The thrill of transcendence: Kathryn Bigelow Studies

Updated with video and new links on April 12, 2010

Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner in Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

[Kathryn] Bigelow’s earliest works are often radical experiments with genres—combinatory, subtractive, subversive, offering a tool for crafting a mode of vital self-reflexive cinema in which the spectator becomes a thrill junkie, like the restless characters in Bigelow’s films. Ultimately, however, the raw exhilaration experienced by Bigelow’s characters must end so they can come to terms with reality and the laws—be they legal or gravitational—that anchor them to society. The later films show an interest in group dynamics as a form of politics or, perhaps, as an ideal of social living contained but not determined by politics. The turning point between these two parts of Bigelow’s career is Strange Days, whose protagonist attempts to wean himself off his addiction to spectacle in order to face the violence of his urban surroundings.
     This is the double bind Bigelow investigates: while thrill is ultimately an alienating form of individualism, the “real world” tends to be a trap, whether confining or merely banal. While Bigelow’s films reveal genre cinema’s promise of glossy escapism to be a dead end, they also pointedly argue that re-engagement with community is tantamount to conformity. One possible escape is offered to Bigelow’s protagonists by seeking out those extreme situations on the bohemian, criminal and physically fraught margins of society, where the rules can be broken and the self fleetingly transcended. Kathryn Bigelow, 'Filmmaking at the Dark Edge of Exhilaration', Harvard Film Archive, 2009

A little while back, Film Studies For Free promised a list of links to openly accessible scholarly essays on the work of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Director for Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker (2009; see that film's Press Kit/Production Notes). And now FSFF's Bigelow Study Day has finally arrived - maybe not its longest links list ever, but one full of highest quality material nonetheless. The links follow the wonderful embedded video 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker' created for The L Magazine by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz.

• Kate Adams, 'Review of The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. By Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds.) London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2003', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005

• Katherine Barscay, 'Kathryn Bigelow's Gen(d)re', Cinephile (Post Genre Issue), Vol. 4, Summer 2008

• Robert Burgoyne, 'The Hurt Locker: Abstraction and Embodiment in the War Film', University of Minnesota Press Blog, March17, 2010
  

• Kevin L. Ferguson, 'Yuppie devil: villainy in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 

• Tom Jennings, 'Rose Coloured Spectacles', Variant,27, Winter 2006

• Jeff Karnicky, 'Georges Bataille and the Visceral Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow', Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998

• Victoria Large, 'Young Vampires in Love: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 53, August 2006

• Jenna Ng, 'The Handheld Digital Camera Aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (via Strange Days)' 16:9, No. 32, June 2006

• Karl Palmås, 'Bodies without Bodhis', First published in Glänta 2-3/2009
  

• Parallax View Special Section on Kathryn Bigelow  February-March, 2010
  
  
  

  • The Loveless Worlds of Kathryn Bigelow by Robert C. Cumbow

  • Black Arts by Kathleen Murphy

  • True Fiction: Kathryn Bigelow on The Hurt Locker – Interview by Sean Axmaker

  • The Way You Don’t Die: The Hurt Locker by Sean Axmaker

• Patricia Pisters, 'Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow's Metafiction', Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Scopic Drive, Time Travel and Film Spectatorship in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and Bigelow's Strange Days', Kinema, 15 (Spring 2001)

• Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker ', The L Magazine, June 26, 2009

• Steven Shaviro, 'Kathryn Bigelow', The Pinocchio Theory, March 10, 2010

• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism and Kathryn Bigelow', Cinephile (Gender and Violence Issue), Vol. 1, April 2005