Nonfiction
Autumn 1958
Film Letter: On the Cult of Displaced Laughter
It has been more than half a century since the medium of moving photography was able to furnish one of its first thrills of eroticism. The Kiss (which lasted a […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1957
Lust for Lifelikeness
Art in America—and above all movie art—tends to be the profession of champions, so it is of the first aptness that Kirk Douglas, whose dull performance as Van Gogh in […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1954
Movie Note: The 3-D’s
The received idea has long been that the movies, because of their photographic nature, tend to make “unreality,” the fictive premise, seem “real”; as a way of making the verbally […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1953
The Film Artist as Prometheus and Pantaloon
Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography by Marie Seton. A. A. Wyn, Inc. $8.50. The tragic social experience of the artist throughout history is a subject with a certain mythological remoteness, […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1951
Movie Letter: Three Myths
I. The Myth of Technique The very first moments of Night and the City (an American film made in London with a London background) shows its scapegrace hero, Harry Fabian, […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1950
Movie Letter: Lament for the Audience—and a Mild Bravo
Just what elements constitute the enlightened film audience in the United States? I wish to define “enlightened” somewhat more broadly than as applying to the public devoted to the experimental […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1950
Movie Letter: Novel Into Film: All the King’s Men
Above a line-cut of his signature, Robert Penn Warren wrote a statement about the film version of his Pulitzer Prize novel, All the King’s Men, which appeared in New York […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1950
Movie Letter: Foreign Films and the Main Problem
The main problem facing all film today is not split by any ocean. Nobody, from the shyest experimentalist to the most heedless super-producer, can get around it because it is […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1949
Movie Letter: “Hamlet” and Documentary
With Joan of Arc as ostentatious a stuffed spectacle as film has ever had, and Olivier’s Hamlet a virtual success only through sheer weight of the cultural tradition, the seismographs […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1949
Movie Letter: Experimental Film: A New Growth
Like the traditional idea of the cultural Bohemia, and a little like Greenwich Village itself, the idea of Experimental Film, at least till lately, has been scorned from the heights […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1948
Movie Letter: Film Form and Ritual As Reality-Principle
The subconscious ingenuity of commercial film-makers is a theme to which the present writer has devoted many thousands of words. As we know very well, the conditions of the commercial […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1948
Movie Letter: The Costume Romance
Post-war years in movie production have seen a revival of the costume romance as more or less a natural part of popular catering. The charm of “another time” as often […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1947
Movie Letter: Charlie Verdoux
After Sarah Bernhardt, no artist in any medium has received so much expertly qualified adulation in the last hundred years as Charlie Chaplin, and doubtless Chaplin has been more universally […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1947
Movie Letter
The mechanization of Hollywood aesthetics continues at an undiminished rate of speed. All the movies of the past months firmly reassert the factory principle that the standard article is inexhaustibly […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1946
Pained Sex: Elizabethan Style
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. New Classics Series. New Directions. $1.00. Pained sex is a phenomenon so common to our times, exploited as are its “victims” by psychiatric clinics, that it […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1946
The Impressionism of Marcel Proust
In the simplest sense, an object is that which exists independently of a subject. But how can objectivity in art be considered pure?—a thought which brings in question the puristic […]
Communications
Autumn 1945
Mr. Tyler’s Approach
Sirs, In his review of my book, The Hollywood Hallucination, in the Summer issue Mr. Eric Russell Bentley briefly, but with crystalline lucidity, expressed the critical consensus of 80 percent […]