Bright Lights Film Journal :: May 2012

May 2012 | Issue 76

From the Editor

Editorial: Of Devils and Runaway Trains, Anthony Mann and Jean-Claude Van Damme

Gary Morris

FEATURES

Tragic Cinema: The Death of Subjectivities in JCVD

Amir Khan

"Once we are shown that JCVD is, in fact, innocent, we are likely to forget 1) that moments earlier we were calling for his blood and 2) the particular events and sequence of events, or types of evidence shown, that had us jumping the gun in the first place. What El Mechri is showing us is how painfully contingent our conclusions about the world are on the particular type of passage we are afforded, the particular unfolding we are privy to."

Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith's Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi's Six Degrees of Separation

Willie Tolliver

"Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity."

SIDEBAR: ANTHONY MANN

Going Through the Devil’s Doorway: The Early Westerns Of Anthony Mann

Stephen Handzo

"Mann's 1950 threesome — The Devil's Doorway, Winchester '73, The Furies — was the most auspicious quantum jump by an American director since John Ford's equivalent Americana triumvirate of 1939 (Stage Coach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk) lifted him into the major phase of his career. Yet Mann's achievements seem destined to remain unappreciated and the director himself obscure."

Mann in the Dark: The Film Noirs of Anthony Mann

Robert E. Smith

The morally complex interrelationship of hero/villain, which is partially accountable for the remarkable intensity of his films, has at its roots the film noirs of the 1940s. The darker side of human nature, the interiority of these earlier, psychologically troubled characters, is the determining force in Mann's noirs. We see the director striving for the depth and complexity of characterization he ultimately achieved in the great films of the 1950s."

Auteurs in the Arena: Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire

Lee Weston Sabo

It's thumb's up and thumb's down for Mann's sprawling, fascinating, multi-auteur epic that inspired "bone-headed" imitations from Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart)

FILMS

"Nun-Lust, Torture-Porn, Church-Desecration and Bad Taste": Reconnecting with Ken Russell's The Devils

Gordon Thomas

"Sex mingles easily with religion, and their blending has one of those slightly repulsive and yet exquisite and poignant flavors, which startle the palate like a revelation – of what? That, precisely, is the question."

La Bete Humaine: Runaway Train

Graham Daseler

"The train is a symbol for whatever you want it to be," the film's director, Andrei Konchalovsky, explains. "It can be viewed as a prison because they can't get out of it, or considered as freedom because they escaped from prison on it, or considered as our civilization running out of control because no-one can stop it."

Dream Story: Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty

Lesley Chow

"The Story of O and Traumnovelle are two tales of outrageous sex that nevertheless come across as lulling and gentle. Sleeping Beauty deserves to be ranked with those works, in its depiction of a world of sexual transactions touched by magic."

Through a Glass Darkly: On Béla Tarr's Damnation

Ela Bittencourt

"You're standing alone at the entrance to the tunnel to an enchanting world, because you know something I can't even put a name to. Something deeper and more ruthless than even I can understand."

"I'm Glad I'm Not Me": The Many Faces of Bob Dylan in Dont Look Back

A. J. Serrano

"It comes as no surprise that Dylan, who has made a career out of dodging tidy classifications and labels, would be involved with a film that exhibits traits of both schools of cinéma vérité, rendering it as one of the most challenging and important works of the 1960s."

Glasnost in Space Revisited-- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Michael Green

"This is a winter movie, an elegy tinged with regret."

DIALOGUES

One Resurrected Drunkard: A Dialogue on Tony Palmer's Testimony

Andrew Grossman and Michael Morse

"Palmer's meticulously composed images hide the fact that this film is, in a sense, underdetermined, open to endless speculation; it is uncontrolled, savage, and thus, indeed, sometimes given to uncensored crudity."

ARTICLES

The Numinous Automaton: At the Center of Scorsese's Hugo

Joseph Natoli

"With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous."

Lovers and Killers? Only on This Island

D. J. M. Saunders

Which is why you and I must escape

Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest-- The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God

Robert Castle

"Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors."

Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich's Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin

Christina Riley

"I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots."

Clashing Harmonics: The Characteristics of Sound in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil

Mark Chapman

"Welles familiarizes us with the geography of the town largely through source music. Los Robles is presented as a labyrinth, an inter-place where physical and moral borders are erased."

History or Humanity? On Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death. A Nietzschean Perspective on Nanjing

Maximilian Yoshioka

"The monumental approach, as one would guess, takes history as something to be inspired by, as a record of human greatness that serves to encourage similar greatness by individuals in future times; in the case of City of Life and Death, it is the various acts of compassion and solidarity that play this role."

EXPERIMENTAL/AVANT-GARDE

Finger Envy: A Glimpse into the Short Films of VALIE EXPORT

Andrew Grossman

"EXPORT's antagonistic body undergoes a bloody rebirth, her mutilation inhibiting the screen's attempt to dominate the body and recentering a commodified humanity whose "eros" struggles to leave its sanguine imprint."

In Passing (2011): And the Remodernist Film Manifesto

John A. Riley

"It is the tunnel vision, the burrowing into specific obsessions, of In Passing's individual filmmakers, combined with the broad scope of the collaborative form, that constitute the film's unique allure."

MUSICALS

Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn's Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire

Alan Vanneman

Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!

STARS

Anthony Perkins: Forever Psycho

Dan Akira Nishimura

"Although he at first resisted, Perkins returned to Norman Bates again and again, in one form or other. Norman's twitchy eccentricity seeped into many of Perkins' post-Psycho performances that preceded the run of sequels."

DIRECTORS

Life of Human Loss: Hugo Haas's Strange Fascination

Steve Johnson

"Through his ability to improvise his own scenarios and engage others in their perambulations, Haas successfully negotiates the threat of circumstance that ensnared Pavel and, most always, wills out."

COLUMNS

Bright Sights - Four Polish Cinema Classics: Innocent Sorcerers (1960); Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (1960); Eroica (1958); Night Train (1959); plus A Trip to the Moon and The Spiders

Gordon Thomas

An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

BOOKS

Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema

By Tim Palmer

Reveiwed by Alicia Kozma

Béla Balàzs: Early Film Theory – Visible Man and The Spirit of Film

Edited by Erica Carter. Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Reviewed by Anthony Metivier

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