Here is a handy rundown of the Bright Lights 66. It includes a review of the great new Farber collection (Filmwell review still forthcoming, it is as long as it is dense). A nifty essay on the problem of filming Gatsby (with or without Vincent Chase). An interview with Jonas Mekas. There is also a snappy biographical take on Modern Times, which, frankly, is persuasive:
Modern Times is distinctly unmodern in that it was the last commercial silent film ever made. Chaplin couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon the freedom to rearrange reality that silent film gave him, but he did make a variety of compromises, finally “speaking” (or at least singing) at the end of the film.
And then there is this fascinating look at the noir west, with great insights into the western genre, such as:
Westerns kept facing this problem, wanting to condemn violence but unable to imagine a world without it. Clint Tollinger’s trigger-happiness is explained by the fact that as a boy he watched his father, a peaceful man who refused to carry a gun, murdered in cold blood. Man with the Gun loses its nerve at the end, allowing Clint to solve the town’s problems with a single bullet, reconcile with his wife and renounce his career, paying for his sins with a symbolic, non-fatal wound. But the western never resolved its ambivalence. Men like Shane and Ethan Edwards make life possible for peaceful families and communities, but pay for their violent ways by riding off alone at the end, eternally solitary wanderers. These endings are ambiguous: do they condemn the gunmen, or the communities for relying on violent justice that they are unwilling to mete out themselves?
And
Far more covertly subversive than the era’s “message movies,” noir managed to smuggle a disenchanted, even despairing vision of postwar life into mainstream entertainment. Pessimism, cynicism and nihilism, outrage at social injustice, world-weary melancholy and amused, astringent misanthropy all found their way into unpretentious thrillers largely overlooked by critics. Plenty of films in the noir spectrum offered only cheap thrills, or had cop-out endings or moralizing frameworks, but as a rule noir films held up a staggeringly unflattering mirror to their viewers. Unlike the gangster movies of the thirties, they were less likely to focus on professional criminals than on ordinary men and women gone astray. As Michael F, Keaney writes, “Watching film noir was like watching your neighbors and friends indulging in illegal or immoral behavior.”6 Noir implicated its audience in the sickness it diagnosed. It was not calculated to make people feel good about themselves or the country they lived in.
And then
In their most conventional form, westerns showed Americans what they wanted to see, romantic myths about their origins. Film noir showed them where they were and where they were going, like it or not. But the dichotomy was not always so simple; some westerns could be as radically skeptical as noir — or even more so. They went beyond addressing postwar problems or expressing anxiety about modernity to trace the roots of certain persistent neuroses in the American character to our cherished myths and archetypes. They led audiences not into the sunset but into the darkness beyond.