Velvet Light Trap articles from September 1991

Velvet Light Trap archives from September 1991

Introduction.
September 22, 1991... A CERTAIN CULTURAL THEORIST SOUNDED a clarion call of sorts some years ago by urging fellow scholars in the humanities to "always historicize." And indeed, within the last decade in film studies there has been an increasing trend toward the...

Institutions and individuals: Riot in Cell Block 11.
September 22, 1991... SINCE THE PUBLICATION IN 1968 OF ALAN Lovell's insightful monograph on the late Don Siegel, auteur critics have regarded Riot in Cell Block 11 as the director's first "mature" work. (1) Where Siegel's previous films were encumbered with...

Hollywood history and the French Revolution: from The Bastille to The Black Book.
September 22, 1991... For through this blessed July night, there is clangour, confusion very great... --Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1) FROM THE INITIAL CONCEPT TO THE PREMIERE screening, a Hollywood film goes through a process influenced by...

Containment, excess, ambivalence: the adaptation of Less Than Zero.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1991... While the anti-drug posture is laudable, it wreaks [sic] (like the entire project) of having been meetinged [sic] to death. One climactic scene... is so preposterous it recalls Cecil B. DeMille's phony moralistic endings to circumvent the...

Wings of the desert; or, the invisible superimpositions.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1991... TRANSLATED BY RICHARD NEUPERT IT IS LATE; I SHOULD WORK BUT I WATCH television. I should go to bed. On TV is one of those Hollywood monuments in Vista Vision and Technicolor from the mid-fifties which lasts for hours--a peplum epic in a...

Evolution, functionalism, and the study of American cinema.
September 22, 1991... "THE CLASSICAL MODE OF FILMIC REPRESENTATION both sustained and was sustained by the development of a specific mode of film production." This is how The Classical Hollywood Cinema, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson,...

The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907.
September 22, 1991... by Charles Musser THE RECENT RELEASE OF THE FIRST THREE books in Scribners' projected ten-volume series, the History of the American Cinema, surely constitutes something of a publishing event for the field of film history. Its eventfulness...

The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915.
September 22, 1991... by Eileen Bowser AS A GENRE IN BOOK PUBLISHING, THE survey history of American cinema has a long tradition dating back at least to Terry Ramsaye's A Million and One Nights. Scribners' History of American Cinema series aspires to set a new,...

An Evening's Entertainment.
September 22, 1991... by Richard Koszarski VOLUME 3 OF THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN cinema, An Evening's Entertainment: The Rise of the Silent Feature 1915-1928, by Richard Kozarski will prove a useful tool for the film teacher, researcher, archivist, and...

Points of Resistance.(Points of Resistance: Women, Power and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71)
September 22, 1991... by Lauren Rabinovitz BECAUSE OF ITS EXPLICITLY INTERVENTIONIST nature, the discourse surrounding the avant-garde cinema has tended to be highly pragmatic. Because the aim of such discourse is to justify wilfully eccentric filmmaking...

Picture Personalities.(Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America)
September 22, 1991... by Richard de Cordova FOR FAR TOO LONG, ANALYSIS OF THE STAR system has proven to be a theoretical and (even more emphatically) historical wasteland within film study. Paradoxically, it would seem that the obvious popular appeal exerted by...