Photographed Where It Happened

|Nate Logsdon| “This is a true story. It was photographed where it happened.” In two sentences, the onscreen statement before the opening credits of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear—the first picture produced by her production company The Filmakers—distills the ethos of independent cinema… Continue reading

New Ideas in Old Hollywood: Ida Lupino’s Outrage

|Doug Carmoody| Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen. Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the… Continue reading

TV Time

|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work… Continue reading

TraditionVision: Ozu’s Exploration of the Multi-Generational Adjustment to TV

|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced… Continue reading

You Guys Are Soft: Male Friendship and Violence in The Hitch-Hiker

On the surface, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about a homicidal maniac who hitches a ride with two friends on their way to Mexicali as murder looms just around the corner. Even the onscreen title that opens the film indicates its true… Continue reading

Lupino Noir: The Femme Fatale Sits in the Director’s Chair

|Patrick Clifford| THIS IS THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN AND A GUN AND A CAR. THE GUN BELONGED TO THE MAN. THE CAR MIGHT HAVE BEEN YOURS OR THAT YOUNG COUPLE’S ACROSS THE AISLE.  WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE NEXT SEVENTY MINUTES COULD HAVE… Continue reading

The Assassination of the Teen Comedy

|Brogan Earney| By the early 2000s, the teen comedy genre was at the height of its powers. Movies like She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and many more, were pumped out monthly and guaranteed to bring box office success. Eventually, they became… Continue reading

Nyah! I Have to Return Some Videotapes, Doc.

|Lucas Hardwick| Spoilers ahead, Doc. Bugs Bunny may have been a master of disguise but his ability to successfully fool his adversaries with a crappy wig and a cheap dress relied on their inability to pay attention. Countless occasions of Bugs’s survival were predicated on feeble… Continue reading

Guinevere Turner, American Psycho, and the Effective Distance of Lesbian Cool

|Sophie Durbin| “Gloria Steinem… as legend would have it, took [Leonardo DiCaprio] to a baseball game and
said, ‘Please don’t do this movie. You’re the biggest movie star in the world right now, and teenage girls are living for you, and I really don’t want them all to run… Continue reading

A Certain Slant of Light: The Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality in Soleil Ô

|Courtney Kowalke| The first movie I saw at Trylon in the spring of 2019 was John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984). The film follows a protagonist known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton), an extraterrestrial who crash-lands in Harlem, New York City… Continue reading