Resources for January 17, 2017

Blakeslee, David, et al. "Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night." Criterion Cast #175 (August 29, 2016) ["After fifteen films that received mostly local acclaim, the 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) at last ushered in an international audience for Ingmar Bergman. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to navigate the laws of attraction. During a weekend in the country, the women collude to force the men’s hands in matters of the heart, exposing their pretensions and insecurities along the way. Chock-full of flirtatious propositions and sharp witticisms delivered by such Swedish screen legends as Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of cinema’s great erotic comedies."]

Broeren, Joost and Sander Spies. "Cutting the Edge: Freedom in Framing." Filmkrant (Posted on Vimeo: 2016)

Camia, Giovanni Marchini. "How to Teach Cinema." Keyframe (January 14, 2017) ["Because our children are being stabbed through their souls by insipid tentpoles."]

Francis, Marc. "Splitting the difference: On the queer-feminist divide in Scarlett Johansson’s recent body politics." Jump Cut #57 (Fall 2016)

Gordon-Reed, Annette. "The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame." The New York Review of Books (January 19, 2017)

Harper, Dan. "The Taste of Greasepaint: On Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Ozu’s Floating Weeds." Bright Lights Film Journal (April 24, 2014) ["The Bergman film is much darker, and examines – with sadistic, Strindbergian zeal – the cruelties that men and women inflict on one other when love is distorted by power. The Ozu film is deceptively comic, and looks at how utterly lost men and women become when their families disintegrate. But the odd resemblance between the films remains intriguing."]

Longworth, Karina. "Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: The Middle Years (Mildred Pierce to Johnny Guitar)." You Must Remember This (August 29, 2016) ["Joan Crawford struggled through what she called her “middle years,” the period during her 40s before she remade herself from aging, slumping MGM deadweight into a fleet, journeywoman powerhouse who starred in some of the most interesting films about adult womanhood of the 1940s and 1950s. That revival began with Mildred Pierce (for which Crawford won her only Oscar), and included a number of films, such as Daisy Kenyon and Johnny Guitar, directed by men who would later be upheld as auteurs, subversively making personal art within the commercial industry of Hollywood."]

McCrary, Micah. "“My Story Doesn’t Begin When I Was Born”: Micah McCrary Interviews José Orduña." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 14, 2017)

Young, Alexandra Leigh. "The Girl Who Didn't Exist." Radiolab (August 29, 2016) ["Alecia Faith Pennington was born at home, homeschooled, and never visited a dentist or a hospital. By both chance and design she is completely invisible in the eyes of the state. We follow Faith as she struggles to free herself from one restrictive world only to find that she is trapped in another. In her journey to prove her American citizenship she attempts to answer the age-old question: who am I?"]