In The Company Of Glenn

Adages for cinephiles

I've been batting around book ideas recently, and I've come up with a quite uncommercial one: a collection of adages, observations, koans, what-have-you for the elucidation of the cinephile rather than the cineaste. In other words, a version of Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer for film lovers rather than film makers. Here's an adage that occurred to me pretty much out of nowhere this morning:

Never trust a filmmaker who says he or she is "putting a mirror up to" something.

That would hold up by itself. Others, such as a perennial favorite of mine, Never count an auteur out, might need a bit of explication (Bunuel is the obvious illustration here, although others might want to cite any number of Woody Allen's "return[s] to form), but the point would be to remain as terse as possible.

Rather than a book, this might make a good comment thread...

Heavily accented eyebrows in cinema, late '60s—early '70s

Visual notes for a study in progress...

Erica Gavin, Vixen, Russ Meyer, 1968

Edwige Fenech, Five Dolls for an August Moon, Mario Bava, 1970

My Al Jolson Problem—And Ours (Updated)

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Steve Daly’s wrong-headed hand-wringing about Warner Home Video’s three-disc release of 1927’s The Jazz Singer ever since I was steered to it last week by Dave Kehr’s droll line “Entertainment Weekly alerts us to the blackface menace that threatens America.” Dave’s putdown (from his blog, which will also direct you to Dave's very fine New York Times consideration of Singer) is funny but maybe a tad too dismissive. Both Daly’s move for the fainting couch and the Warner package’s own features raise a question that has lost none of its pertinence over the years, said question being “How do we deal with the issue of minstrelsy in American popular culture?"