemed to transform the movie for me. As it had, it seemed, for the audience around me, who were responding to it in a way no imaginable 1950s audience could have: being alert and to and amused by every hollow ring in Lana Turner’s multi-costumed, leading-lady performance, for example, just as I was being. We had become an audience for the “Sirkian subtext”, as it was called. And we were no longer (as we had been years before) jeering alone. This time even the director was on our side.

     And so there is the Melodrama and there is the melodramatic. The trick is to figure out which is which. [Sam Wasson, Bigger Than Life: The Picture, The Production, The Press', Senses of Cinema, Issue 38, 2006]

The most important ironies in Sirk are those of so much film melodrama of the 1950s, namely the ironies of the failure of dominant ideology, the vast distance between how social institutions, gender roles, and other fundamental values are supposed to function and how they actually do function. Much of this “ironic” social critique of Sirk’s films is overt and uncomplicated (the country-club values in All That Heaven Allows or Lana Turner’s kitsch glamour in Imitation of Life [USA, 1959]). What the “irony in Sirk” debate is mostly directed to, instead, is the fact that the films often take up an attitude critical of ideological norms without overtly acknowledging that they are conducting such a cri- tique, and that they present characters in the grip of dominant values (therefore “good” characters) whose ideological conformity is objectively destructive but who are never overtly labelled by the film as hollow or destructive (the Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall characters in Written on the Wind are a clear example). The melodrama of Sirk and his contemporaries is quite different in this respect from most earlier forms of cinematic melodrama (Griffith for example), where all the values inherent in the films are plainly depicted as what the films think they are. But although the hollowness of some of Sirk’s “good” characters does indeed interfere with the overt ideological work of the narrative, it hardly disables the melodrama of these characters’ sufferings, or the pathos of their entrapment in ideology. Indeed, the reverse is the case: they are rendered more pathetic by their impossibility, and the film’s distance from their “false consciousness” then functions much like dramatic irony, and not at all like any kind of scornful detachment. [William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16]

[T]o understand what Imitation of Life is trying to do audiences have to trust in its distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, between its evocations of real life and its manifestations of life’s imitations. The evocations of real life rely on emotional manipulation – the emotion of motion pictures. It is only by way of these moments of intense emotional involvement that the moments of authenticity in the film can be distinguished from those of pretence. And it is the moments of pretence, of escaping into falsifying theatres of one form or another, that Sirk is holding up for criticism. Finally, that is what is produced by Sirkian ‘ironic distanciation’: an acknowledgment of the inauthentic imitation of life.[Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007]

Film Studies For Free today celebrates studies of the work of Douglas Sirk with an almost melodramatically long list of links to online scholarly items on this director's films and some of the films they have influenced. The list builds on Kevin B. Lee's very valuable, existing webliographical work.
 
FSFF knows, of course, that offering up such easy access to these resources means that there won't be a dry eye in the house. But if your tears are due to FSFF having missed a good Sirkian link, do please let us know by commenting below...

• Jeanine Basinger, “The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow”, Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• William Beard, 'Maddin and Melodrama', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 14:2, Autumn 2005, fn 6, pp.15-16

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'Sirk and the Critics', Translated by Eithne Bourget,  Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jean-Loup Bourget, 'God Is Dead, or, Through a Glass Darkly', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jeremy B. Butler, 'Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934. Douglas Sirk, 1959): Style and the domestic melodrama', from Jump Cut, no. 32, April 1987, pp. 25-28

• Fred Camper, 'The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair', Chicago Reader, April 14, 2006

• Susan Courtney, ‘Picturizing race: Hollywood’s censorship of miscegenation and production of racial visibility through Imitation of Life’, Genders, vol. 27, 1998 (mostly on the Stahl film)

• Adrian Danks, “The Far Side of Paradise”: Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven,' Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 5

• Sybil DelGaudio, 'The mammy in Hollywood film: I'd walk a million miles — for one of her smiles', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 23-25

• Lucy Fischer, 'Modernity and Postmaternity: High Heels and Imitation of Life', in Horton, Andrew Horton (ed.), Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

• Freda Freiberg, Review of Fannie Hurst, Imitation of life. Edited and introduced by Daniel Itzkovitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)', Screening the Past, 20, 2006

• Chris Fujiwara, 'Tears Without Laughter Deciphering audience responses to Douglas Sirk, in the U.S. and Japan', Moving Image Source, August 18, 2008 

• Tag Gallagher, 'White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk', Senses of Cinema, Issue 36, 2005

