Bright Lights Film Journal :: February 2013

February 2013 | Issue 79

From the Editor

Editorial: "God Bless Us, Everyone?"

Gary Morris

FEATURES

The Women in Prison Film:
From Reform to Revolution 1922-1974

Oren Shai

"The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex ('Love Starved Women!'), violence ('Rape, riot, and revenge'), and often the pretense of an exposé ("The story of a woman's prison today') to attract moviegoers."

The Music of Words:
Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films

Imogen Sara Smith

"While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don't-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers' films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what's not there."

Limelight: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin">

Looking at Charlie — Limelight:
An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin

Alan Vanneman

"I have ideas!" If only that were true!

ARTICLES

When the World Was Wide(r):
A Requiem for PBS

Andrew Grossman

"There was a time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 'formed as an educational, non-commercial, and public interest alternative to the vast wasteland of commercial networks,' meant something other than drearily underproduced Anglophone mysteries, self-help seminars for pensioners and forced retirees, staged cooking lessons, cheapjack puppet shows, and various and unspeakable retrenchments of the petit bourgeoisie."

God Bless Us Everyone: Including Bankers and Businessmen

D. J. M. Saunders

They might be learning to be human, too

"Where Are We Now?" A Still Life in Moving Frame

Norm Ball

"I wish I was beside her but I'm not there, I'm gone" — from I'm Not There, Bob Dylan

"Gatsby? What Gatsby?" Discovering Fitzgerald's Most Elusive Character, in the Novel and the Movies

Joan McGettigan

"When I told my students I have a harder time than that shrugging off Hollywood's misguided adaptations and revisions, one said, 'Why? Whenever you want to, you can still go back and read the book.'"

To Rome with Love: A Personal History">

Ozymandias Melancholia: Woody Allen's To Rome with Love: A Personal History

Matt Brennan

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed . . . — from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

STARS

Mickey Rooney: Seriously!

Jim MacEachern

"A great man is only the reflection of a great boy in a larger mirror." — Ann Shoemaker, the actress playing his mother in Strike up the Band (1940), to actor Mickey Rooney "Even in 1940, it was unlikely that movie audiences believed that Mickey Rooney, then twenty years old, would grow up to be a great man. He was, at the time, one of Hollywood's biggest stars. One secret of his allure was that it seemed he would never grow up at all." — Thomas Hine, Mickey Rooney and the Downsizing of Man

FILMS

The Talented Mr. Ripley">

The Complex Art of Murder: On The Talented Mr. Ripley

Graham Daseler

"The Ripley of the novel was like an arsonist, snidely torching the social hierarchy that refused him admittance; the Ripley of the film is more like Charlie Chaplin in a china shop: every time he reaches to pick up a broken plate, he crashes into another shelf."

Enjoyed Inglourious Basterds? You're Doing It Wrong!

Alexander B. Joy

"Aldo Raine is nothing more than Adolf Hitler wrapped in an American flag."

Caché">

Hidden Within Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Examination of the Effects of Repression in Michael Haneke's Caché

Anna Morris

"Caché lays bare a heavy psychological truth about the collective unconscious — without submitting to another perspective, we may not be able to recognize and acknowledge the abject parts of our own selves, even when they are clearly presented to us, hidden in plain sight."

Lincoln">

Lincoln" title="Father of His Country: Spielberg's Lincoln" vspace="4" hspace="7" align="right"/>Father of His Country: Spielberg's Lincoln

Page Laws

"Spielberg's post-millennial Lincoln epitomizes the more experienced politician's awe for Justice (as distinguished from the malleable Law), which is to be sought by whatever means necessary and inevitably involves sacrifice, perhaps of one's very soul. There's more than a touch of Faust in this script."

Small Stakes, Small World: Technology and Skyfall

Isabella Kapur

"Skyfall, in some ways, represents how cultures that are so connected by technology are less easily used as eye candy. They are no longer considered distinct and different enough to warrant surprise or awe. The world seems so small that saving it is no longer a spectacle."

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" title="What Else Is Lost with Memory Loss? Memory and Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" vspace="4" hspace="7" align="right">What Else Is Lost with Memory Loss? Memory and Identity in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Gemma King

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd. Alexander Pope (As quoted by Mary [Kirsten Dunst])

What's "Natural" about "Naturalist Cinema"? On Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights

Virgina Konchan

"Director Arnold heightens the once-"natural" processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity."

NEO-ARISTOTELIAN DIALOGUE

Fun in the Aristotelian Supermarket: A Dramatic Sketch on the Future of Visuality

Andrew Grossman

"Bottled and packaged products were sold mainly according to static imagery and rhetorical claims. With the advancing sophistication of the cinematic age, however, we gradually developed a taste for kinesthesia, ending the false dignity of stasis. The famous Heinz commercial, featuring ketchup slowly trickling downward onto a nude meat patty, was our watershed moment, our epiphany."

REVIVALS

La Fille to Dr. Cordelier: Thoughts on Five Jean Renoir Films" title="From La Fille to Dr. Cordelier: Thoughts on Five Jean Renoir Films" />

From La Fille to Dr. Cordelier: Thoughts on Five Jean Renoir Films

John Belton

"Renoir's static images contain a great deal of emotional intensity — like that last lyrical shot of the sun setting in La Fille — and the sheer beauty of his two-dimensional compositions generates an emotional involvement within the viewer (like that in the viewer of a painting) and a sense of emotional treatment of the romantic material within the frame, yet preserves an awareness of the existence of a larger world beyond the borders of the frame."

Underground: Anthony Asquith's First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment" title="More Than Just Another Day Underground: Anthony Asquith's First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment" vspace="4" hspace="7" align="right">More Than Just Another Day Underground: Anthony Asquith's First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment

David L. Pike

"It is a much starker contrast than, say, in Hitchcock's London films of the same period, where the humorous grace notes of the urban everyday and a happy ending are balanced throughout by a recognition of the inherent instability and all-out terror of the same modernity that produces those grace notes."

OPERA ON BLU-RAY

Opera Goes Blu, and So Should You: An Amateur's Guide to Mozart's Operas on Blu-ray

Alan Vanneman

"Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music... ."

COLUMNS

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The Blue Angel; The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling; Fritz Lang: The Early Works: Harakiri, The Wandering Shadow, and Four Around the Woman; Hello I Must Be Going

Gordon Thomas

FESTIVALS

Night of Silence and Recent Turkish Cinema" title="The Body Fights Back: Night of Silence and Recent Turkish Cinema" />

The Body Fights Back: Night of Silence and Recent Turkish Cinema

Lesley Chow

"There is an uneasy relationship between the characters and their environment. A setting may blur as a man walks out of it, only to have him re-emerge sharply in the foreground. We often cut between a "timeless" panorama and a nervous, self-conscious face that exists very much in the now."

BOOKS

Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, by Mark Shiel

Reviewed by Richard Martin

Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips, by Michael Ankerich

Reviewed by Matthew Kennedy

Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Reviewed by Cerise Howard

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Watch on Youtube »

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BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

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I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

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"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

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The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

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This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

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Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

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Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

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Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

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Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.

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