Bright Lights. 64.

By David Hudson on 05/06/2009

As Bright Lights Film Journal editor Gary Morris notes right up front, there is but one review of a recent theatrical release in the new issue, Robert Ecksel's take on James Toback's "Tyson": "The presence of a virtual tidal wave of book reviews didn't settle my mind. Talk about old school! But a quick consult with Igor proved as soothing as one of his 'happy ending' massages. Everyone's favorite slobbering hunchback says BL has not gone reactionary after all; we've just relocated our thoughts on contemporary film in festival reviews, yours truly's Little Stabs roundup, and our ever-changing blog, q.v. Whew!"

Old school or not, two books have come out, one relatively recently, the other not so much, that are still being discussed far and wide, and this issue boasts enough material on both to make BL about as here and now as a film journal can be.

The new edition of André Bazin's "What is Cinema?," translated by Timothy Barnard and published by caboose, has sparked on of cinephilia's richer discussions of late over at Girish Shambu's place as well as a special issue of Offscreen. Just the other day, Jonathan Rosenbaum reminded us of the many reasons we can be very grateful indeed for this edition.

Now in BL, Bert Cardullo's translation of Bazin's "Fifteen Years of French Cinema" appears, as a note points out, in "English here for the very first time, with the kind permission of Editions de l'Etoile and the late Janine Bazin. This essay focuses on the critical years from 1942 to 1957, during which French cinema would slowly replace its old guard, or le cinéma du papa, with a new wave of talents like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and Chabrol. This 'sea change' has been much remarked on since, but Bazin was the first to document it in print, one year before his own death from leukemia in November of 1958."

Cardullo has also translated Bazin's "Monsieur Hulot and Time," first published in Esprit in 1953 and "one of the first serious considerations, if not the very first one, of Jacques Tati as a film artist."

The other book on a thousand virtual tongues is Richard Brody's "Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard," originally met, as Bill Krohn notes in his fierce reading for Cinema Scope, with generally approving, even laudatory reviews. But a second harsh wave of dissent is now rolling in. Reviewing "Everything Is Cinema" for BL, Mike Miley finds it "has all the qualities a great, definitive book on Godard should have, and yet it falls short because it insists on imposing an unsatisfying, incomplete, myopic definition onto its subject."

Not appearing in BL is Adrian Martin's review - Andy Rector's got it at Kino Slang and notes: "Right off Adrian brings up a huge deficiency in the book not yet mentioned elsewhere: that Brody does not take account of Godard's impact on world cinema." As you'll see, though, that's just for starters.

Well, in 2009, the 50th anniversary of the New Wave, lines can be drawn even to Tex Avery. Or rather, from, as Greg Ford explains in a piece he put together in... 1978. While popular in Europe, it appears in English online for the first time here in BL. Gary Morris ran "Tex Avery: Arch-Radicalizer of the Hollywood Cartoon" in the print version of the journal back in the day and he pulls the money quote right up to the top: "Avery's pics confirm an always-lingering suspicion that the many radical plays with movie syntax and the numerous distancing techniques employed in 60s live-action films, of 'New Wave Cinema' extraction, were, in fact, first invented, and used for purely comic effect, in animated cartoons."

Mark Adnum's piece, "Retro Virus: Did AIDS perform Nensha?," is surely one of the darkest long journeys to be taken in all of film criticism. There are points at which you might want to hold a copy of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" up to the screen, but whatever you want to make of the web Adnum spreads, you'll likely find more than a few strands intriguing.

Another contributor with a penchant for the associative is DJM Saunders, who prefers his webs a little less tightly woven.

Doris Wishman's "Nude on the Moon" "demands that we cast aside the term 'exploitation filmmaking,' for this exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist's reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden." No, Andrew Grossman is serious. I didn't know about this movement, but he's got it documented.

Gordon Thomas rounds up half a shelf of DVDs and C Jerry Kutner highly recommends "Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947 - 1986."

There are two festival reports, Frank Bren from the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Cleo Cacoulidis on Middle Eastern Cinema at the 49th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

And there are three interviews, Gerald Peary with Joel McCrea (conducted in 1982), Michaël Abecassis with Iranian director Khosrow Sinai and Damon Smith with James Toback.

For Noah Berlatsky, the "Friday the 13th" series is "not really about righteous revenge in a Dirty Harry mode; nor is it a coming-to-manhood. Instead, it seems to me, it's more like Spider-Man or Superman; a fantasy of powerlessness/power in which the shuttling between identities provides the fluid, sadomasochistic charge."

Dan Callahan's profiles of Hollywood legends are always a highlight of any issue of any publication and this time he offers us none other than Ida Lupino.

Christopher Sandford argues that James Mason "was a superbly accomplished, versatile screen actor, whose mannered precision always gave the impression that he was inwardly seething with furious, invisible activity, and who touched genius in a dozen or so of his 123 roles."

"I don't think I really understood the potential of silent acting before seeing Ruan Lingyu in 'The Goddess' (1934)," writes Lesley Chow. "This is an actress who shows excitement down to the curl of her fingers, and whose face reveals every kind of mercurial change."

"One of the lost treasures of the pre-Code era, [Lee] Tracy was the definitive brash, wily, fast-talking, stop-at-nothing operator," writes Imogen Sara Smith. "He skated around in perpetual overdrive, jabbing the air with his fingers, spitting out his lines like a machine-gun, wheedling and needling and swearing you can take out his appendix without ether if he's lying (he's got you there -- he had it out already.)"

