New Brights Lights Film Journal

Delphine Seyrig (as A) in L'Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France 1961)

A quick post to begin the blogging week: Film Studies For Free is delighted to flag up that Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online. Below are all the relevant links. There are some very good articles, written as always in BLFJ's entertaining, but still scholarly-critical, house style, including ones on Polanski, Chaplin, Delphine Seyrig, Kubrick, Tarantino, and a great interview with Jonas Mekas. Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting its companion blog, Bright Lights After Dark. Those of you on Twitter might also like to follow the BLF Journal  @blfj

From the editor

• Keep watching the lights...

Articles

• Roman Polanski: What's on Trial? By Karin Luisa Badt

• Looking at Charlie: Modern Times An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin "Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!" By Alan Vanneman

• Past Sunset: Noir in the West "I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me." By Imogen Sara Smith

• On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong Especially when the lovers aren't, By D. J. M. Saunders

• Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America "Tease was out, honesty was in." By Jack Stevenson

• The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual "We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era." By Jesse Stommel

• The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions, By Jay Rothermel

• Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah "In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance." By Rob Faunce

• Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century, By Suzanne del Gizzo

• Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others, By Barry Wurst II

Actors

• Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return "Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice." By Dan Callahan

• Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust" "Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever." By Christopher Sandford

Directors

• Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men "I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me." By Damon Smith

• Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas "One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me." By Jon Lanthier

Columns

• Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases, By Gordon Thomas

• Letter from New York (c. 1980) "The problem is other people — crazy people." By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

• Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1 "Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates." By Vlad Dima

• "Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2 "This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them." By Lee Weston Sabo

• Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing "His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place."" By Robert Castle

• Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11 "Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp." By Devan Goldstein

• Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies "Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances." By Joan McGettigan

• "They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain "Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . .", By Jay Rothermel

• Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"By Gary Morris

Festivals

• After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival "An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?", By Lesley Chow

• Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience", By Megan Ratner

• Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Getting out of the ghetto, By Gary Morris

• From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival "VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all." By Ben Cho

Books

• In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder, By Joseph McBride

• Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot, By Jon Lanthier

• America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart, By Matthew Kennedy

• Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North, By Deborah Allison