• Stephen Handzo, 'Intimations of Lifelessness: Sirk's Ironic Tearjerker', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Sara Hayat, Dream Houses Gone Wrong: Small Town, Suburbia, and Architectural Narrative in Four Films by Douglas Sirk, Masters Thesis, University of Miami, 2010

• Richard Henke, 'Imitation of Life: Imitation world of vaudeville', from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994, pp. 31-39

• Victoria Jaschob, 'Fear of Heaven', Film International, 2007

• Tamar Jeffers McDonald, '“Very Little Wrist Movement”: Rock Hudson Acts Out Sexual Heterodoxy', Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 31 (2006) 843-858

• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', originally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

• Kevin B. Lee, 'Douglas Sirk: An Annotated Webliography', Shooting Down Pictures, December 2009

• André de Alencar Lyon, 'The Afterlife of Melodrama: Roger Michell's Changing Lanes', SURJ., Spring 2004

• James MacDowell, 'Beneath the Surface of Things: Interpretation and Far From Heaven', Offscreen Journal, Volume 10, Issue 5 (May 31, 2006)

• Geoff Mayer, 'Review of Ben Singer. Melodrama and modernity. Early sensational cinema and its contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001', Screening the Past, 16, 2004

• Marsha McCreadie, 'Petra’s Place', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Gary Morris, 'Introduction to the Douglas Sirk Issue', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Gary Morris, 'Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind", Images, Issue 10, February 2004 

• Laura Mulvey, 'All That Heaven Allows', Criterion Collection, June 18, 2001

• Laura Mulvey, 'Written on the Wind', The Criterion Collection, June 18, 2001

• Geoffrey O’Brien, 'Magnificent Obsessions', The Criterion Collection, January 19, 2009

• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007

• Mark Rappaport, 'The Sirk-Hudson Connection', The Criterion Collection, January 21, 2009

• Mark Rappaport, 'The Secret Life of Objects', Rouge, 13, 2009

• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006

• Vadim Rizov, 'Stahl vs. Sirk', The Daily Notebook, January 31, 2009

• Monique Rooney, 'What passes in Imitation of Life (1959)?', Humanities Research Vol. XVI. No. 1. 2010: Passing, Imitations, Crossings,edited by Monique Rooney and Carolyn Strange (PDF) 

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Rediscovering Ali: Fear Eats the Soul', JonathanRosenbaum.com, September 5, 2008

• Richard Rushton, 'Douglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation', Screening the Past, Issue 21, 2007

• Tom Ryan, 'Douglas Sirk/Detlef Sierck', Senses of Cinema, November 2003

• Dave Sanjek, 'Summer Storm', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

• Andrew Sarris, 'Sarris on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Christopher Sharrett, 'Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Cineaste, Vol.XXXV No. 4 2010

• Robert E. Smith, 'Love Affairs That Always Fade', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Jane Stern and Michael Stern, “Two Weeks in Another Town: Interview with Douglas Sirk”, Bright Lights 6, (1977)

• Antonio João Teixeira, '“A False Creation" - Stains in the Glossy World of Imitation of Life', Revista Letras, Curitaba, N. 66, P. 193-206, Maio/Ago. 2005

• Michael Töteberg, 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: All That Fassbinder Allows', The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003

• Suzanna Danuta Walters, Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', orignally published in Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

• Agustin Zarzosa, 'Signifying Objects, Embodied Ideas, and Melodrama', Scope, Issue 7, february 2007

• George Zuckerman and Albert Zugsmith, 'Zuckerman and Zugsmith on Sirk', Bright Lights 6, (1977)

Adrian Martin Podcast

Film Studies For Free is delighted to inform its readers, today, about a really worthwhile podcast by Adrian Martin - a recording of a great talk he gave in the Provisional Insight Colloquium series at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, on July 18 2008, entitled 'Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and some others'.

The abstract for the talk is given below. The podcast (just over an hour long) can be accessed (with or without a slideshow) from the Monash University Arts website HERE.

For further great podcasts from the same series (by Ian Aitken; Andrew Benjamin; Graeme Gilloch; Helen Grace; Deane Williams; and the wonderful Lesley Stern) click HERE.

Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others

Adrian Martin

In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk.

Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). His books include What is Modern Cinema? (Uqbar 2008), Raul Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions (Altamira 2004), The Mad Max Movies (Screensound/Currency 2003), Once Upon a Time in America (BFI 1998) and Phantasms (Penguin 1994), and he has regular columns in Film Quarterly (US), De Filmkrant (Holland) and Cahiers du cinéma España (Spain). He is the Co-editor of Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and the Internet film magazine Rouge.