More Pre-Code frolicking: Mae West is "so startlingly progressive, we presume all of ancient history defined her as the ultimate; it all has the iconic haze of myth, folklore." Will digitalization ruin it all, wonders Erich Kuersten. He also reviews the third volume of TCM's "Forbidden Hollywood," which by now we know to be a William Wellman collection.

As if all this were dizzying enough as it is, and with so much more to go, too, BL presents the first in a "series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven launches the series with fascinating write-ups of two works by Allan Dwan, screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, December 4, 1979."

So back to those book reviews. First up is Derek Hill's "Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave," and Colm O'Shea notes that the filmmakers under consideration here, or at least the six warranting their own chapters, are Richard Linklater, David O Russell, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and Michel Gondry.... It's curious that Kaufman, despite being featured in the title, does not get a chapter to himself. Though the book was written before 'Synecdoche, New York,' Kaufman is after all presented as the driving force behind Jonze and Gondry's best work to date, and the embodiment of the sensibility with which Hill is so enamoured.... Hill sets out his linking principle as a predominant thematic through-line of comic unease and alienation."

Speaking of Gondry, Erich Kuersten reviews "You'll Like this Film Because You're in It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol": "The book chronicles the events of his DIY film installation at Deitch Projects in New York City, March 2008. The gallery was turned into something between a poverty row film studio, a volunteer community garden, and an after-school art class, with clear and clever guidelines Gondry worked out in advance (and changed as the process evolved). He's very open and honest, and why not? His whole style is so bracingly selfless and ego-free that he knows he can't fail; there's nothing he's trying to win. He's not even playing; he's just a vessel for his own love of cinema and joy in sharing the creative process."

I've pointed out several reviews of Jeffrey Vance's "Douglas Fairbanks," so let it just be said here that Gordon Thomas finds it a "magisterial biography" and: "For each film from 'The Mark of Zorro' through 'The Iron Mask,' Vance provides a separate chapter with a detailed critical analysis that dovetails with his accumulating portrait of Fairbanks the man. Extensively indexed and cited, this is scholarship without tedium; it is a joy to read and an assessment long overdue."

Many reviews of Joseph Epstein's "Fred Astaire" have been cited in the Daily as well. Here, Alan Vanneman is a bit disappointed: "As a Fred Fancier of long standing" - - see, for example, his rollicking riff in this issue on "Let's Dance" - "I may be a little picky, but as I see it Mr Epstein has done little more than skim the relevant literature. For some reason, actually watching Fred's movies seems to have been too much for him." Vanneman also has a piece in this issue on Busby Berkeley's "Hollywood Hotel," an "odd film, with a number of jerks and twists, a film that, at times, threatens to turn itself into a diamond in the rough but never follows through. Despite a few real gems, 90 percent of the film is solid zircon."

Molly Haskell's "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited" racked up its own entry back in February. "Hasn't it all been said before?" asks Matthew Kennedy. "You might be surprised. Haskell demonstrates that 'GWTW' (moviedom's most famous acronym) remains a riveting myth of the Civil War and Reconstruction refracted through the prism of 1930s moviemaking. And it has acted as cultural benchmark ever since, eliciting alternate responses as subsequent decades create their own blueprints of analysis."

Also, "Joseph P Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years": "Every page teems with details, and as far as Kennedy in Southern California, this feels definitive. That is as much because of who Kennedy was as it is because of [Cari] Beauchamp's voluminous, unimpeachable research." Her "iron fortitude is to be admired. It must be dispiriting to spend so much time with a man whose self-interest was as colossal as his conscience was small."

Noah Berlatsky on "Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxpoitation Master, Film by Film": Calum Waddell "has done yeoman's work -- this is the first monograph about Hill ever, and as a guide for Hill junkies and cinephiles, it is superb." He "knows his stuff and has done his homework. To spend that much time on a project indicates passion... but it's precisely that passion that he seems to have trouble communicating."

Lesley Chow on "Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy," a collection of essays appearing as part of Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy Series: "What I didn't expect was that many of the writers would dive into the motives and back-stories of Tarantino plots as if they were a form of interactive fiction... There is a general tendency to talk around plot points, trying out different ethical and mythological models to fit the characters. This can result in an inspired piece like Luke Cuddy and Michael Bruce's vision of 'Kill Bill' as a step-like process to enlightenment, or it can create arguments unrelated to the tone of the films."

Ann McKim has brief reviews of two books; first, "[Jeffrey] Richards is an authority on Victorian popular culture, and 'Hollywood's Ancient Worlds' convincingly uncovers the ancient epic's roots in the 'cult of Hellenism' in both the American Founding Fathers and Britain's Victorian intellectual class; in neoclassical paintings; in hugely popular, kitschy 18th-century plays; and in sanitized myths retold for children in books like Bulfinch's 'The Age of Fable.'" And Alex Bailey's "Movie Photos: A Definitive Guide to Movie Photography" is "less interesting as a personal story than as a gallery seductive images."

[Photo: Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood," MGM, 1943]

Tags: Allan Dwan, André Bazin, Charlie Kaufman, Doris Wishman, Douglas Fairbanks, Fred Astaire, French New Wave, Gone With the Wind, Ida Lupino, Jack Hill, Jacques Tati, James Mason, James Toback, Jean-Luc Godard, Joel McCrea, Khosrow Sinai, Lee Tracy, Mae West, Michel Gondry, Quentin Tarantino, Tex Avery