Tuesday, 3 April 2012

New Issue of LA FURIA UMANA on Jerry Lewis and much more...

Frame grab image of Jerry Lewis as 'Warren Nefron' in Smorgasbord aka Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983). Read Steven Shaviro's new article on this film

Smorgasbord (retitled Cracking Up by the distributor) is Jerry Lewis's last self-directed feature film. It first opened in France in 1983; it never received a proper American release. (In the US, it was immediately relegated to cable television -- which is where I saw it for the first time). And Smorgasbord still isn't very well known today -- even among Lewis aficionados. (It is, for instance, the only one of Lewis's self-directed films not to appear in the index to Enfant Terrible, an academic essay collection edited by Murray Pomerance in 2002, which otherwise covers Lewis' film career quite comprehensively). Yet I think that Smorgasbord is one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films; in what follows, I will try to explain why. [Steven Shaviro, 'Smorgasbord', La Furia Umana, 12, 2012; hyperlinks added by FSFF]
Film Studies For Free just heard about the latest issue of the pentalingual film journal La Furia Umana. There are lots of brilliant articles in English, and other marvellous work, too, in other languages that will be entertainingly translated by Google, if you so require.

The particular highlight, this time, is a truly brilliant and wide-ranging dossier on the work of Jerry Lewis, a human fury of an actor if ever there was one... But FSFF also had plenty of thoughts usefully and skilfully provoked by Kim Nicolini writing on the Post-Feminist Possibilities in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. 

And there's a lot more to explore and learn from besides the above. Just feast your polyglot eyes on the below...

nota editoriale

rapporto confidenziale
prima linea
histoire(s) du cinéma
l'occhio che uccide
flaming creatures
the whole town's talking
western fragmenta
the new world
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